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Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826501.400&print=true
[Related material appended.]
8.4.5
by Debora MacKenzie

FOR years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be
flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will
die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet,
you can't help wondering whether the survivors might be better off
in some ways. Wouldn't it be easier to rebuild modern society into
something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer
of us.

Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a
devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their
nightmare scenarios - a plague like ebola or smallpox - as
"civilisation ending". Surely they are exaggerating. Aren't they?

Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the
street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past
couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many
predicted plagues, famines and wars - from Malthus to Dr Strangelove
- that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a
doom-monger.

There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale,
complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from
collapse. "It's an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious
and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective
reality," writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the
University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book
Collapse. "We think we are different."

Ever more vulnerable

A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the
conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society
is becoming ever more vulnerable (see page 30). In a severe
pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.

No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high
mortality could cause social collapse - at least none that has been
made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic
all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse,
let alone take it into account.

There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black
Death killed about a third of Europe's population. Its impact was
huge, but European civilisation did not collapse. After the Roman
empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170,
however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse.
Why the difference? In a word: complexity.

In the 14th century, Europe was a feudal hierarchy in which more
than 80 per cent of the population were peasant farmers. Each death
removed a food producer, but also a consumer, so there was little
net effect. "In a hierarchy, no one is so vital that they can't be
easily replaced," says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England
Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Monarchs
died, but life went on."

Individuals matter

The Roman empire was also a hierarchy, but with a difference: it had
a huge urban population - not equalled in Europe until modern times
- which depended on peasants for grain, taxes and soldiers.
"Population decline affected agriculture, which affected the
empire's ability to pay for the military, which made the empire less
able to keep invaders out," says anthropologist and historian Joseph
Tainter at Utah State University in Logan. "Invaders in turn further
weakened peasants and agriculture."

A high-mortality pandemic could trigger a similar result now,
Tainter says. "Fewer consumers mean the economy would contract,
meaning fewer jobs, meaning even fewer consumers. Loss of personnel
in key industries would hurt too."

Bar-Yam thinks the loss of key people would be crucial. "Losing
pieces indiscriminately from a highly complex system is very
dangerous," he says. "One of the most profound results of complex
systems research is that when systems are highly complex,
individuals matter."

The same conclusion has emerged from a completely different source:
tabletop "simulations" in which political and economic leaders work
through what would happen as a hypothetical flu pandemic plays out.
"One of the big 'Aha!' moments is always when company leaders
realise how much they need key people," says Paula Scalingi, who
runs pandemic simulations for the Pacific Northwest economic region
of the US. "People are the critical infrastructure."

Vital hubs

Especially vital are "hubs" - the people whose actions link all the
rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries
from the UK's oil refineries for 10 days in 2000, nearly a third of
motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were
cancelled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to
running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went
unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt
University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a
rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the
UK shut down for just a week.

What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or
too scared to work? Even if a pandemic is relatively mild, many
might have to stay home to care for sick family or look after
children whose schools are closed. Even a small impact on road
haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects.

One reason is just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades,
people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped
keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely
instead on frequent small deliveries.

Cities typically have only three days' worth of food, and the old
saying about civilisations being just three or four meals away from
anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the
UK. In the US, plans for dealing with a pandemic call for people to
keep three weeks' worth of food and water stockpiled. Some planners
think everyone should have at least 10 weeks' worth. How long would
your stocks last if shops emptied and your water supply dried up?
Even if everyone were willing, US officials warn that many people
might not be able to afford to stockpile enough food.

Two-day supply

Hospitals rely on daily deliveries of drugs, blood and gases.
"Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators," says
public health specialist Michael Osterholm at the University of
Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has been calling for broader
preparation for a pandemic. "But they'll run out of oxygen to put
through them first. No hospital has more than a two-day supply."
Equally critical is chlorine for water purification plants.

It's not only absentee truck drivers that could cripple the
transport system; new drivers can be drafted in and trained fairly
quickly, after all. Trucks need fuel, too. What if staff at the
refineries that produce it don't show up for work?

"We think that if we can make people feel safe about coming to work,
we'll have about 25 per cent staff absences if we get a flu pandemic
like the one in 1918," says Jon Lay, head of global emergency
preparedness for ExxonMobil. If that happens, then by postponing
non-essential tasks, and making sure crucial suppliers also hang
tough, "we can maintain the supply of products that are critical to
society".

Some models, however, suggest absenteeism sparked by a 1918-type
pandemic could cut the workforce by half at the peak of a pandemic
wave. "If we have 50 per cent absences, it's a different story,"
says Lay, who says his company has not modelled the impact of
absence on that scale. And what if a pandemic is worse than 1918?

