"WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTEROUS DECISIONS?" asks Jared Diamond in his landmark book, "COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".

The beginning of the summer of 2007 roughly marks the fourth year at the plateau of peak oil according to Jan Lundberg and other reliable sources. Although seemingly close the Relocalization movement has yet to achieve critical mass. Why is that? Why is there continued resistance to the obvious solutions? What is obvious to us has not been perceived by the general public. Will our efforts be enough to make a real difference under present conditions of climate, energy economics, and self-absorption?

For those of us in the Relocalization movement, a meta-view is useful if not essential. Our effectiveness in formulating what our strategies must be, and the pitfalls that could unravel our efforts to save us from ourselves depend on an accurate understanding of where humanity stands at this moment.

The following may be useful in forming a relocalization strategy or plan for your unique area. This author has experienced a variety of objections from those who would resist the notion of preparing for power-down, or life in an energy-constrained, low carbon environment.

Jared Diamond has catalogued the resistance based on real, historical cases and it's instructive. "By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures," says Diamond, "…we may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success.

The process of informing and advising our fellow citizens begins with informing ourselves. Few sources of a meta-view of sustainability can rival the information presented in Jared Diamond's "Collapse". The following are selective quotes from Collapse and reflections on how this information relates to our work to promote and model Relocalization.

Relocalization doesn't occur easily, as those who have tried can attest. It can't be done alone, or in a small group. A small, committed group can succeed more easily in an enlightened, informed, and mature population. In our "sibling society, this is not often the case.

In the first decade of the Third Millennium, life on planet Earth faces challenges unprecedented since the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. In the course of their natural evolution one species, homo sapiens, discovered a class of fuels derived from Cretaceous fossils that allowed them to thrive, prosper and multiply with exponential intensity.

Although they used coal to facilitate numerous tasks as far back as 1000 BCE, the industrial revolution caused a rapid increase in its uses and utility. After James Watts' improvement of a coal-fired steam engine in the 1760's there was a rapid increase in the use of coal. In 1859 a discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania ushered in a period in which coal was gradually supplanted by oil and petroleum distillates. Yet the rising demand for cheap energy to supply the burgeoning population meant that coal remained a popular fuel for electrical generation.

The advantages of coal and oil are associated with a doubling of world population from 1 to 2 billion in the 46 years between 1928 and 1974. As of this writing the population is estimated at about 6.6 billion and rising.

In 1896 a Swedish scientist first postulated the possibility that the burning of fossil fuels could cause a "greenhouse effect" and cause an increase in the earth's temperature. Yet only in the time period after World War Two did the use of all fossil fuels really expand and gradually began an accelerating the alteration of the composition of the atmosphere. It wasn't until C. D. Keeling's patient and meticulous measurements of atmospheric CO2 in Hawaii in the 1960's, and continuing today, that the phenomenon was recognized as a great danger.

Many scientists now claim to see evidence that humanity is approaching a point of no return. The processes unleashed by human's burning of fossil fuels could create a self-sustaining series of feedbacks known as a runaway greenhouse effect. There is a critical threshold in the interplay between the composition of the atmosphere and planetary processes at the Earth's surface. To put it more simply, human's have arrived at a point in their evolution where they could virtually drive themselves to the point of extinction along with more than half of the other life-forms on Earth. And that calculation doesn't take into account the potential for a thermonuclear holocaust unleashed by humans in a fear-driven attempt to compete and survive on a severely resource-constrained planet.

"WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTEROUS DECISIONS?" asks Jared Diamond in his landmark book, "COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". In his classes at the University of California at Los Angeles on how societies cope with environmental problems, the question that most puzzled his students during the Easter Island lessons was, "how on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which it depended?" This question was repeatedly raised as they considered other societies that made similar mistakes.

At the beginning of chapter 16 Diamond says, "They also asked a related question: how often did people wreak ecological damage intentionally, or at least while aware of the likely consequences? How often did people instead do it without meaning to, or out of ignorance? My students wondered weather - if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now - those people of the next century will be as astonished about our blindness today as we are about the blindness of the Easter Islanders."

Diamond calls Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" as a seminal source of analysis. Yet Tainter was skeptical about the possibility that some complex societies failed because they depleted environmental resources. "My UCLA undergraduates and Joseph Tainter" as well, writes Diamond, "have identified a baffling phenomenon: namely, failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups. That problem is of course related to the problem of failures of individual decision-making…. But some additional factors enter into failures of group decision-making, such as conflicts of interest among members of the group, and group dynamics."

To illuminate what really happens Diamond proposes "a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making". He divides these factors into four categories. "First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may then fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed."

Collapse is full of historical case studies in preceding chapters. He notes, "While all this discussion of reasons for failure and societal collapses may seem depressing, the flip side is a heartening subject: namely successful decision-making." He cites the need to understand the reasons for the bad decisions as a "checklist to guide groups to make good decisions".

Why do groups do disastrous things because of a failure to anticipate a problem? Diamond says, "One (reason) is that they may have had no prior experience of such a problem, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility".

"Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten." "Another reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem involves reasoning by false analogy. When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations."

Diamond's second stop on his road map, "after a society has or hasn't anticipated a problem before it arrives, involves its perceiving or failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia.

First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible." "Another frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it arrives is distant managers, a potential issue in any large society or business." "Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a sl;ow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." " Politicians use the term 'creeping normalcy' to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations." "Another term related to creeping normalcy is 'landscape amnesia': forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual."

"The third stop on the road map of failure is the most frequent, the most surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.

Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term "rational behavior," arising from clashes of interests between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people." "The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively enforced."

