Imagine a world where towering civilizations crumble, leaving behind only remnants of their once-great achievements. From the mighty empires of ancient history to the advanced societies of recent times, the collapse of civilizations has been a recurring theme throughout human existence. The people of Rapa Nui, who thrived from the 10th to the 17th century, harmed their environment so deeply that they jeopardized their food supply, and other necessities. This, along with fights among clans, led to their eventual collapse. The question is, why do complex systems falter, and could our civilization be in danger of a similar fate?

Civilizations are complex structures characterized by advanced social, cultural, economic, and political development. They typically include features such as urbanization, technological advancements, written language, organized religion, and division of labor. Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse—a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size.1 Civilizational breakdown can be sudden or gradual, leading to a significant decline or disintegration of its social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Total disappearance, as in the case of the Maya civilization,2 or radical change, as in the Song Dynasty,3 both qualify as collapses. Throughout history, the collapse of civilizations has been driven by a combination of external and internal factors.4 Our current global civilization faces similar challenges. As Harold Laski observed in 1947, "The world has been very near to disaster, and it is far from apparent that its direction is now set to clear waters."5

This essay argues that our civilization is indeed at risk of collapse due to natural disasters, resource depletion, disease, and invasion. To evaluate that risk, the reasons behind the collapse of past civilizations must first be analyzed.

Natural Disasters: Maya, the Indus Valley, and Cahokia

The Maya civilization, although highly advanced, faced severe environmental challenges between the 7th and 9th centuries that contributed to its eventual collapse. In the aforementioned period, annual precipitation plummeted by 41-54 percent, and up to 70 percent in periods of extreme drought.6 In conjunction with low levels of sea-surface salinity,7 this led to decades-long droughts, causing the most severe climatic challenges the Mayans had faced in thousands of years. Their territories became less inhabitable: reduced precipitation meant less and less potable agricultural water for citizens in Mayan cities. This severely damaged food production, which led to high levels of malnourishment and vulnerability to disease within the population. As a result, Mayans progressively abandoned their cities, which led to the Mayan empire’s fragmentation into feeble city-states.

Similarly, the Indus Valley civilization, located in present-day northwestern India and Pakistan, shrank from numerous large cities to small communities around 2500 BCE, with many settlements being abandoned. According to Sanjeev Kumar, "Indus Valley urbanism emerged on the face of a prolonged trend towards declining rainfall," and as with the Mayan civilization, environmental deterioration was the main cause of the Indus Valley civilization's collapse.8 Cahokia, a thriving commercial metropolis in modern-day Missouri, faced severe floods; its population scattered to other regions, and it also eventually collapsed.9 These three examples show how environmental factors can catalyze the fall of civilizations. Drastic disasters like sustained droughts and severe floodings directly affected agricultural production, leading to insufficient food supplies and, subsequently, population decline and dystrophy when people abandoned their original territories to seek food and stable habitation.

Resource Depletion: Rapa Nui

In the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), arguably one of the world's most isolated civilizations, mysteriously collapsed before the arrival of European colonists. Historians have hypothesized various possibilities for its collapse; David K. Foot argued that the non-sustainable utilization of vital natural resources like wood was the most conceivable cause.10 The islanders relied on wood from a slow-growing, subtropical palm to support their nourishment, economy, and culture. Palmwood was used for firewood, to make tools, craft canoes, build houses, and construct Mo'ai. As the island's population increased, demand for this resource exceeded the trees' natural recovery rate, resulting in deforestation, severe soil erosion, and weakened land productivity. Societal development stagnated, and the social structure of Rapa Nui fell apart.

Disease and Conflict: The Aztec and Incan Empires

In addition to factors of environmental disasters and resource depletion, infectious diseases have also led to sociopolitical chaos and civilizational decline either by killing people directly and causing death within the population or making them vulnerable to other challenges.11 It is widely accepted that a major factor in the collapse of the Aztec Empire was the drastic population decline caused by the smallpox epidemic of 1520, which killed millions of people. Research shows that children bore the brunt of infections. Indigenous children were not immune to smallpox, and while the entire population was extraordinarily vulnerable to the novel virus, children were particularly affected. The Incan Empire, the Aztecs’ southern neighbor, was similarly devastated by the same disease, which killed 200,000 people, including Emperor Huayana Cupac, leading to widespread social disorder.12

Civilizations made vulnerable by diseases additionally faced direct and indirect stresses. Lower population correlates with lower productivity and long-term social unrest and chaos, which could lead to civil war and weaker combat capacity against foreign enemies. In the case of both empires, invasion by Spanish colonizers, who had developed immunity to smallpox, accelerated their collapse. When the Indigenous peoples were fatally infected, but the invaders remained unaffected, it seemed that they were a supernatural punishment for the Aztecs and their empire.13 When Spanish troops invaded the Aztec Empire, the indigenous people were already weakened following infection. Moreover, their weapons were primitive by comparison.14 The invaders destroyed many cultural relics and forced the Aztecs to learn Spanish, severely damaging their sense of cultural identity.15 The civil war brought the empire destruction and chaos and made the conquest much less difficult since there were few resistances.

