Collide-a-scape

James Lee, the demented guy who was killed after taking hostages at the Discovery channel headquarters, is turning into quite an illuminating inkblot in the blogosphere. Exhibit A is this headline from Anthony Watts:

When warmistas attack

Exhibit B would be the majority sentiment that flows from that post’s comment thread, of which this one was among the first few out of the box:

Are you surprised? All of the unbalanced minds are on the Alarmist side. Now watch for the reaction of Romm and Hansen and all of the other spittle-flecked lunatics. Will they have the guts to embrace his actions?

Joe Romm, for his part, rightly criticizes the warped nature of Watts’ headline (as well as the equally cringe-inducing first line from that post) and the offensive tenor of many of the commenters in that thread.

On the central figure in the tragic event,  Romm also correctly observes:

I don’t think you can tell much about this guy from his actions and writing other than the fact that he was crazy every which way.

Then Romm, being Romm, couldn’t leave well enough alone. In the next breath, he forfeits the high ground when he writes:

But you can tell a lot about the anti-science, pro-pollution blogosphere by how they react to this and whether or not they denounce Anthony Watts.

Really? Does that also apply to the (presumably pro-science, anti-pollution) liberal blogosphere, a representation of which Anthony Watts (oblivious to the odious comments from his own readers in the thread of his post), gleefully points out in the thread of this Think Progress post?

This is the thing that puzzles me about Romm. He could have simply let the Watts post speak for itself. It was a gift staring him in the face. Instead, he had to overreach and demagogue it.

So I guess we can tell a lot about Romm and Watts, too, based on how they treat this sorry episode.

The September issue of Scientific American has a bunch of interesting articles, including this introductory essay on why humans always seem to be fearing one doomsday or another. Here’s the irony:

You might think that the enterprise of science, with its method and its facts, would inoculate us against the most extravagant doomsday obsessions. But it doesn’t. If anything, it just gives us more to worry about.

And who are the biggest worry warts? You guessed it:

Some of the most fervent and convincing doomsayers, after all, are scientists. Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has warned that of out-of-control nanobots could consume everything on earth. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has publicly offered a bet that a biological catastrophe—accidental or intentional—will kill at least one million people by 2020 (so far, no takers). Numerous climatologists sound the alarm about the possibility of runaway global warming. They all stand on the shoulders of giants: British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in the 19th century that the rise in population would lead to widespread famine and catastrophe. It never happened, but that didn’t stop Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich from renewing the warning in his 1968 book The Population Bomb when he predicted that global famine was less than two decades away. Catastrophe didn’t arrive then, either, but does that mean it never will? Not necessarily. Still, people often worry disproportionately about disasters that are unlikely to occur.

Now we come to the objective of the article:

Science may be a culprit, but it also offers some explanation for why we can be so fearful. Some researchers think that apocalyptic dread feeds off our collective anxiety about events that lie outside our individual control.

There’s more to tease you, but it’s just a web preview. To read the whole thing (as well as other articles with titles such as, “The Brief, Eventful Afterlife of a Human Corpse“), I suggest buying a print copy. Seems like perfect beach reading as we wind down summer.

Not me, silly. I still have no clue why I blog.

But I have in my possession the first draft of Joe Romm’s recent post, “Why I blog.” It’s a rough, bullet-point version that was smuggled out of Romm’s kitchen window by a source who shall remain anonymous. Here it is:

I joined the new media because the motherf#!$*! mainstream, status quo, false-balance media are so utterly, miserably, failing to report on the looming end of civilization.

What I have learned most from my blog is that hyperbole works! The louder I shout, the more insults I hurl, the more credible I become.

I am channeling the spirit of George Orwell. He was a truth teller. So am I. Don’t believe me? I’ll blowtorch your name in public.

I dicate all my posts not just because I love the sound of my voice, but because I love the poetry of my meandering 2,000 word posts, and the artistic beauty of those 50-word headlines.

I blog because it gives me more pleasure than the treadmill. Also, I simply would burst from acid reflux if I didn’t have a vehicle to truth-tell.

I blog because my brother lost his house to Hurricane Katrina. That singular event, which I admit, had nothing to do with global warming, motivated me to become an unflinching truth-teller.

George Orwell. Note to self: insert more references to Orwell.

A key goal of my blog is to save you time by being as verbose as possible. I know that sounds like a contradiction. It’s not. I never contradict myself. Remember, I am a truth-teller. The point is, you don’t need to bother going anywhere else for truth-telling. Everything you need to (and should) know about climate science, climate politics, and the motherf#$%&! status quo media is what I tell you.

On that note, F-you Andy Revkin! I’m the man! Not you! And I’m gonna drum that home from hell to high water.

