"NARRATOR:" "It was the greatest civilization in history." "So advanced and powerful it dwarfed anything that came before it." "But like other great societies, it did not last." "One day in the future, scientists may look back and investigate the colossal ruins, searching for answers to one haunting question:" "how could a civilization that mastered the planet suddenly collapse?" "From the wreckage, they piece together this remarkable story... the story of what on Earth happened to us." "200 years from now, if our worst fears are realized, our world could look like this." "Great cities lie abandoned." "Incredible feats of engineering left to ruin." "JARED diamond:" "There's a real possibility that first world civilization as we know it is going to decline or collapse within the next several decades." "It all depends upon the decisions that we make." "NARRATOR:" "It may seem impossible, but many experts agree." "Our modern, industrialized civilization could fall apart." "joseph TAlNTER:" "A collapse today would be the greatest disaster in human history." "The overall society would simplify, probably many of us would go back to an agrarian way of life." "We would lose everything to which we have become accustomed." "NARRATOR:" "To understand how our civilization could collapse, imagine it already has." "In the year 2210, our descendants, the survivors, set out on a scientific expedition to figure out what went wrong." "They know we faced many challenges, any of which could have brought us down." "But which one was it?" "Somewhere, buried in the rubble, they hope to find the single factor that tore our world apart." "diamond:" "Many of the most advanced societies of the past ended up in ruins, although at the height of the Roman Empire, or the height of Maya civilization, it would have seemed equally absurd that those great societies could ever collapse." "Well, they did, and we could." "It's a matter of life or death for us, to understand why these past societies succeeded or failed." "NARRATOR:" "Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Dr. Jared Diamond believes we have arrived at a critical juncture in history." "We're faced with a choice-- to fail or succeed." "Unlike the fallen civilizations before us, we can learn from the mistakes of the past and ensure our survival." "In these cliff tops of Mesa Verde, Colorado," "Diamond investigates what became of the Anasazi, the ancestral Pueblo people." "diamond:" "Looking at these ruins, the first big question for me is:" "Why did they end up collapsing?" "Why did they put all this work into constructing this remarkable site and then abandon it?" "I have to wonder, are we going to make the same sort of mistakes that these people made, and end up abandoning our own cities that archaeologists in the future will look at and say, oh, what beautiful ruins, where did they go wrong?" "NARRATOR:" "The Anasazi's rise to greatness began around 600 AD in a narrow valley in one of the continent's most desolate regions." "At Chaco Canyon, they built their city of dreams." "At its peak, Chaco was the hub that connected over 1 50 outlying communities across the Southwest." "Like all great capital cities, Chaco is a magnet that attracts goods and people from all corners of the region." "stephen LEKSON:" "Everybody around here would have heard about Chaco." "There's this place, hundreds of miles away, where amazing things were built, and lots of amazing things from Mexico were brought up." "If you were traveling into Chaco from the north, and it was carefully engineered to bring you into a particular part of the canyon, and bring them to the edge, where the world drops away, and they would see Pueblo Bonito." "They would see the city of Chaco down below them." "It would have been incredibly dramatic." "It's dramatic today." "If you were living in the boonies and came to Manhattan-- that would be the experience." "NARRATOR:" "For over two decades, archaeologist Dr. Steve Lekson has been digging into the mystery of Chaco's astonishing rise and fall." "From little more than dust, they built a metropolis." "[thunder]" "Long before the first skyscrapers of Chicago and New York, these buildings stood as the largest structures in what is now the United States." "Five stories tall, with over 600 rooms," "Pueblo Bonito is just one of twelve Great houses that create the spectacle of Chaco." "LEKSON:" "Chaco Canyon was laid out to impress people who were coming from the outside of the canyon." "Big buildings, babbling brooks, the control of water would be a big architectural element here." "Chaco would have been like the Emerald City of Oz." "They're making a very strong statement about their power over nature by building this city here." "NARRATOR:" "In this desert, success hinges upon managing the one resource they can't import--water." "Chaco's irrigation systems are a marvel of the pueblo world." "They harness the meager rains that fall on the canyon by damming run-off flows on the cliffs above, storing water for the dry season." "Populations increase." "Chaco reaps the good times." "But then cracks in their political system begin to appear." "LEKSON:" "When the city was really rolling along, they added these masses of interior rooms." "There was a flurry of construction from 1075 on through the 1 100s where they build bigger and bigger, and then the wheels come off... which is interesting." "[drumming]" "NARRATOR:" "The Anasazi are a desert people-- used to living on a knife's edge." "They had lived through many dry spells, when the seasonal rains didn't come." "But scientists have discovered from tree ring evidence that around 