population and all parts of the world linked by air travel, new diseases such as AIDS spread rapidly-and a virus as deadly as AIDS but more easily transmissible could appear at any time. Starvation, social strife, and disease interact in complex ways. If famine were the sole mechanism of collapse, the species become extinct quite suddenly. A population that grows in response to abundant but finite resources, like the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, tends to exhaust these resources completely. By the time individuals discover that remaining resources will not be adequate for the next generation, the next generation has already been born. And in its struggle to survive, the last generation uses up every scrap, so that nothing remains that would sustain even a small population. But famine seldom acts alone. It is exacerbated by social strife, which interferes with the production and delivery of food. And it weakens the natural defenses by which organisms fight off disease. Paradoxically, disease can act to spare resources. If, for example, a new epidemic should reduce the human population to a small number of people who happen to be resistant to it before all the world's resources are severely depleted, the species might be able to survive a while longer. AFTER THE FALL But even if a few people manage to survive worldwide population collapse, civilization will not. The complex association of cultural traits of which modern humans are so proud is a consequence of abundant resources, and cannot long outlive their depletion. Civilization refers, in its derivation, to the of living in dense nucleated settlements, which appeared as population grew in response to plentiful resources. Many things seem to follow as a matter of course when people live in cities, and wherever civilization occurred, it has involved political consolidation, economic specialization, social stratification, some sort of monumental architecture, and a flowering of artistic and intellectual endeavor (Childe, 1951). Localized episodes of such cultural elaboration have always been associated with rapid population growth. Reasons for the abundance of resources that promoted this growth vary from one case to another. In some instances, a population moved into a new region with previously untapped resources; in other instances the development or adoption of new crops, new technologies, or new social strategies
population and all parts of the world linked by air travel, new diseases such as AIDS spread rapidly-and a virus as deadly as AIDS but more easily transmissible could appear at any time. Starvation, social strife, and disease interact in complex ways. If famine were the sole mechanism of collapse, the species become extinct quite suddenly. A population that grows in response to abundant but finite resources, like the reindeer of St. Matthew Island, tends to exhaust these resources completely. By the time individuals discover that remaining resources will not be adequate for the next generation, the next generation has already been born. And in its struggle to survive, the last generation uses up every scrap, so that nothing remains that would sustain even a small population. But famine seldom acts alone. It is exacerbated by social strife, which interferes with the production and delivery of food. And it weakens the natural defenses by which organisms fight off disease. Paradoxically, disease can act to spare resources. If, for example, a new epidemic should reduce the human population to a small number of people who happen to be resistant to it before all the world's resources are severely depleted, the species might be able to survive a while longer. AFTER THE FALL But even if a few people manage to survive worldwide population collapse, civilization will not. The complex association of cultural traits of which modern humans are so proud is a consequence of abundant resources, and cannot long outlive their depletion. Civilization refers, in its derivation, to the of living in dense nucleated settlements, which appeared as population grew in response to plentiful resources. Many things seem to follow as a matter of course when people live in cities, and wherever civilization occurred, it has involved political consolidation, economic specialization, social stratification, some sort of monumental architecture, and a flowering of artistic and intellectual endeavor (Childe, 1951). Localized episodes of such cultural elaboration have always been associated with rapid population growth. Reasons for the abundance of resources that promoted this growth vary from one case to another. In some instances, a population moved into a new region with previously untapped resources; in other instances the development or adoption of new crops, new technologies, or new social strategies
ehv.docx