I blog because I love my commenters. They reinforce my basest instincts, they appreciate my truth-telling and they never fail to say that in the most adoring terms.

The ultimate reason that I blog is because it’s too late for humanity. But I want the cockroaches who will inherit hell and high water to know that somebody was out there yelling from the rooftops.

The ultimate, ultimate reason that I blog is because there’s a great hunger for such ravings. That is what keeps me going. Your hunger for my rants. Thank you all for lapping it up!

Well, it looks like Keith’s back, and my classes will be starting soon, so this is probably a good time to sign off.  Thanks to Keith for inviting me to do this, and thanks to all the commenters for making it such an interesting experience.  I’ll continue to blog at Gambler’s House, so if you just can’t get enough of my longwinded posts, that’s where to look.

Do conservation biologists make ethically questionable trade-offs when trying to save a species? This is the argument that Marc Bekoff makes in a provocative New Scientist essay. Bekoff, who is a biologist and an animal rights advocate, asks:

Can people who value individual lives work with those who are willing to sacrifice lives for the good of a species or an ecosystem? What role should animal sentience play in such decisions?

Bekoff has long been questioning the practices and ethics of conservation biology. I first talked to him 12 years ago, when I wrote this piece about a controversial program that reintroduced Canada lynx to Colorado. (Earlier this year I wrote a short post about the lynx reintroduction program and Bekoff.) I wish I had more time to talk about his current essay, but I wanted to put it out there and get some of your reaction.

I’ve already questioned the idea that the decline of Chaco Canyon as a regional center in the twelfth century constitutes an example of societal “collapse,” but there’s another major event in Southwestern prehistory that could conceivably qualify.  This is the large-scale and apparently complete depopulation of the entire Northern San Juan region between AD 1280 and 1300.  This cultural region, which covers large parts of southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, is often called the “Mesa Verde” region, after the well-known cluster of sites on and around Mesa Verde now part of major national park, but it also includes many other areas, including the recently designated Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Cedar Mesa/Grand Gulch area in Utah.  All of this vast area, as well as the parts of the San Juan Basin to the south that were still occupied after the decline of Chaco, seems to have been abandoned astonishingly rapidly.  The western parts in Utah were apparently abandoned first, starting around the 1260s, and all construction and other apparent activity came to a very abrupt halt throughout the region by 1280.  In some areas, such as Mesa Verde proper, construction was quite active throughout the 1270s, making the total lack of evidence for construction in the 1280s particularly remarkable.

So what happened here?  There are two main types of explanations, environmental and social, and their relative popularity has varied over the years.  The environmental explanation depends largely on the striking coincidence of the abandonment of Mesa Verde with the so-called “Great Drought” of AD 1276 to 1299, one of the earliest major climatic events to be identified in the tree-ring record.  The near-perfect alignment of the drought with the final abandonment of the area is indeed remarkable, and this explanation has been pretty popular and remains so today, but there is considerable evidence that there was more going on.  For one thing, while all of the Southwest is in some sense marginal for agriculture, within that context the northern San Juan is one of the most productive and reliable agricultural areas.  Indeed, much of southwestern Colorado is used today for commercial farming, largely using dry-farming methods not all that different from those used in antiquity.  The Mesa Verde area gets plenty of rainfall, and while a short growing season can be an issue at the higher elevations, throughout most of the region it is not generally problematic.  Models of agricultural potential based on tree-ring data have generally shown that the carrying capacity of the Northern San Juan greatly exceeded any plausible estimate of its overall population throughout prehistory, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that individual communities would always be able to support themselves on the land they happened to have.

Social factors, then, are probably involved along with the drought.  There is definite evidence for a considerable amount of violence during the thirteenth century in this area, and settlement patterns become increasingly defensive over time.  There is also an increasing diversity in public architecture among the various communities, suggesting that traditional religious or ideological structures may have been breaking down and being replaced by new ones.  A strong tendency toward settlement aggregation, perhaps due to defensive considerations, may have played a role in these religious trends.  Furthermore, all of this may have been influenced or set in motion by deteriorating environmental conditions; environmental and social factors were not necessarily separate things.

So where did the people go?  The general assumption is that they mostly went to the northern Rio Grande Valley, which sees a remarkable increase in its population right around AD 1300, just as Mesa Verde is emptying out.  This is a bit problematic, however, since there is relatively little evidence for people with obvious Mesa Verde cultural traits showing up in the Rio Grande at this time.  This may be because people were emigrating away from Mesa Verde in small groups and assimilating into existing Rio Grande communities, or it may have been because people were changing their cultures as they moved, perhaps abandoning the old social institutions that had been ineffective in preventing the abandonment and adopting new ones that seemed to work better.  It’s hard to say, really, and this is a topic of ongoing research.  One interesting effort recently has been the Village Ecodynamics Project by Washington State University and Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, which has used agent-based modeling and other innovative techniques to try to understand the culture history of the Northern San Juan.