Critical infrastructure

All the companies that provide the critical infrastructure of modern
society - energy, transport, food, water, telecoms - face similar
problems if key workers fail to turn up. According to US industry
sources, one electricity supplier in Texas is teaching its employees
"virus avoidance techniques" in the hope that they will then
"experience a lower rate of flu onset and mortality" than the
general population.

The fact is that the best way for people to avoid the virus will be
to stay home. But if everyone does this - or if too many people try
to stockpile supplies after a crisis begins - the impact of even a
relatively minor pandemic could quickly multiply.

Planners for pandemics tend to overlook the fact that modern
societies are becoming ever more tightly connected, which means any
disturbance can cascade rapidly through many sectors. For instance,
many businesses - including New Scientist's parent company - have
contingency plans that count on some people working online from
home. Models show there won't be enough bandwidth to meet demand,
says Scalingi.

And what if the power goes off? This is where the complex
interdependencies could prove disastrous. Refineries make diesel
fuel not only for trucks but also for the trains that deliver coal
to electricity generators, which now usually have only 20 days'
reserve supply, Osterholm notes. Coal-fired plants supply 30 per
cent of the UK's electricity, 50 per cent of the US's and 85 per
cent of Australia's.

Powerless

The coal mines need electricity to keep working. Pumping oil through
pipelines and water through mains also requires electricity. Making
electricity depends largely on coal; getting coal depends on
electricity; they all need refineries and key people; the people
need transport, food and clean water. If one part of the system
starts to fail, the whole lot could go. Hydro and nuclear power are
less vulnerable to disruptions in supply, but they still depend on
highly trained staff.

With no electricity, shops will be unable to keep food refrigerated
even if they get deliveries. Their tills won't work either. Many
consumers won't be able to cook what food they do have. With no
chlorine, water-borne diseases could strike just as it becomes hard
to boil water. Communications could start to break down as radio and
TV broadcasters, phone systems and the internet fall victim to power
cuts and absent staff. This could cripple the global financial
system, right down to local cash machines, and will greatly
complicate attempts to maintain order and get systems up and running
again.

Even if we manage to struggle through the first few weeks of a
pandemic, long-term problems could build up without essential
maintenance and supplies. Many of these problems could take years to
work their way through the system. For instance, with no fuel and
markets in disarray, how do farmers get the next harvest in and
distributed?

Closing borders

As a plague takes hold, some countries may be tempted to close their
borders. But quarantine is not an option any more. "These days, no
country is self-sufficient for everything," says Lay. "The worst
mistake governments could make is to isolate themselves." The port
of Singapore, a crucial shipping hub, plans to close in a pandemic
only as a last resort, he says. Yet action like this might not be
enough to prevent international trade being paralysed as other ports
close for fear of contagion or for lack of workers, as ships' crews
sicken and exporters' assembly lines grind to a halt without their
own staff, power, transport or fuel and supplies.

Osterholm warns that most medical equipment and 85 per cent of US
pharmaceuticals are made abroad, and this is just the start.
Consider food packaging. Milk might be delivered to dairies if the
cows get milked and there is fuel for the trucks and power for
refrigeration, but it will be of little use if milk carton factories
have ground to a halt or the cartons are an ocean away.

"No one in pandemic planning thinks enough about supply chains,"
says Osterholm. "They are long and thin, and they can break." When
Toronto was hit by SARS in 2003, the major surgical mask
manufacturers sent everything they had, he says. "If it had gone on
much longer they would have run out."

The trend is for supply chains to get ever longer, to take advantage
of economies of scale and the availability of cheap labour. Big
factories produce goods more cheaply than small ones, and they can
do so even more cheaply in countries where labour is cheap.

Flawed assumptions

Lay points to recent hurricanes in the US and the 2005 fire at the
Buncefield oil depot in the UK as examples of severe disruptions to
the normal supply chain. In all of these instances, he points out,
supplies from refineries were maintained. But those disasters were
localised, and help could come from unaffected places nearby.

Disaster planners usually focus on single-point events of this kind:
industrial accidents, hurricanes or even a nuclear attack. But a
pandemic happens everywhere at the same time, rendering many such
plans useless. "There are numerous assumptions behind our
conclusions," Lay admits. "If they prove to be flawed, we could
struggle."

The main assumption is how serious a pandemic could be. Many
national plans are based on mortality rates from the mild 1957 and
1968 pandemics. "No government pandemic plans consider the
possibility that the death rate might be higher than in 1918," says
Tim Sly of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

Even a rerun of 1918 could be bad enough. In a 2006 study, economist
Warwick McKibbin of the Lowry Institute for International Policy in
Sydney, Australia, and colleagues based their "worst-case" scenario
on the same death rate as in 1918. The result, their model predicts,
would be 142 million deaths worldwide, leading to a massive global
economic slowdown that would wipe out 12.6 per cent of global GDP.