1 1 30 AD," "Chaco was hit by an unusually severe drought-- lasting 50 years." "LEKSON:" "There were droughts like that before, but there weren't so many people in the canyon." "When that 50-year drought comes along, people start thinking that the guys in the capital aren't doing their job, because it's their job to make it rain." "When it quit raining, they couldn't sustain it and it went to pieces." "NARRATOR:" "Lekson believes that drought may have been the last straw for a civilization already weakened by social and political strife." "The Anasazi decide to leave Chaco Canyon in droves, creating waves of turbulence that ripple across the territory." "But this is just the first of a brutal series of droughts over the next 1 50 years that would help push their civilization over the edge." "Back in the steep canyons of Mesa Verde," "Diamond pieces together the final days of the Anasazi." "They had retreated into defensive settlements, built into the alcoves of these cliffs." "diamond:" "This dramatic setting is the Anasazi endgame." "There were people fighting more and more for the same resource pie... and so in a decade or so, they went from constructing this to walking away from it." "Those are warnings that the Anasazi offer for us." "NARRATOR:" "The Anasazi civilization collapsed, but many people survived." "They broke up and simplified-- moving into smaller communities, called Pueblos." "diamond:" "I've asked myself whether the Anasazi could have made different choices, better choices." "They tried lots of different things, and those experiments didn't work." "But eventually they found the experiment that did work, and that was to concentrate in Pueblos." "The Pueblo people today are the modern descendants of the Anasazi." "[thunder]" "LEKSON:" "Chaco was an experiment with a different way of doing business, a kind of organization and governance that was amazing while it was going on for a while, and then it failed." "And I think Pueblo people remember that as a brilliant chapter in their past, but not what they were supposed to be doing-- it didn't suit the landscape, it didn't suit the resources." "They overshot." "NARRATOR: 200 years from now, will investigators exploring this desert region find our cities of dreams and wonder if we had been living under the same illusion?" "Centuries in the future, a research team in the desert of the American Southwest begins surveying a ghost town that was once Phoenix." "They work fast-- by mid-morning, the temperature has risen to 1 27 degrees Fahrenheit." "From the shells of empty office buildings and miles of dilapidated suburbs the investigators calculate the city's enormous population boom." "At its peak, over 100,000 people moved into the area each year." "But after its burst of prosperity in the late 20th century, the city was abandoned even faster than it rose." "What could have made the residents of Phoenix turn their backs on such a huge investment?" "JAMES KUNSTLER:" "The archaeologists may find the broken remnants of the motels and tract houses in Phoenix, and they'll put two and two together and realize, oh, my God, these people created a city of millions in a region of North America" "that can't possibly support a population that large." "They had these fantastic schemes for bringing huge volumes of water hundreds of miles, and they had this thing called air conditioning which made it possible for people to sleep at night." "NARRATOR:" "In the concrete bowels of the city, the future investigators could identify the key to its expansion... a constant flow of cheap energy and water." "They follow the city's water supply to its source, scanning for weaknesses in the system." "The labyrinth of pipelines leads to other cities and farmland, all tapping into the same supply." "hundreds of miles away, they reach the source." "Our massive engineering schemes turned the region's wild rivers into electricity for millions of homes." "Behind these dams we store enough water to support 20 million people." "But from the watermarks in the canyons, investigators see that over many years the levels of the reservoir were dropping." "By the year 2010, the writing was already on the wall." "These water sources allowed our desert cities to thrive." "But they ran dry." "Like the Anasazi, had we built for the good times, ignoring the risk of severe droughts?" "daniel GlLBERT:" "What's so curious about human beings is that we can look deeply into the future, foresee disaster, and still do nothing in the present to stop it." "The majority of people on this planet, they're overwhelmed with concerns about their immediate well being." "NARRATOR:" "In downtown Los Angeles," "Jared Diamond sees the dilemma of his city's future water supply as he watches a colony of birds along the LA River." "diamond:" "There are a lot of barn swallows flying around here, with forked tails." "The biggest birds are two snowy egrets, and the best bird there is a stilt, with long legs, they're somewhat endangered." "This area, when it was natural stream, there would be hundreds of thousands of wetland birds here, and we've canalized it so that there are now just a few of the birds." "Down here, this Los Angeles River looks like a brook." "The trouble is there are lots of straws in the milkshake upstream." "NARRATOR:" "As the population of Los Angeles County nears 1 1 million," "California is faced with increasingly difficult choices about how to manage its water." "diamond:" "The birds may have the last laugh because if there's not enough water and we give up on Los Angeles, the birds are gonna come back, and we're the ones who are gonna