Demographic Collapse Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Demographic collapse is a term used to describe the decline of population or part of a population, especially its size, growth, density, or distribution. The term is connected to and often synonymous with societal collapse and is sometimes expressed simply as collapse.

Societal collapse is the broad decay or long-term decline of a specific culture and its institutions. Societal collapse frequently describes plagues, sudden and massive loss of human life, and the resulting breakdown of a civilization. The term is frequently attributed to William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples.

The 14th-century Black Death of Europe and the death of large numbers of indigenous peoples in the Americas from smallpox, measles, and typhus transmitted by the arriving Europeans are the most commonly cited examples of demographic collapse. Other examples of collapse in North America include the Cahokia and the Anasazi; in Central America, the Maya; in Africa, the Great Zimbabwe; in Asia, the Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities; in South America, the Tiwanaku and Moche societies, and in the Pacific Ocean, Easter Island.

Many societies can have a decline in one or more of their cultural systems, and a collapse is a sustained decline. However, it is sometimes arbitrary to distinguish between a decline and a collapse. Some authors argue against the term demographic collapse used as a euphemism for genocide. Sometimes, as in the case of Haiti in the 16th century, historians can’t agree on the degree of death that resulted from disease and the amount of death that resulted from war, slavery, and forced labor in mines. Some historians say the massive loss of Haitian population was due to natural causes and diseases, and others say the population was intentionally starved and worked to death and thus it was genocide. There are frequently multiple causes in a case of civilization collapse, and it is sometimes difficult to detect primary from secondary.

Authors such as Joseph Tainter maintain that while disease, crop failures, invasions, and environmental degradation may be apparent causes of collapse, the ultimate cause is “diminishing returns on investments in social complexity” and the subsequent abandonment of or failure of the civilization. Jared Diamond follows this multivariable model of describing collapse and accents the environmental variables as being most important. He defines collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”

He maintains that the factors leading to, or more usually, combining to create collapse are usually rising hostile relations with neighboring civilizations, decay of friendly allies and trading partners, climate change, and environmental damage. When cultural systems break down, starvation, war, and disease commonly occur. Collapse frequently occurs slowly, and historians and anthropologists wonder why members of various civilizations seem unable to change the direction of a culture in order to survive. Sometimes, however, collapse happens suddenly and with little warning. The Soviet Union in the 20th century is a good example of sudden collapse.

Beyond plagues and invasions, paleontologists, historians, climatologists, and anthropologists believe environmental problems frequently lead to collapse. Accidental ecological suicide, or ecocide, appears to have led several civilizations to collapse. The categories of these environmental problems are often related to overfishing, overhunting, deforestation, soil problems, water depletion, human population growth, and the effects of invasive species. In modern times, besides all of these usual difficulties with the environment, humankind must deal with the large-scale effects of industrialization on the environment: human-caused climate change, nuclear and chemical waste, greenhouse gases, ozone depletion and energy shortages.

Researchers write that our globalized society is perhaps more vulnerable to collapse than civilizations in the past, because a collapse in part of the global system could lead to a collapse of civilization all over the planet. Understanding why civilizations of the past have collapsed promises insights about avoiding a collapse in the future.

Bibliography:

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Succeed (Viking Adult, 2004);
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books, 2002);
William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, rev. (Anchor, 1998);
William McNeill, A World History, 4th (Oxford University Press, 1998);
Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1990).