Death rate

This scenario assumes around 3 three per cent of those who fall ill
die. Of all the people known to have caught H5N1 bird flu so far, 63
per cent have died. "It seems negligent to assume that H5N1, if it
goes pandemic, will necessarily become less deadly," says Sly. And
flu is far from the only viral threat we face.

The ultimate question is this: what if a pandemic does have huge
knock-on effects? What if many key people die, and many global
balancing acts are disrupted? Could we get things up and running
again? "Much would depend on the extent of the population decline,"
says Tainter. "Possibilities range from little effect to a mild
recession to a major depression to a collapse."

Related Articles

The bird flu threat
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925331.500
6.1.7

Down with the flu
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18124365.200
4.2.28

Population Earth: enough already?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19125711.100
6.9.30

Weblinks

The Last Americans: Environmental collapse and the end of
civilization, by Jared Diamond
http://www.mindfully.org/Heritage/2003/Civilization-Collapse-EndJun03.htm

The food lifeboat
http://www.foodlifeboat.com.au/


Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826501.500&print=true
8.4.2

by Debora MacKenzie

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with
tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a
few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins.
Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should
ours be any different?

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive
asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "Will
a pandemic bring down civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling
possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that
ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?

A few researchers have been making such claims for years.
Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory
suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops
beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly
fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively
minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.

Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to
start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it
is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep
disaster at bay.

Environmental mismanagement

History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and
of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the
University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental
mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and
warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to
stop destroying our environmental support systems.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees.
He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital
environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's
about saving civilisation," he says.

Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors
started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find
solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000
years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human
societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State
University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of
Complex Societies.

If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When
they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields
lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too
many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax
people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and
a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.

Diminishing returns

There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of
organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency
of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And
increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing
returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or
joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that
investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number
of patents per dollar invested in research as that research
investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears
everywhere, Tainter says.

To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise.
Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a
larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to
manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for
your buck.

Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy
and resources available to a society are required just to maintain
its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or
barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil
order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is
organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another
group.

Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the
collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese
dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations
relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder
and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit,
things fell apart.

An ineluctable process

Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex
than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal
and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of
diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of
oil is mounting and although global food production is still
increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental
degradation and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per
unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are
inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."

Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer
Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter
reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily
more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental
problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are
also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a
fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system
they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies
add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy,
one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing,
and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies
give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are
at this point.

This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief
that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical
   systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased
complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond.
"Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This,
he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those
like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.

Increasing connectedness

Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political
scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the
2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness
and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get
food from another village that didn't."

As connections increase, though, networked systems become
increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can
propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on
each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem.
"Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says
Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood."

The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to
transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks
that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials,
information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock,"
says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a
disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one
side of the world to the other."

For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe
suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their
respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a
similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled
networks like these create the potential for propagating failure
across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale
University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and
disasters.

Credit crunch

Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has
now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means
a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's
financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a
debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could
be enormous."

"A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says
Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep."
Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost.
And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't
clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely
networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late.

"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose
enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such
systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can
be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable."

So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond
successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have,"
Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get
injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee
as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources
dwindle.

Tightly coupled system

Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are
prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of
natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz
Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some
ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new
forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more
generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and
bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled
system.

"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in
the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But
unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can
trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system.
The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its
replacement by a newer, simpler one.

Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and
fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says.
Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise
profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide.
Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises
efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to
be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our
critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh
the benefits."

Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start
carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of
only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After
the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they
simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy
and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they
switched from professional army to peasant militia."

Staving off collapse

Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced
society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action
now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised
production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second,
we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing
company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing,
but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of
action."

The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying
hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some
back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other
sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce
competition, private companies will always increase efficiency
unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.

Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points
to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid,
tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is
becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth,
the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial
instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and
fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we
will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are
running out of cheap and plentiful energy.

"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow
for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a
way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to
healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests,
which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by
disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is
recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow
partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says,
rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing
complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.

Tipping points

Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can
no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we
had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in
just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see
how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between
tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable
technology, or collapse?"

Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save
civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a
'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society
reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the
problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be
subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.

Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work
suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep
cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long
run this cannot be sustainable.

The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in
population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and
industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there
would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome
to think about."

If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half
the world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our
hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to
lose are subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who
survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really
will inherit the Earth.

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