lose." "NARRATOR:" "Scanning buried sections of a suburban neighborhood, scientists detect what look like water storage systems-- perhaps a safeguard against drought." "It appears that each family had a year's supply of drinking water in their backyard." "But further excavations give the scientists new insight-- when it came to our choices about water, we may have been living in a mirage." "gilbert:" "There's no doubt that we're not letting Phoenix or Los Angeles go without a fight." "We will use every trick at our disposal, until they're just not inhabitable." "There are people today who live in some awfully inhospitable environments, and they call them home." "But once we really run out of the basic resources we need to sustain human life, those cities become ghost towns." "[birds chirping]" "NARRATOR:" "Upstream from Los Angeles, in California's Central Valley, drought and increasing competition for water is forcing farmers to make painful decisions." "At a single farm near the town of huron, they're ripping up 90,000 trees-- turning $18 million worth of almond orchards into mulch." "STUART WOOLF:" "This is an incredibly difficult decision for us to make." "You know, this is kind of like our Sophie's choice-- we have to decide which of the crops that we've been nurturing all these years we need to destroy." "And unfortunately when we look at our return per acre foot of water, we don't have enough water to sustain them, so we've got to kill them." "NARRATOR:" "In the 1950s Californians transformed this valley from desert scrub to a garden of Eden." "The diversion of water through hundreds of miles of manmade aqueducts created one of the most productive farming regions in the world." "But now a burgeoning water crisis is transforming this billion-dollar landscape yet again." "WOOLF:" "I can't think of a farmer in the area that has trees like us that aren't pulling some of his trees out right now and grinding them up." "Those that have invested greatly in drip irrigation or in wells can probably stick it out longer than others that haven't." "NARRATOR:" "With a single almond tree guzzling up to 100 gallons of water a day, farmers like Woolf are adapting, by planting less thirsty crops." "As drastic as it seems, many experts think these hard decisions are exactly what's needed to hold on to California's farmland." "The limited water supply is causing prices to skyrocket, instigating a fierce battle between cities like Los Angeles and California's lucrative agribusiness." "Some farmers are making money by choosing not to grow food at all." "Instead, they're cashing in by selling off water allocations." "Many farmers gamble their savings to drill deeper and deeper into underground aquifers in hopes of striking blue gold." "But like the California gold rush of a century and a half ago, many fear the bonanza will be short-lived." "david GREGORY:" "We've been real busy-- as fast as we can drill them they want us to drill another one." "The rigs have got a whole lot bigger than they used to be, and we're doing that to accommodate getting the deeper water." "We're gonna drill this well to 2,400 foot and see how it looks, and then we'll decide the total depth after that." "I'm sure pumping the water is taking a toll." "We're pulling a lot of water out of the ground." "If the water table gets low enough, it's going to have to end." "NARRATOR:" "Drilling may buy farmers more time, but in the long run, if droughts persist, much of this agricultural Eden could turn back to desert." "[thunder]" "On the outskirts of an abandoned California suburb, future investigators come across strange cracks in the desert." "Probing the depths of a fissure, they find highly compressed layers of soil-- evidence that the region's underground aquifers had been depleted." "Over-pumping had caused the land to sink and fracture." "Many of the Earth's ancient aquifers, which can take thousands of years to replenish, were being sucked dry." "As a result, the ground underneath some of our biggest cities had sunk by over 30 feet." "Already, around the world competition over water is stirring up trouble." "In January of 2000, violent protests erupt in Bolivia as the public fights back against the privatization of their local water supply." "On every inhabited continent, there is increasing conflict over this precious commodity." "diamond:" "Water has been one of the prime factors that has destroyed civilizations in the past." "There is talk that one of the first water wars, if there is one, may be between Turkey and Syria and Lebanon and Israel." "There's also a big water problem brewing in Southeast Asia." "it's only a matter of time before there's not going to be enough water to feed more than half of the world's people." "NARRATOR:" "But in all the turmoil of the water crisis," "Diamond sees a silver lining." "Many cities are coming to grips with the true cost of wasting water-- a reality check that may help avert an Anasazi-style disaster." "diamond:" "The city of Los Angeles just ordered us to water only on Tuesdays and Fridays, and if I choose to water on Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, my water bill will go sky high." "In order to have a happy future in Los Angeles or Phoenix, we have to gear our water policies to the occasional dry years, rather than to all the wet years." "There are societies in the past that did that, and they've been going on for thousands of years, whereas societies that geared their policies to the good years, when the dry years came, they got clobbered," "like the Anasazi." "There are reasons for hope because within the last few years the combination of