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Historical Perspectives on the Three Crises and on Restorative Development

The Cambodian city of Angkor is so old that it died half a century before Columbus stumbled onto the “New World.” It ruled the mighty Khmer Empire for more than twice as long as the United States has existed. Part of the reason for its power and long life was its location in one of the most resource-rich areas of Southeast Asia.

Experts long assumed the city was abandoned as a result of invasion, but archaeologists now realize, thanks in part to new data from satellite imagery, that its fall was probably due to the convergence of the Three Crises. Angkor’s obsolete infrastructure and population growth, combined with its misuse of land and water resources, ruined the health of its ecosystems and probably the health of its citizens.

Angkor covered over a thousand square kilometers at its peak (Boston, by comparison, is about 67 square kilometers). Its growth resulted in massive deforestation and horrendous pollution of waterways (core samples from canal bottoms show them to have been the primary 36recipient of household wastes and garbage). Area wetlands were disrupted by a latticework of roads and canals.

The 600 buildings uncovered so far reveal a pattern of low-density development. In modern vernacular, the city sprawled itself to death. Angkor’s economy, culture, and armies were defeated by the same “three horsemen” of new development’s apocalypse that threaten us today: the Constraint Crisis, the Corrosion Crisis, and the Contamination Crisis (in Angkor’s case, the contamination was primarily organic, such as fecal).

We like to think that such a fate couldn’t happen to us, but isn’t it likely the citizens of Angkor were afflicted with similar hubris? They enjoyed “king of the hill” status far longer than we have. The fact is, human nature hasn’t changed much, if at all; we’re responding similarly to similar situations and stimuli. New development almost always remains on the throne too long, because humans (especially our institutions) react primarily to present crises—not future crises—no matter how certain the latter may be.

The relevant lessons of Angkor don’t end in the past, however. The area around Tonle Sap, the largest lake in the area, has always been the territory’s primary economic engine, due to its fish harvests, productive wetlands and forests, and rich soil. A millennium ago, Angkor’s excessive new development almost killed the Tonle Sap ecosystem, shutting off its flow of resources. Thanks to the resulting demise of Angkor, the Tonle Sap wetlands were able to restore themselves in the subsequent centuries. As a result, Tonle Sap eventually resumed its role as the economic core of the region. Once again, though, it’s on the verge of collapse, for all the same reasons.

For the first time, economic and ecological data spanning over a thousand years are being analyzed from a trimodal perspective. The Mekong River Commission, a hybrid research and management entity created in 1995 by the governments of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, is performing this pioneering work.

The committee members believe that a better understanding of this progression of overextended new development, lack of conservation, environmental collapse, socioeconomic ruin, and eventual restoration will help them avert a repeat performance. Rather than allowing a repeat of the reflexive, natural, slow restoration that follows apocalypse, they hope to make this period of restoration conscious, planned, and rapid.

The same patterns being revealed in ancient Angkor’s development are also showing up in recent research into the Maya, the Anasazi, the 37Easter Islanders, and many other “mysteriously disappeared” civilizations: over-extended new development, followed by a failure to restore.

BACK TO THE WEST

Egypt, Rome, and Greece provide the best-documented series of declines and rebirths (in western civilization) for the study of restoration economies, and their cycles continue to this day. All three are busily restoring their heritage sites, both for their cultural value and their importance to the tourism industry. Egypt recently spent many years (on and off) restoring the Great Pyramid, the largest of the three Giza Pyramids, built as King Cheops’ tomb about 4,500 years ago. Rome invested eight years in restoring the 1,500-year-old Coliseum, where classical Greek tragedies are now performed rather than the more traditional—but somewhat less socially acceptable—gladiatorial combat. And Greece is restoring the Parthenon. These are representative of the myriad restoration projects that, from ancient monuments to famous palaces to old mills, are occurring across the planet.

If restorative development is the only path to long-lived economic growth (other than constant conquest and pillaging of other societies), we must be able to look to the historical records of the greatest civilizations for documentation of restorative dynamics and characteristics, right? Possibly, but not likely.

The problem is that not many hard facts exist on ancient economies. Future research and analysis will likely provide more statistics related to the natural economic progression of new development, maintenance/ conservation, and restorative development. For now, we largely have to rely on that least rigorous of tools, common sense, to support the legitimacy of the trimodal development perspective: new development, maintenance/conservation, and restorative development. What other modes could there be?

That each of the three modes of development cyclically enjoys star billing as the dominant mode is also a no-brainer. How else to grow a 38new civilization but by emphasizing new development, which creates a need for maintenance/conservation? Both of these modes, though, culminate in a need to renew the built assets when they reach the end of their useful life, and to restore the natural assets when they can no longer withstand humankind’s impact without assistance.