Okay, so that’s more or less what happened.  Does it count as a “collapse”?  Let’s look back at Jared Diamond’s criteria for collapse:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

In this case 1, 3, and 4 are pretty obvious.  The Mesa Verde region was totally depopulated, which is about as major a loss of population as you can get.  It’s also very large, and the changes that resulted from the abandonment of the region and the influx of population to the Rio Grande have persisted to the present day; many aspects of Mesa Verde culture notable in the archaeological record were not brought to the Rio Grande, and are not present in the modern Pueblos there.  Since Diamond apparently considers only one of the first two criteria to be necessary, he probably would consider this a collapse, but most other collapse theorists, including Joseph Tainter, consider loss of complexity to be a more important consideration than loss of population, so let’s look at complexity in the Mesa Verde case.

There basically isn’t any evidence for significantly complexity in Mesa Verde before its abandonment or in the Rio Grande afterwards.  Unlike the Chaco case, the villages in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan seem to have had relatively egalitarian social structures, at least economically and probably politically as well.  This is not to say that there were definitely no disparities in political power, but that they were likely masked and subverted by an egalitarian ideology that prevented massive accumulation of wealth and power.  This is the case in the modern Pueblos, where despite some possible inequalities in power and political influence among different clans or societies the overall ideology has enforced a general economic equality.  This seems to have been the case in the thirteenth-century Northern San Juan as well, and it could have been in part a reaction to the perceived excesses of the Chacoan era, although it’s noteworthy that a certain amount of Chacoan influence seems to have persisted, especially in the Totah area around Aztec, albeit without much evidence for the economic inequality that marked the Chacoan era itself.

Mesa Verde doesn’t get mentioned in the collapse literature as much as Chaco, although sometimes the two are kind of muddled together incoherently, and for good reason.  What we seem to be seeing at Mesa Verde is a period of societal difficulty that resulted in depopulation and migration, a common pattern in Southwestern prehistory.  While there were some changes in society during the abandonment and migration that make it difficult to tell exactly where the people ended up, these changes don’t seem to have been related to any change in the overall complexity of the society, which remained about as complex as it had been before.

Julien Riel-Salvatore links to an interesting article on a man in the Brazilian rainforest who is the only surviving member of an “uncontacted” tribe and the decision by Brazilian authorities to leave him alone by setting aside a large area for him to use and waiting for him to contact them if he so chooses.  As Julien notes, the term “uncontacted” is problematic, especially in this case, since the remaining members of the tribe were almost certainly killed by ranchers or loggers who bulldozed their village in 1996.  That sure sounds like “contact” to me.  Indeed, earlier attempts by the authorities to contact him were successful in the sense that they did find him, but only in the context of “tense standoffs,” one of which ended with him shooting one of the government agents in the chest with an arrow.  It’s possible that the Brazilian government is using the term “contact” (or its equivalent in Portuguese) in a narrow, specialized sense in referring to these situations, but even if that’s the case it doesn’t really make sense for anyone else to use it.

That aside, it’s an interesting article, short and definitely worth reading.  One of the issues it mentions is the way a provision in the Brazilian constitution giving tribes rights to the land they have traditionally used has created a perverse incentive among settlers who want the land of uncontacted tribes to get rid of the tribes before the government finds them.  It also discusses the government’s view that publicizing the existence of the uncontacted man actually makes him safer, because it keeps the settlers from trying anything now that they know people are watching.  Thought-provoking stuff.

Andrew Revkin has two interesting posts giving different perspectives on the best way to implement a post-carbon energy system.  One quotes from a recent interview with Bill Gates in which he argued that increased government funding of energy-related research and development is the key, and the other gives a response from Richard Rosen arguing that Gates is overestimating the potential for major breakthroughs in energy research and that while more research funding is needed, what’s more important is rapid and widespread implementation of the clean energy technologies available now.  From my understanding of energy technology and economics, I think Rosen is basically right here, although he seems to be implying that Gates is making a stronger argument against implementation than he is.  Nevertheless, there’s less dispute here than meets the eye, I think, and it’s really more a matter of balancing priorities than of making binary decisions, which I think both Gates and Rosen understand.  Neither of them, however, is really grappling with the elephant in the room on this issue, which is the immense political challenges in getting any of these policies implemented on a scale that’s going to do any good, although Revkin does mention this in his follow-up questions to Rosen and Rosen discusses it a bit in his response.