market forces and government regulation have really affected people's behavior." "It really gets your attention when you have to write a $1 ,000 water bill instead of a $200 water bill." "NARRATOR:" "But if the populations of our desert cities continue to grow, even frugal water use may only go so far." "Centuries from now, evidence of a global water crisis could lead scientists to question if this is what brought about our downfall." "Or was it something else?" "[crowd cheering] ln the coliseums of ancient Rome... and on the ball courts of great Mayan cities... crowds are engrossed in games of life and death." "These two civilizations existed oceans apart... yet they had one thing in common." "Both were so consumed by their own success they appeared blind to the fact that after centuries of domination... [crowd cheers]" "...their time was up." "These seemingly invincible civilizations were on the verge of collapse." "is our civilization so absorbed by the spoils of our success that we can't see the dangers right in front of us?" "200 years in the future, scientists exploring the wreckage off the Florida coastline might marvel at the sheer pace of our progress." "Over the 20th century the rise of our civilization seemed to be unstoppable." "In half a human lifetime, we went from traveling 45 miles per hour in a Model-T Ford to thousands of miles per hour as the Apollo rocket broke through the earth's atmosphere." "Every great civilization has its defining moments, and sending man to the moon may be the high point of ours." "Will that moment prove to be the zenith before our fall?" "diamond:" "Our civilization today is behaving like a nuclear reaction, going faster, faster, faster, faster." "The way the world population and the way the technology and its destructive power have been increasing over the last century has been exponential." "Now for the first time in world history we face the risk of global collapse." "NARRATOR:" "Of all the junk we leave behind, one artifact could stand out to future investigators as the icon of our civilization." "Across the planet, they may find the rusted debris of over two billion cars." "The rapid growth of our transportation and technology makes the rest of history look like child's play." "But it couldn't have happened without a herculean source of power." "We had tapped the Earth's ancient reserves of fossil fuels." "Dirty, grimy substances with magical properties." "The team calculates that just a spoonful of oil contains the same amount of energy as a day of physical labor." "A single tank of gas is worth two years of manpower." "But there was a catch to our relentless progress-- there was only so much of this wonder fuel to go around." "TAlNTER:" "We don't pay the full price for anything that we consume." "The price is largely paid through the accumulation of past solar energy from millions of years ago, which is fossilized in carbon fuels." "The fact that we can afford the military that we have, our ability to send astronauts into space." "The size of government that we have." "All of these are subsidized by ancient sunlight, and we have become accustomed to thinking that this will simply go on forever." "NARRATOR:" "Throughout much of the 20th century-- the boom years of oil-- the stuff was literally oozing out of the ground." "It wasn't just potent, it was dirt-cheap." "We were like kids with pockets full of candy-- we couldn't eat it up fast enough." "diamond:" "These are the derelict ruins of an abandoned power plant." "It was state of the art when it was constructed barely 50 years ago." "This was an oil-fired power plant that extracted only 25% of the energy out of oil and wasted the other 75%." "Today we might think how stupid, what were they thinking then?" "Well, at that time oil seemed an infinite supply, and it didn't make any difference to waste 314 of the energy of oil." "As I stand here at this enormous piece of technology that must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and then was abandoned so quickly, I find myself wondering is this a metaphor for a whole civilization today." "The pace of change is faster now than it ever has been in human history." "We're the first society to be living amidst ruins of our own construction." "NARRATOR:" "Until we came along, many would argue that the Western Roman Empire was history's greatest success story." "The Roman system of government and law still stands as the foundation of many modern societies today." "Its engineering and architecture remains the model for many of our own designs." "Fueling Rome's progress was its drive for territorial expansion." "Rome at its height appears to be an unstoppable force." "What was once a small hilltop village would command all of Europe and the Mediterranean by 1 1 7 AD." "The empire amasses great wealth, and is connected by a vast network of Roman roads and adorned with baths, amphitheaters and coliseums." "Like us, the Romans have a voracious appetite for growth." "But rather than oil, the fuel behind their expansion was peasant labor and fertile land-- the spoils of their conquests." "According to collapse expert Dr. Joseph Tainter," "Rome had the perfect strategy, up to a point." "TAlNTER:" "The Romans, they've been likened to a gang of thieves, and they had a particular way of keeping expansion going, which is, when they would conquer a province, they would loot the province of its accumulated precious metals" "and take away many people into slavery." "And they acquired enormous wealth this way, and then channeled that wealth back into further expansion." "NARRATOR:" "But the further their empire reaches, the