In conclusion, the major contributing components of civilizational collapse are natural disasters, diseases, resource depletion, and internal and external political conflict.

Potential Collapse of Modern Civilization

Given these historical factors of past civilizational collapse, it is reasonable to believe that our civilization is also in danger. As Elie Wiesel states, "Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future."16 This stirring observation reminds us of the importance of learning from the failures of collapsed civilizations to try to avoid making the same mistakes. If we do not act, our civilization could face a similar fate.

Following the Industrial Era, productivity has increased significantly. Continuous and rapid technological advancements and globalization have created an interconnected world. Our technological advancements are developing much more quickly than they have at any other time in history, agricultural production is very secure, and our ability to fight against diseases and natural disasters has also been greatly improved.

The effects of natural disasters are now less severe than they were in ancient times due to the long-term impact of the technological and economic development of society. For instance, from 2000-2017, floods in China caused 3,074 deaths, while the Chinese population in 2017 was 1.396 billion.17 The destructive power of natural disasters has decreased sharply since humans have predictive technologies such as remote sensing, radars, satellite imaging, and so on.

Meanwhile, ongoing overconsumption has perpetuated the exploitation of natural resources, leading to the extinction and endangerment of many species. Biodiversity has been heavily devastated, and pollution has continuously damaged our planet.18 Our industrialized society relies on key resources; when we exploit them faster than they can be replenished, depletion occurs. Exhausting major energy sources could set off a chain reaction. As scarcity starts to emerge in the economy, the fight for dwindling resources could lead to global conflicts.19 Modern society’s intertwined frameworks could be rendered non-operational without sufficient energy resources. Unless renewable energy sources are scaled up, overconsumption and production curbed, and recycling technologies improved, resource demands could exceed the Earth's carrying capacity, leading to failures of infrastructure, governments, law, and order.

Our global civilization’s interconnectedness—commercial air travel, global trade routes, national transport networks—makes us prone to the rapid spread of illnesses. As we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, a highly infectious illness can overwhelm healthcare facilities worldwide and cause social unrest and economic damage on a global scale.20 Basic services and global supply chains could be disrupted, igniting embers of civil unrest. Moreover, accumulating scientific evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2, the acute phase of COVID-19, causes long-term immune dysfunction in the form of a debilitating illness known as long COVID.21 In January 2023, an estimated 65 million or more individuals had long COVID; with continued and consistently high rates of re-infection, this number has indubitably risen ever higher. Besides that, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a deep recession globally, with income and living standards falling correspondingly.22

Not only that, but serious conflicts such as the war between Russia and Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine have had significant impacts on international order and remain unresolved.23-26 As technology develops, humans wield the power to destroy our achievements as a civilization. Tension between powerful countries, China and the United States for instance, remains at dangerously high levels.27 Lest we forget the destructive power of modern weapons: about 250,000 Japanese people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American atomic bombs in 1945, with hundreds of thousands more dying from radiation in subsequent decades. Currently, the world’s nuclear-armed states have stockpiled between 12,000 to 13,000 warheads, each one more devastating than all bombs used during the Second World War combined.28-29 It would take a mere few nuclear weapons to exterminate our global civilization.

Modern society still lacks the necessary solutions to avoid the factors that caused past civilizations to collapse. Despite unprecedented technological development increasing our ability to defend against natural disasters, we cannot control nature and prevent catastrophes. Diseases, many of them incurable, continue to kill hundreds of thousands annually. The most devastating factors of civilizational collapse in the present day: ongoing internal conflicts, the threat of world war, climate crisis, and environmental destruction are undeniable. This underscores the necessity for humanity to learn from history to design sustainable practices, strengthen international relations, and build systems to mitigate such risks, and to secure a better, more stable future for our civilization.

Notes

1. Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

2. Marilyn A. Masson, "Maya collapse cycles," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 45 (2012): 18237-18238.