We know that most long-lived civilizations suffered degradation and destruction of their natural and built environments, often due to factors we like to believe are unique to our modern times. Historically, these problems usually stimulated calls for conservation and restoration that echo today’s Constraint, Corrosion, and Contamination Crises. Here are just a few examples:

• Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all criticized their own (and earlier) generations for destroying the formerly beautiful landscapes and forests of Greece, and called for their restoration. The stark, stony landscape that tourists assume is Greece’s natural, picturesque condition is actually the result of human-induced erosion (from deforestation and agriculture) during four seperate episodes of unsustainable new development: around 2500 B.C., 350-50 B.C., A.D. 950-1450, and modern times. Each of the earlier episodes was followed by a period of natural soil restoration due to societal collapse (and resulting disuse).
• Around 1758 B.C., the King of Babylonia, Hammurabi, enjoyed widespread public praise—and suffered attacks from powerful private development interests—for establishing extensive systems of public parks and forests.
• Archeologists Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert Adams have discovered evidence that the collapse of the Sumerian civilization—the world’s first large agricultural society—was due to the salinization of its soils via irrigation. It took millennia to naturally restore the farmland. (Soil salinization is occurring again worldwide, and we can’t afford to wait a thousand years for passive restoration.)
• 39Marcus Cicero (106–43 B.C.) issued a call that can be heard on Capitol Hill today: “The… budget must be balanced. The… treasury should be filled. Government indebtedness must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. The people should learn to work again, instead of living off the public dole.” Cicero called for revitalizing Rome’s lethargic, lead-poisoned culture; restoring its crumbling infrastructure; and renewing its tired, new development-based (via conquest) economy.
• Emperor Majorian issued an edict in A.D. 458 to protect Rome’s old buildings from demolition.
• In 45 B.C., Julius Caesar, sick of the dust, noise, and congestion of Roman streets, banned all chariots and wheeled transportation during daylight hours, as part of his effort to restore the quality of urban life.
• Two millennia later, scientists exploring Roman silver and lead mines (operated from 20 B.C. to A.D. 80) in Extremadura, Spain, reported, “There is as much as 20,000 ppm (2.0%) lead, 7000 ppm (0.7%) zinc, and 5000 ppm (0.5%) arsenic in the dump soils, much higher than… outside the mining area… [M]etals continue to be transported into the local drainage systems.”¹

Such historical examples of toxic, excessive, and/or poorly planned new development (and related restoration efforts) are legion. Of course, many Asian cities are far older than anything in the West, and have even longer data tails from which to glean insight into the trimodal development development “cycle.”

Anthropogenic ecological collapses are obviously nothing new. What is new is the scale of the damage. Unlike Rome or Angkor, modern contamination sites and ecosystem collapses often are not limited to clearly defined areas. Compared to its condition three centuries ago, virtually our entire planet could be considered a brownfield. “Wilderness areas” are now those that are less contaminated, less radioactive, or less disrupted than urban and industrial areas; forget pristine. As a result, remediation and ecological restoration firms now enjoy a very broad range of expansion opportunities.

AN UNPRECEDENTED MOMENT IN TIME

I offer the historical material of this chapter to provide perspective. We mustn’t forget that the Three Global Crises in general, and restoration in particular, are nothing new.

The Corrosion Crisis has obviously been striking specific aspects of our built environment for millennia. Many societies have encountered the Constraint Crisis whenever their increasing population collided with a lack of new geographic frontiers. As with Rome, more than a few early European and Asian city-states went through their own Contamination Crises.

Even if we had copious hard data, these earlier examples, despite some similarities to our present situations, probably wouldn’t offer us much insight or policy guidance, because OUR Restoration Economy is very different from any in Earth’s history. Our Restoration Economy is a macrophenomenon that has been centuries (actually millennia) in the making. Ours is the first Restoration Economy that will be global, rather than national or regional, in scale:

• This is the first time in history that the planet has been mostly developed, rather than mostly wilderness, pasture, and small-scale agriculture.
• This is the first time in history that the vast majority of our structures has been in a deteriorated state (thanks in part to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ sudden proliferation of built environment.)
• This might be the first time since the Yucatan meteorite strike 65 million years ago that species have been disappearing at such a high rate, and that ecosystems have been collapsing worldwide.
• This is the first Restoration Economy to occur subsequent to a population increase of four billion in just one century, after having taken hundreds of millennia to reach half that.
• This is the first Restoration Economy to occur in a world with tightly connected societies and economies, thanks to telephones, TV, airlines, the Internet, satellites, express freight, and international lending.
• 41This is the first Restoration Economy equipped with computers and biotechnology, making it easier (in theory) to functionally integrate our built, natural, economic, and personal environments.
• This is the first Restoration Economy to occur as we’re just beginning to understand the complex adaptive systems that we are, and within which we co-evolve.

Bottom line: we humans are at a unique moment in our development. Throughout previous millennia, we frequently have called upon our individual and societal reserves to meet the challenge of restoring cities, and even entire countries. But never before have we been presented with the challenge of restoring our entire world, both built and natural.

¹ Robert G. Schmidt, Cathy M. Ager, and Juan Gil Montes, adapted from poster presented at Metals in Antiquity Symposium, revised February 2001.