more difficult and expensive it becomes for Rome to exert its control." "TAlNTER:" "The problem with expansion is that it can't go on forever." "Ultimately you reach the point where it's no longer profitable or possible to continue conquering." "NARRATOR:" "As the Romans ran out of easy territory to conquer, they came up short on cheap labor and fertile land to feed their growth." "The Empire's fuel supply was dwindling." "In a sense, Rome faced an energy crisis." "As with the Romans, we, too, are waking up to the ugly realization that our easy conquests of resources are coming to an end." "Every barrel of crude oil is getting harder and more expensive to find." "In Northern Canada, miles of wilderness are being scraped raw to get to one of the earth's last great reserves of oil." "But extracting the raw fuel from these oil-soaked tar sands requires intensive amounts of energy and water-- two things already in short supply." "KUNSTLER:" "The whole fossil fuel fiesta has been a really big party for the world, and the hangover's going to be kind of painful." "NARRATOR:" "Many experts think that we only have decades before the earth's oil reserves run out." "According to Diamond, the choice is ours." "Solving our energy crisis boils down to two things-- developing alternative energy sources and re-engineering our cities." "diamond:" "My best-case scenario is a city with rapidly flowing traffic of small cars and with many or most of the people riding these rail lines in the centers of the freeway." "There are cities that have such rapid transit systems... similar to that of New York or Berlin or Chicago." "About 50 Chinese cities are building rapid transit systems." "All it takes is two things." "It only takes money and it takes willpower." "NARRATOR:" "Future scientists might think our undoing was that we waited too long to ramp up new energy sources." "Our civilization may have simply run out of gas." "But then another side of our story begins to come clear." "If our civilization doesn't go down the right path, desolate reaches of the planet, like California's Mojave Desert, may one day hold clues to our attempt to revamp our energy supply." "Investigators discover that by 2010, we started fighting back with an arsenal of inventions aimed at harnessing nature's oldest, most powerful energy source." "We built fields of mirrors that focused the sun's heat on central towers." "Inside, cauldrons of boiling water, heated to 1 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit, drove giant steam turbines that powered thousands of homes." "In our race against time, engineers were scaling up every possible energy alternative." "By 2010, the production of renewable energy in Europe and North America was doubling nearly every year." "They calculate that we were able to squeeze enough energy out of a single wind turbine to power 20 schools." "But retooling our energy grid came at a price." "TAlNTER:" "With fossil fuels, which have so much embedded energy, we can produce all the energy that we need from just a few points on the earth's surface." "In the future, if we're largely dependent on solar energy, wind, they're going to give us low net return." "We're going to have to commit large areas of deserts, the plains, perhaps coastlines to producing energy." "This is going to transform the landscape." "KUNSTLER:" "There's a widespread idea out there that if we could only just ramp up a certain set of alternative energy systems or fuels that we could keep on living the way we're living." "We're not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World and the interstate highway system on any combination of solar, wind, ethanol, algae, dark matter, used French fried potato oil." "We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us." "NARRATOR:" "There's one energy option on the table that packs a far bigger punch in a much smaller package... many fear too big a punch." "To match the output of one nuclear power plant, it could take as many as 1 ,000 wind turbines." "TAlNTER:" "I think people are to a large extent irrationally frightened by nuclear energy." "France generates most of its electricity with nuclear generation, and they do so safely." "But the problems with nuclear power in the future is that it's now beginning to appear that uranium may be in short supply." "NARRATOR:" "Nuclear power has virtually zero emissions of greenhouse gases... but comes with the huge cost of building the reactors and disposing of the radioactive waste." "Most experts agree, there is no silver bullet." "Securing our future energy supply will take everything we've got:" "new renewable sources, nuclear power, and cleaner fossil fuels like natural gas." "TAlNTER:" "If we start the investment now in new energy sources, we can envision a future that is stable." "It will be a good way of life, but it will be different." "diamond:" "The solutions will come from the top down from governments and businesses and from the bottom up from each of us as individuals." "Just as businesses can save money by burning less gasoline, we as individuals can save money by burning less gasoline in our cars and by burning less heating fuel for our houses, and if hundreds of millions of us do it," "that goes a long way toward solving the world's problems." "NARRATOR:" "Future scientists may see that we were conserving our fossil fuels and re-energizing our society." "But were we doing enough?" "Just as the race was heating up, other powerful forces were stacking up against us." "Along the once populated coast of the Gulf of Mexico, future scientists search for records that may hold details of our