Diamond clarifies this by noting that the perpetrators are usually "few in numbers" and "highly motivated" by large profits "while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals".

A frequent type of rational bad behavior is "good for me. Bad for you and for everybody else" - to put it bluntly, "selfish".

"One particular form of clashes of interest", notes Diamond, "has become well known under the name 'tragedy of the commons,' in turn closely related to the conflicts termed 'the prisoner's dilemma' and 'the logic of collective action'."

Garrett Hardin wrote an extraordinary book on this topic ("Exploring New Ethics For Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle", Viking Press, NY 1972) that has become an environmental classic. His "Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Depite Economists, Ecologists, And The Merely Eloquent" is a lesser heralded work but equally valuable to the Relocalization Movement."

Diamond continues with a number of potential solutions and cites "the tragedy…" for leading to the loss of many common resources. One is by government or other strong force controlling the resource by enforcing harvesting quotas, the privatization of the resource, and finally, for consumers to guide themselves by enlightened self-interest toward conservation.

He continues, "Clashes of self-interest involving 'rational behavior' are also prone to arise when the principal consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource but society as a whole does."

"A further conflict of interest involving 'rational behavior' arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else."

Diamond quotes Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly" which documents many historic conflict of interest collapses. They range from the Trojan horse, to Pearl Harbor. But Tuchman asserts, "Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as 'the most flagrant of all passions.' "

Diamond notes another reason for a failure to attempt to solve perceived problems. It involves, he says, "what social scientists call 'irrational behavior" i.e., behavior that is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by a clash of values: we may ignore a bad stus quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling. 'Persistence in error', 'wooden-headedness, 'refusal to draw inference from negative signs,' and 'mental standstill or stagnation' are among the phrases that Barbara Tuchman applies to this common human trait. Psychologists use the term, 'sunk-cost effect' for a related trait: we feel reluctant to abandon a policy (or to sell a stock) in which we have already invested heavily.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disasterous behavior." However, "The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense."

"It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival." "All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can't be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning them will insure survival."

"Perhaps a crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values when times change." "Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win those gambles."

"Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive and complaibn about the problem." "The public may dismiss warnings because previous warnings that proved to be false alarms." (ref.: Aesop's fable of the boy who cried "Wolf!") The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking ISEP." (It's somebody else's problem.)

"Partly irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems often arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same individual." "Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focu: they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters and pay attention only to problems that are on the verge of explosion." (The 90-day focus syndrome.) "Economists rationally attempt to justify these irrational focuses on short-term profits by 'discounting' future profits."

"Some other reasons for irrational refusal to try to solve a perceived problem are more speculative. One is a well-recognized phenomenon in short-term decision-making termed 'crowd psychology'." "A calmer small-scale analog of 'crowd psychology that may emerge in groups of decision-makers has been termed 'group-think' by Irving Janis."

"The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem," writes Diamond, "is psychological denial." Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has famously described this phenomenon in her seminal paper often referred to as "the five stages of grief". The original was titled, "The Five Stages of Reaction Upon Hearing Catastrophic News". Diamond summarizes this by writing, "Although psychological denial is a phenomenon that is well established in individual society, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well."

"Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little, and too late. Some attempted solutions may backfire and make the problem worse…"

"At the end of this chapter we seem to have moved towards the opposite extreme: we have identified an abundance of reasons why societies might fail." "But it's obvious that societies don't regularly fail to solve their problems. If that were true, all of us would now be dead or else living again under Stone Age conditions."

"Why, then, do some societies succeed and others fail, in the various ways discussed in this chapter? Part of the reason, of course, involves differences among environments rather than among societies: some environments pose much more difficult problems than do others." "In fact, while environmental conditions certainly make it more difficult to support human societies in some environments than in others, that still leaves much scope for a society to save or doom itself by its own actions.

It's a large subject why some groups (or individual leaders) followed one of the paths to failure discussed in this chapter, while others didn't." "But I still hope that better understanding of the potential causes of failure discussed in this chapter may help planners to become aware of those causes and to avoid them."

Diamond uses President Kennedy as a contrasting example of a leader learning from his mistakes in the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Citing Irving Janus' book, Groupthink, "the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions…"

"The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making."

"Why did decision-making in these two Cuban crises unfold so differently? Much of the reason is that Kennedy himself thought hard after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he charged his advisors to think hard, about what had gone wrong with their decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to become freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoiud his overly influencing the discussion himself."

"Yet, it calls for a leader with a different type of courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary."

Diamond cites examples of effective decision-making. "They include the early Tokugawa shoguns, who curbed deforestation in Japan long before it reached the stage of Easter Island; Joaquin Balaguer, who (for whatever motives) strongly backed environmental safeguards on the eastern Dominican side of Hispaniola while his counterparts on the western side didn't; the Tikopian chiefs who presided over the decision to exterminate their island's destructive pigs, despite the high status of pigsin Melanesia; and China's leaders that mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable leaders include German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other western European leaders, who decided after World War II to sacrifice separate national interests and to launch Europe's integration in the European Economic Community, with a major motive being to minimize the risk of another such European war."

"Those examples of courageous leaders and courageous people give me hope. They make me believe that this book on a seemingly pessimistic subject is really an optimistic book. By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures, we too, like President Kennedy in 1961 and 1962, may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success."

Jared Diamond's accounts of failures and successes are worth our consideration because they are keys to preventing a global collapse of unprecedented proportions. In the spirit of enlightened self-interest we may be sufficiently instructed by them to help prevent the current "perfect storm" of crises from overwhelming human civilization and the other species that depend upon us for continued existence.