I’d second Peter McCluskey‘s suggestion of fertile soil. So far as I know, the clearest case is the Chaco Canyon civilisation where pollen studies have proved that what is now an inhospitable desert in Nevada used to be a green and pleasant land before the civilisation destroyed itself through deforestation making them unable to keep their topsoil. (And wow, they destroyed it so thoroughly that the place is still desert centuries later.)
I‘m also leaning towards the idea that at least some other ancient civilisations destroyed themselves in a similar way [1] including the Indus Valley civilisation. Not quite exactly the same thing, but the case of Easter Island cutting down all their trees is a similar case of self-inflicted environmental damage causing permanent harm to the civilisation. (Disclaimer, I’m not a historian or archaeologist.)
And like him, I’m not very reassured by the recent record. There are non-civilisation-collapsing examples of similar phenomena from the 1930s Dust Bowl in the US prairies to the current ongoing desertification of the Sahel ie expansion of the Sahara caused mostly by over-grazing. And the inadequate response to climate change [2] suggests that even the most developed countries haven’t become a lot wiser with modern tech.
Having said all that, I agree with the point that so far everyone has been wrong to worry that we will run out of guano / whale oil / peat / coal /oil / potash / insert resource here. But we seem to be a lot better at finding a technological replacement for [specific valuable resource] than we are at mitigating complex externalities with long-term effects.
[1] Basically any civ where the current explanation for their collapse is given as ‘climate change’— that’s the archaeologist equivalent of shrugging and saying ‘they weren’t destroyed by invasion so we dunno’.
I’d second Peter McCluskey‘s suggestion of fertile soil. So far as I know, the clearest case is the Chaco Canyon civilisation where pollen studies have proved that what is now an inhospitable desert in Nevada used to be a green and pleasant land before the civilisation destroyed itself through deforestation making them unable to keep their topsoil. (And wow, they destroyed it so thoroughly that the place is still desert centuries later.)
I‘m also leaning towards the idea that at least some other ancient civilisations destroyed themselves in a similar way [1] including the Indus Valley civilisation. Not quite exactly the same thing, but the case of Easter Island cutting down all their trees is a similar case of self-inflicted environmental damage causing permanent harm to the civilisation. (Disclaimer, I’m not a historian or archaeologist.)
And like him, I’m not very reassured by the recent record. There are non-civilisation-collapsing examples of similar phenomena from the 1930s Dust Bowl in the US prairies to the current ongoing desertification of the Sahel ie expansion of the Sahara caused mostly by over-grazing. And the inadequate response to climate change [2] suggests that even the most developed countries haven’t become a lot wiser with modern tech.
Having said all that, I agree with the point that so far everyone has been wrong to worry that we will run out of guano / whale oil / peat / coal /oil / potash / insert resource here. But we seem to be a lot better at finding a technological replacement for [specific valuable resource] than we are at mitigating complex externalities with long-term effects.
[1] Basically any civ where the current explanation for their collapse is given as ‘climate change’— that’s the archaeologist equivalent of shrugging and saying ‘they weren’t destroyed by invasion so we dunno’.
[2] with a partial exception for Europe