collapse." "The researchers find a glut of computers... but they're nothing more than empty shells." "We had lived in a great information age, but after our fall, much of our electronic data disappeared." "Our digital records were locked up in obsolete software and defunct hard drives." "Fortunately, some ancient civilizations, like the Maya, left a lasting roadmap to decipher the story of their rise." "Their records, etched in stone, may hold clues for scientists investigating our own potential for collapse." "At Copan, a powerful Mayan city-center in Western honduras, a six-story stone staircase chronicles 300 years of conquests and dynastic glory." "With over 2,000 hieroglyphs, it is the longest carved history of the New World." "Yet one chapter was never committed to stone-- the story of their downfall." "Resident archaeologist Dr. Ricardo Agurcia is piecing together the mystery of the last days of the Maya at Copan." "AGURClA:" "It's a dramatic ending, you have on the one hand magnificence, I think, incredible development in art, architecture and writing." "And then, in a very short period of time, it's over." "The contrast between the magnificence and then the silence, I think, is fascinating to all of us." "NARRATOR:" "The Maya transform a vast area of tropical rainforests and dry lowlands into fields of corn-- feeding a population explosion." "At its zenith, the Maya civilization stretches from what is now honduras to Mexico and is more densely populated than Los Angeles County today." "As rival cities clash for power," "Copan emerges as one of the biggest and most dominant." "With the expansion of the city-states, competition between their rulers becomes fierce." "[whooping]" "Warfare is a fixture of the Maya landscape." "Across the region, there are signs in the stonework that this cult of violence may have been spiraling out of control." "On top of a temple," "Agurcia examines a portrait of the last king of Copan that testifies to the turmoil of his rule." "AGURClA:" "It is dramatically different from any of the portraits of the kings that we have before this time." "It shows him as a fierce warrior." "You can see his face over here, and then his right hand is holding a spear." "And this is the tip of the spear over here." "This is a very heavy emphasis on warfare, unlike what we have in the art of Copan anywhere else." "NARRATOR:" "In many parts of the Maya world, archaeologists find a pattern of escalating warfare." "One explanation for their collapse is that this violent conflict ultimately brought them down." "But behind this theater of war, archaeologists are finding subtle clues that other lethal forces are at play." "Underneath Copan's acropolis, two buried temples reveal possible signs that a crisis was slowly building." "The first is constructed nearly 300 years before the city collapsed." "AGURClA:" "You can see that in making the iconography, all the artwork on it, they're using very, very thick layers of plaster." "And for the production of this plaster, there had to be a massive consumption of firewood." "NARRATOR:" "The Maya produce plaster by heating limestone with an intense fire." "Even a small amount of plaster requires cutting a large number of trees for firewood." "But as Copan inches closer to the time of collapse, this liberal use of plaster curiously disappears." "AGURClA:" "Now here you can see a completely different situation in terms of the plaster." "We're getting this very thin veneer on the surface of highly polished rock, and this is a very clear example of that huge transition from the thick coats of plaster to this very thin wash almost over the stones." "I think the Maya were adapting to the change that they had provoked." "They were cutting down the forest drastically to produce all of this plaster, but also there's less firewood, and so they have to do something." "NARRATOR:" "Beyond this thin veneer, archaeologists find layers of evidence at Copan, and at other Maya sites, of severe deforestation-- a problem, Agurcia believes, was compounded by the Maya's expanding population." "Something had to give." "AGURClA:" "When you cut that forest down... then you get flash flooding, you get drastic movements of the river, you get massive soil erosion." "All of those impact negatively in the production of agriculture." "It's very clear this valley could not sustain itself." "The city was way too large for its immediate surrounding territory." "NARRATOR:" "Signs of disease and malnutrition appear in many of the skeletal remains found at Copan-- further evidence that their agricultural success had dissolved into a food crisis... one that may have fractured their civilization." "By 950 AD, not just Copan, but many of the Mayan cities are largely abandoned." "[speaking Mayan language]" "AGURClA:" "They are in many ways victims of their own success." "Eventually there is a certain clash between resources and the human demands on them." "I think warfare is a symptom, it's not a cause." "I really believe that the underlying factors that lead to warfare speak of deprivation, of lack of things." "I think people fight because they need resources." "diamond:" "What on Earth were the kings thinking as the society was winding down?" "What they wanted was to build a bigger temple than the king next door, and so they didn't think about forests and soil and these banal problems of resources." "In pursuing their short-term interests, the kings ended up undermining their own society and getting overthrown themselves." "NARRATOR: 200 years from now, scientists may find our civilization was following a similar recipe for disaster." "Like the Maya, did