Chaco Canyon is often discussed in the “collapse” literature as a prime example of societal collapse, often tied to climatic change and sometimes to ecological overshoot (although that part’s pretty dubious).  Both Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter use it as an example of societal collapse in their respective books on the subject.  It’s easy to see why; Chaco is remarkable for its impressive remains in a very harsh and unpromising setting, but it’s clear that those impressive remains date to a remarkably short period of time, and that something happened afterward that changed things considerably and led to a near-total cessation of further activity in the canyon.

The human occupation of Chaco Canyon goes back a very long way, but the key developments that made it an important regional center seem to have begun in the AD 800s with the initial building of a few “great houses,” which in that period were large masonry structures similar in layout and construction techniques to the “small houses” in which most Southwestern people lived at the time but much on a much larger scale.  These early great houses, including Pueblo Bonito and Una Vida, show considerable signs of residential use in their earliest parts, and it seems that they were at least initially residential structures.  It’s not at all clear what inspired their construction, but there were similar structures being built in other parts of the region at the time, so Chaco may not have been particularly special at first.  Over the course of the next hundred years, however, something seems to have happened to make Chaco a major regional center, and starting around AD 1030 a building boom in the canyon in which the existing great houses were expanded using much more elaborate techniques and an even larger scale of construction coincided with the construction of entirely new great houses both in the canyon and throughout the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico and beyond into Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.  These “outlying” great houses were mostly placed in existing small house communities, which continued to be occupied, and were connected to the canyon via an elaborate road system.

Over the next hundred years, construction both inside and outside the canyon continued almost without pause, and at the same time a vast amount of material of all kinds was brought into Chaco from a vast surrounding region: turquoise, shell, copper bells, macaws, and other exotic materials, as well as more quotidian items such as pottery, construction timbers, and corn.  Then, around AD 1130, everything seems to have come to an abrupt halt.  Construction of great houses, after a shift around AD 1100 toward a different type of architecture, seems to stop entirely by around 1125, and activity in the canyon slowed to a crawl at that point.  There was probably at least a small population remaining until the depopulation of the whole region in the late 1200s, but it was nowhere near as large as the apparent population at the system’s height.  It is this decline in activity that collapse theorists seek to explain when they look at Chaco as a case study.

So what happened?  There are various theories out there.  Many point to a prolonged period of drought from around 1130 to 1180, which coincides suspiciously closely with the end of major activity at Chaco, as having somehow led to the collapse, although this explanation is somewhat problematic given that earlier droughts, especially a short but severe one in the 1090s, didn’t have nearly the same effects on the system.  Others argue that political, social, or economic instability within the Chaco system itself, whatever its nature, was the main cause of the collapse, with drought perhaps playing a subsidiary role.  Most people agree, however, that Chaco is indeed an example of societal collapse.

But is it?  Let’s look at some of the criteria for defining collapse, using Diamond’s list:

1. Collapse involves a major loss of population.
2. Collapse involves a loss of complexity.
3. Collapse occurs over a large geographic area.
4. The changes brought about by collapse persist for a long time.

Measuring the population of Chaco at any time is surprisingly difficult, but given the much lower level of activity after 1130 I think it’s safe to say that there was a major decline of some sort.  The extent to which Chaco was a complex society at all is disputed, but I find the arguments for complexity more convincing than the arguments against it, so let’s take relative complexity as a starting point and see if there’s evidence for a loss of it.  Recall Ben Nelson’s definition of complexity:

Social systems are considered complex if they are comparatively large demographically and spatially, encompass multiple settlements in an integrated political structure, and exhibit horizontal and vertical social differentiation. Other properties associated with complexity are hereditary ranking, production of surplus and its appropriation by an elite, craft specialization, and long-distance exchange.

Large demographic scale is basically the same as population, so that one’s covered.  We’ll get back to spatial scale and settlement pattern later.  There isn’t much evidence for horizontal social differentiation at any point in the Chacoan archaeological record, but the vertical differentiation implies by the elaborate burials in Pueblo Bonito does seem to end around 1130.  Ranking goes along with vertical differentiation, and surplus and its appropriation are controversial and hard to find in the archaeological record, as is craft specialization.  That leaves us with long-distance exchange, which does continue to go on at Chaco, but at a much lower level than before.  So yes, I think it’s fair to say that Chaco became less complex according to most of the criteria that can be used to assess complexity there.