3. Sòng Cháo, "Song Dynasty," (2009).

4. Malcolm H. Wiener, “The Collapse of Civilizations,” accessed April 25, 2024.

5. Harold J. Laski, "The Crisis in Our Civilization," Foreign Affairs 26, no. 1 (1947): 36-51.

6. Nicholas P. Evans et al., “Quantification of Drought During the Collapse of the Classic Maya Civilization,” Science 361 (2018): 498-501.

7. Richardson B. Gill, Paul A. Mayewski, Johan Nyberg, Gerald H. Haug, and Larry C. Peterson, “Drought and the Maya Collapse,” Ancient Mesoamerica 18, no. 2 (2007): 283–302. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536107000193.

8. Sanjeev Kumar, "Environmental Factors Contribute to the Decline of Indus Valley Civilization," International Journal of History 1, no. 1 (2019): 48-55.

9. Larry V. Benson, Timothy R. Pauketat, and Edward R. Cook, “Cahokia’s Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change,” American Antiquity 74, no. 3 (2009): 467–83.

10. David K. Foot, “Easter Island: A Case Study in Non-Sustainability,” Greener Management International, no. 48 (2004): 11–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/greemanainte.48.11.

11. T. Aidan Cockburn, “Infectious Diseases in Ancient Populations,” Current Anthropology 12, no. 1 (1971): 45–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2740635.

12. Mark Thomson, “Junior Division Winner: The Migration of Smallpox and Its Indelible Footprint on Latin American History,” The History Teacher 32, no. 1 (1998): 117–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/494425.

13. Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 528–529.

14. Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th – 18th Centuries, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press 1993).

15. Joel N. Shurkin, The Invisible Fire, (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979).

16. Elie Wiesel, “A God Who Remembers,” NPR, April 7, 2008, accessed August 11, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2008/04/07/89357808/a-god-who-remembers.

17. Yufeng Wei, “Causes and Effect of Several Typical Natural Disasters in China,” DESTech Transactions on Social Science Education and Human Science, January 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322710937_Causes_and_ Effect_of_Several_Typical_Natural_Disasters_in_China/citation/download.

18. Fayssal Ayad, “Mapping the Path Forward: A Prospective Model of Natural Resource Depletion and Sustainable Development,” Resources Policy 85 (2013): 104016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2023.104016.

19. Philip Andrews-Speed, et al., “The Global Resource Nexus. The Struggles for Land, Energy, Water, Minerals,” Transatlantic Academy (2013), https://www.water-energy-food.org/resources/report-the-global-resource-nexus-the-struggles-for-land-energy-food-water-and-minerals.

20. John Snow Project Editorial, “‘Endemic’ Sars-COV-2 and the Death of Public Health,” John Snow Project, November 8, 2023, https://johnsnowproject.org/insights/endemic-sars-cov-2-and-the-death-of-public-health.

21. John Snow Project Editorial, “Covid-19: A New Disease Paradigm,” John Snow Project, September 14, 2023, https://johnsnowproject.org/insights/a-new-disease-paradigm.

22. James K. Jackson, Martin A. Weiss, Andres B. Schwarzenberg, and Rebecca M. Nelson, Global Economic Effects of Covid-19: In Brief, (Congressional Research Service, 2020).

23. Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk and Monica Hakimi, “Russia, Ukraine, and the Future World Order,” American Journal of International Law 116, no. 4 (2022): 687–97, https://doi.org/10.1017/ajil.2022.69.

24. Julia Geneuss and Florian Jeßberger, Russian Aggression and the War in Ukraine: An Introduction, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Volume 20, Issue 4, (September 2022): 783–786, https://doi.org/10.1093/jicj/mqac055.

25. Oren Yiftachel, "Deepening Apartheid: The Political Geography of Colonizing Israel/Palestine." Frontiers in Political Science 4, (2023): 981867. Accessed June 17, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.981867.

26. Dana Jarbawi, Tariq Jarbawi, and Ali Jarbawi, “A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism’s Entangled Project,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 24, no. 1 (2017): 197–220.

27. Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, "The Coming Conflict with America," Foreign Affairs (1997): 18-32.

28. Frank Barnaby, “The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Medicine and War 11, no. 3 (1995): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/07488009508409217.

29. Einar H. Dyvik, “Who Has the Most Nuclear Weapons Worldwide 2024.” Statista, June 17, 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/264435/number-of-nuclear-warheads-worldwide.

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