we ignore the signs that a food crisis was bearing down on us?" "diamond:" "Today we have six and a half billion people in the world." "If today we can't feed six and a half billion people, what are we going to do in a few decades when we have nine and a half billion people?" "NARRATOR:" "Imagine a post-collapse world." "200 years from now, investigators explore a barren wasteland." "Scattered across the central plains of North America, they find abandoned industrial buildings and rusting machinery." "In the debris, they might discover a new lead to our collapse--dust." "A dust storm 1 ,200 miles wide kicks up over a vast region of northwest China." "The massive cloud drifts across the Pacific Ocean and blankets parts of North America in a thick brown haze." "In one fell swoop, millions of tons of topsoil from China's breadbasket were scraped off by the wind." "In recent decades these seasonal events have mushroomed into mega storms." "Each spring, they choke Asian capitals such as Seoul and Beijing." "The combination of over-grazing and intensive agriculture, among other factors, have already eaten away up to one third of the country's farmland." "China is caught in a vise grip of competing forces-- including a growing population and the expansion of its deserts." "The investigators may determine that many of the world's large industrialized farms had been abandoned in the decades before our collapse." "And it happened at a time when the earth's growing population needed all the food it could produce." "By 2010, humans were already using up to 90% of the world's available farmland." "Sampling the residue of our soil and crops, they uncover the secret of our agricultural success." "We had figured out a way to cheat nature-- by injecting chemicals into marginally productive lands." "Around 1950, we began pumping the soil with artificial fertilizers and pesticides." "The effects were staggering." "By the end of the century, crop yields had increased five-fold-- feeding a growing world population." "But the dividing line between feast and famine can be razor thin." "Our survival may have come down to a layer of topsoil only eight inches deep." "KUNSTLER:" "Basically what we've been doing for the last 60 years or so is pouring a lot of petroleum on the soil." "As a by-product of all of that artificial fertilizing and using gigantic machines to cultivate the land, we've destroyed the soil." "NARRATOR:" "The investigators may have hit on one of the key factors that was literally undermining our civilization." "Every year, billions of tons of the earth's topsoil was being blown away." "inch by inch were we digging ourselves deeper into a global food crisis?" "We were up against a fundamental law of nature:" "to restore one inch of topsoil is a process that can take up to 500 years." "diamond:" "The changes in our agriculture have been to produce more and more food on less and less land, with high inputs of technology and energy." "This is an example of how different threats to us interact." "We have not only agricultural problems, but also energy problems." "In addition, our agriculture problem interacts with our water problem." "More and more of our agricultural land is ending up short of water." "NARRATOR:" "In Ethiopia, and many less developed regions around the world, a land grab is now under way." "Countries like Saudi Arabia and China are hedging their bets by buying up farmland beyond their borders." "In countries where many people are starving, food is now being exported to wealthy nations abroad." "But as every last patch of potential farmland gets eaten up, some experts fear it won't be long before there's nowhere left to turn." "In this worst-case scenario, investigators could find the leftovers of our supermarket abundance littering every continent of the globe." "They figure out that we kept pace with our civilization's insatiable appetite through genetic engineering." "We created clever new breeds of super-crops that were resistant to floods, droughts and disease." "In some regions of the world, seven out of ten products on supermarket shelves were genetically modified." "Using science and innovation, for decades we stayed one step ahead of our growing food crisis." "But all our wizardry may not have been enough when world population hit nine billion." "In a matter of decades, we could have gone from a civilization that was spoiled for choice to empty supermarket shelves." "diamond:" "Food is one of the quickest triggers for collapse." "If people don't have food today at 1 2 noon, there will be a crisis the next day, rioting in the streets." "I know what it would be like because I lived in Chile in 1969 when there was a food crisis." "The shelves were bare, it was bare wood." "Once a week Saturday morning, meat came in and we all rushed down to buy our meat before the meat was sold out." "But if we make the right decisions, then the shelves are going to be covered with this beautiful food year after year." "The choices are in front of me." "One choice is to have as much of your food as possible grown locally, to reduce the transport costs." "Well, I happen to be in California now, and I'm looking at California grapefruits and California oranges." "That's great." "If I were in Spain, I would be looking for Spanish grapefruit and Spanish oranges." "Food has to be grown sustainably, the farms have to be economically viable." "There has to be a water supply for the indefinite future." "Preferably the food should be grown as organically as possible, so there should be as little pesticide as possible accumulating in the soil and in the water." "There are