That brings us back to spatial scale, and here’s where things get tricky.  It turns out that the evidence for reduced activity at Chaco Canyon after 1130 doesn’t correspond to a similar reduction in activity in most other parts of the Chaco system at the same time.  Indeed, some areas, such as Aztec Ruins on the Animas River to the north, see a marked increase in activity after 1130, and both Aztec and the Mesa Verde area further north see continued activity on a large scale, indicative of a large population, until the depopulation of the whole area in the late 1200s.  The area to the west doesn’t see such dramatic growth, but it does seem to keep on going without much change after 1130.  Similarly, while the area immediately south of Chaco seems to have been largely depopulated even earlier than the canyon itself, the area further south continued to see activity long after, indeed up to the present day at Zuni Pueblo.  And in many of these areas, especially at Aztec and at the northern and southern extremes of the original Chaco system, the outlying Chacoan great houses seem to have continued to be used, though perhaps not the same way as they were originally intended to be used, long after the cessation of great house construction in Chaco itself.

So it seems that the Chaco “collapse” really only applies to a single location, Chaco Canyon itself, and not to the society as a whole.  Indeed, some archaeologists have interpreted these data as showing not so much the collapse of the system centered on Chaco but a series of changes in it, possibly including a shift in emphasis away from Chaco itself toward Aztec, which replaced it as the center of the system.  Whether or not some form of the system that developed at Chaco continued at Aztec, it’s clear that there were a lot of changes going on in the region during the 1100s, including an apparent movement of population away from Chaco, probably at least in part to Aztec and Mesa Verde.  The lack of continued construction on the scale seen from 1030 to 1130 and the reduced level of trade do seem to suggest that the Chacoan system declined in power and influence after 1130 whether or not it moved to Aztec, but there turns out to be very little evidence of a “collapse” occurring over a large spatial scale, although the changes do seem to persist for a long time.

So what are the implications of this for studies of collapse in general?  It’s hard to say, but I think one lesson is that it’s important to look at these things on the societal level rather than on individual sites or localities, no matter how important or central they seem.  Some Southwestern archaeologists now prefer the term “reorganization” to “collapse” for situations like the changes at Chaco after 1130 and the contemporaneous events in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico.  It’s certainly quit different from the massive depopulation of the whole Four Corners region in the late 1200s, which however doesn’t fit well into “collapse” models either because there’s little evidence of a system on any level larger than the individual community during this period, with the possible exception of a rump Chacoan system operating on a small scale out of Aztec.  That event, which corresponds to another prolonged drought, is of interest in its own right, but this post is long enough already.

There’s been some interesting discussion in the comments to my post on looting and archaeology, including some pushback on the polemical tone and innuendo of the post, which I think is largely deserved and fair.  I wrote the post in a deliberately provocative way, and it’s quite reasonable for people to challenge some of the insinuations in it.  That said, some people seem to be interpreting it as insinuating that collecting artifacts is still a widespread or accepted practice in Southwestern archaeology, which is definitely not the case and not what I meant to imply.  When I said that collecting of artifacts in dubious ways has extended into the recent past and is probably still going on, I meant by a very small number of archaeologists who would be doing so very quietly, and I will admit that I don’t know of any specific examples and don’t mean to imply that I do.  The vast majority of Southwestern archaeologists over the past sixty years would be horrified by the idea, and they are quite right to portray what they do as very different from mere pothunting and collecting artifacts for their own sake.  By saying that there isn’t really much difference between the two activities, I was referring to a common perception from the outside.  Obviously the way I phrased it didn’t make that as clear as I intended; although I did intend it in a somewhat polemical way, it seems to have come across as a much stronger statement than I meant it to be.

There are some archaeologists working in other parts of the world, including Oscar White Muscarella, Paul Barford, and David Gill, who have argued that collectors and museums, along with some archaeologists, have played a major role in supporting looting.  The Southwest is fortunate in that its archaeological establishment, despite the problems with its public image, has been resolute in opposing pothunting and the illegal antiquities trade, which has made it a bit easier for authorities to enforce the cultural heritage protection laws on the books.  What I was trying to get across in the previous post is that despite this admirable public stance, archaeologists in the Southwest still have a problem with persistent public misunderstanding of what it is that they do, and that while occasional cases of active participation in the antiquities market are obviously not going to help that, the main problem is a lack of effective public outreach and explanation of the very real differences between archaeology and pothunting.  Jim Allison chimed in to point out that this is easier said than done, and he’s quite right.  Effective outreach requires time and money, and there is never enough of either.  I don’t have an answer to the question of how, exactly, archaeologists should be doing this sort of outreach.  I’m just saying that it needs to be done, and that archaeologists in all parts of the complicated network of institutions and relationships that constitutes Southwestern archaeology today need to put more effort into figuring out how to do it in order to fight many of the major problems they face.