The Easter Island Problem

Subtitle: Are we Americans Actually Capable of an Ecological Revolution?

Before they began to die of starvation, before their ritualized society collapsed, before they chopped down the last remaining tree on the island, before their public monument projects began to stretch thin the society’s ability to supply basic needs, Easter Islanders must have realized: how we’re living our lives isn’t going to cut it in the long run. If they could see the crisis coming, why didn’t they do anything to avert it? If we could conjure their voices to tell their story, what would they have to say to themselves?

Would their narrative sound a little like ours now?

The Easter Island Problem is not a new problem, as Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. Many times in human history a society has seen the writing on the wall, and yet been unable or unwilling to change its ways in time to avert disaster. Professor Diamond has said recently to the audience of National Public Radio that it is unlikely the first world lifestyle as we know it will exist anywhere in the world in a generation. Frightening as this assertion might be, it is supported by the most comprehensive report ever done on the relationship between how we live our lives and the ecosystems that support it: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Through that looking glass, we are able to have a certain amount of foresight. The writing on the wall we can see is probably much the same as the Islanders must have seen in written in their rapidly-deforested landscape: our long term success as a society depends upon fundamentally changing our relationship with the natural world. We need to undergo an ecological revolution.

Carolyn Merchant, the author of Ecological Revolutions: Nature Gender and Science in New England offers one simple, elegant model for understanding when a society could undergo an ecological revolution and why. Merchant saw the relationships between a society and the environment that it inhabits as three overlapping spheres of human life: reproduction, production and consciousness. Ecological transformations occur when tension between the requirements of society and the natural requirements of an ecosystem reach a critical threshold. Given the dynamism of the relationships between society and the environment, once that point is reached dramatic changes will happen on both sides of the equation. That dynamic transformation is an ecological revolution.

Given that an ecological revolution for Americans will occur either way, the key question is what kind of transformation we have in store for us. Ecological revolutions can be lumped into two broad categories, as adaptive or reactive. An adaptive revolution is one where the critical pressure between ecology and society generates transformations in reproduction, consciousness, and production that allows the society to evolve to a new stable equilibrium with the ecology that supports it. These changes that transform the society would also slow down the ecological processes that were driving the society towards collapse. A reactive revolution, well, that’s essentially all the other possibilities.

An ecological revolution you say? We Americans are a curious lot. Our society is on the one hand, a porous, pluralistic creature. We pride ourselves on being pragmatic and adaptive. We are quite willing to pick new ideas up and see if they fit us. At the same time, we are stubborn and stogy, championing the values that shaped our nationhood and have changed little in two hundred plus years. We pride ourselves in being able to impose our will on the world, holding manifest destiny and bending the land to our will as core rights as Americans. While we easily pick an idea up, it takes a Civil War or a Great Depression or a Martin Luther King to convince us to put an idea down. The key question that the Easter Island Problem poses to us is this: are we willing to question our key values? And, are we willing to put down the values that are not actually in our best interests? What could possibly propel an adaptive ecological revolution for us Americans?

Not reproductive pressures, it would seem. Currently, the number of Americans grows slightly each year, as our declining birth rate is balanced by immigration. While it does not seem likely in the foreseeable political future, it is possible the floodgates of immigration would open, allowing millions of would-be Americans into the country. What might be driving this where it to occur? If it were not from internal shifts in society that would amount to shifts in production or consciousness, would it be external shifts such as famine in other places? If that were the case, it would seem unlikely in such a “climbing on to the lifeboat” scenario that we could muster anything but a reactive response. And if the opposite were true and there was a severe decline in the number of Americans? Again, the conditions likely to have produced such a human cataclysm could most likely be described as an internal collapse, or a reactive ecological revolution in America that has already begun to play itself out.

What then can be said for the great engine of American ingenuity, our mechanisms of production? We like to think of the American marketplace as the model of the ideal market, where producers and consumers tango, using simple self interest to empower the invisible hand to guide all to the public good in a great collaborative dance. If our mechanisms of production are to propel an ecological revolution, they will need to be dynamic, innovative, and adaptive to the constraints our supporting ecosystems place upon us. In a perfect market system, fundamental change in production is possible because there is a dynamic interplay between both parties to the dance: the preferences of consumers and the modes of production.

Unfortunately, our market isn’t exactly perfect. There are always outside consequences to our decisions as producers and consumers that affect others in society. Those externalities are considered one of the key drags on a perfect market system, and can make our elegant tango couple more like a drunken whirlwind. One way to phrase the Easter Island problem is this: are we willing to question the “perfectness” of our market system?

Perhaps the greatest cause of market externalities is that American culture holds consumers blameless for the impact of their consumption decisions on others. If a person buys paper from a paper mill that damaged the Columbia river, we scold the paper mill, not the purchaser of paper.

In the 1970’s Harold Coase wrote a paper that now plays a crucial role in economic theory, and also nicely explains how consumers get off the hook. Coase’s Theorem states that externalities only “exist” because there is a producer and a victim; in our culture’s habit of thought, the consumer is left out of the equation. As a result, Our economic model focuses on how to allocate property rights in order to create the appropriate normative outcomes to these externalities, which addresses the consequences but not the cause of our less-than-perfect decision making.

To draw on an example from ecology, ants and aphids are two co-adapted species. Ants will often “farm” aphids, protecting them from other predators and relocating them to healthy leaves and ensuring they can thrive and reproduce. In turn, aphids produce a sweet “milk” that ants use to feed the queen for cloning more ants. This mutualistic relationship can wreak havoc on a single tree or even an area of a forest, but would we ever ascribe the damage done to the tree solely to the aphids? These two co-adapted species are both responsible, just as producers and consumers are for the externalities to production.

Why do we hold them blameless? The primacy of the consumer and their inalienable right to consume what they please, how they please is one of the most deeply enshrined American values. I’ll leave the why alone for now (I’ll tackle that tough nugget in a separate post); regardless, the result is that consumer decision-making is free of the informational pressure from externalities. In a natural system, the externalities (damage to the tree) of this ant-aphid duo would eventually limit the number of aphids the ecosystem could support, and put a pressure on the ants and aphids to reach a sustainable equilibrium. This informational feedback can be found throughout nature, providing both stability and the ability to adapt to changing conditions. However, our systems of production are a human system that relies on human-constructed feedbacks. If human institutions or regulations or habits do not provide that informational feedback, the information is lost. The Easter Island problem poses this question to us: if it is going to lead to our collapse, are we willing to let go of this central American value that protects the primacy of the consumer?

Since consumers are left unaccountable for the externalities to their consumption choices, the consumption side of our American market dance is “tethered” to its current decision-making paradigm. As long as the characteristics of consumption remain essentially fixed to the current modes of behavior, even if the supply side incorporates the information from externalities effectively the system is incapable of fundamental change. If one partner in the dance isn’t willing to try some new steps, they aren’t going to get very far. This makes this a shift in consciousness that would connect consumers with the consequences of their consumption of critical importance. Without that, our potentially adaptive, innovative market system will remain in deadlock. This change in the American consciousness is then the linchpin that might allow us the possibility of an adaptive ecological revolution, and permit us to escape the Easter Island problem.