already many farmers who are being careful about soil erosion." "All we have to do is just have more farmers doing things that some farmers are already doing." "NARRATOR:" "In many countries, signs that we're adapting are showing up in our supermarkets." "But in less developed regions, the switch to sustainable foods is still too costly." "Will we be able to reconfigure our food chain on a global scale?" "As future scientists begin to map out the convergence of forces closing in on us-- water, energy, and now food-- they detect a dangerous catalyst that could have made all these problems snowball out of control." "This could be downtown hong Kong 200 years from now." "As a research team combs the submerged streets, it's obvious that centuries ago there was a major shift in climate." "The flooded remains tell of a frightening scenario, unleashed by a five-degree rise in global temperatures." "Over the course of the 21st century, our coastal cities must have been hit by a Molotov cocktail of extreme weather and melting polar ice sheets." "There was a devastating rise in sea level." "humans have always been one of the most adaptable of species-- the survivors of many bouts with ice ages and global warmings." "Why then, did our civilization, with all our scientific knowledge, wait so long to react to climate change?" "diamond:" "We've arrived at our present situation unexpectedly in that 30 years ago we did not foresee global warming." "It's not because we were blind or stupid." "It's because these large scale problems, they're very complicated." "It was unimaginable a few decades ago that there would be so many people putting out so much greenhouse gases as to be capable of heating up the whole atmosphere." "What an absurd idea." "It's only within the last dozen years that we've realized this really is happening." "NARRATOR:" "In spite of scientific warnings that the oceans could rise between three and ten feet in the next century-- business along the coasts is booming." "Many of the world's fastest growing cities, like Shanghai and Mumbai, are still spending trillions of dollars to build at sea level." "gilbert:" "The human brain is designed to respond to dangers very efficiently." "But those dangers have to be intentional, they have to be immoral, they have to be immediate." "A saber tooth tiger, a gunshot would clear this room instantly." "These are exactly the kinds of dangers that we've evolved to respond to." "Problem is that global warming doesn't push any of those buttons." "NARRATOR:" "Diving deeper into the mystery of our climate's radical shift, the investigators encounter miles of dead coral reefs-- evidence of a mass extinction of marine life." "They figure out that the oceans had been poisoned-- becoming highly acidic as they absorbed the overdose of carbon dioxide in the air." "had we seriously underestimated the consequences of our dependence on fossil fuels?" "In the frozen reaches of the planet, scientists are witnessing one of global warming's biggest surprises, bubbling up from the earth's crust." "For millions of years, ancient carbon has been locked under the permafrost." "Now rising Arctic temperatures are thawing out the soil." "Scientists are documenting the release of huge amounts of methane-- a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide." "This is one of nature's wildcards that could ratchet up global warming and tip the balance against our civilization." "diamond:" "For sure the world is going to be two degrees warmer." "hopefully it's not going to be five degrees or seven degrees warmer." "As a civilization we're at the beginning of dealing with climate change." "Now increasing numbers of people are facing up to it, and hopefully some decision-making is about to happen." "NARRATOR:" "The cost of climate change is already estimated to be in the trillions of dollars." "humans may have the ability to adapt to the consequences of rising sea levels, severe droughts, and extreme weather, but many experts wonder if we will be able to afford it." "TAlNTER:" "Just think of things like the cost of building a seawall around Manhattan and maintaining it-- the cost of having to evacuate millions of people from coastal areas of Bangladesh and from other low-lying parts of the world, and resettle them somewhere." "Climate change will be a game changer." "NARRATOR:" "The more they search, the more our descendants realize the scope of the problems we faced." "Our civilization took huge financial risks and reaped the rewards." "But did the choices we made in the boom years lead to an even bigger bust?" "Depending on the choices we make now, by the year 2210, this may be all that's left of the towns of Southern Europe." "As shortages of food, water, and energy reached critical mass, investigators could conclude that our costs of living may have been too high." "We had the wealth to solve big problems." "But in the end, had we gambled away our future for the sake of short-term profits?" "TAlNTER:" "Most people don't have a boom and bust mentality." "They have a boom mentality." "One could think back to the boom in housing, which went bust." "NARRATOR:" "By the tail end of the 20th century, high rollers from New York to London were betting the bank on a runaway real estate boom." "We couldn't rip down our cities to build new ones fast enough." "gilbert:" "I think wanting more is probably a basic human motive." "We're part of a culture that elevates personal success, personal gain, to the status of almost a moral imperative." "NARRATOR:" "Then, in the fall of 2008, the monopoly game blows up." "The financial crisis ricochets around the globe." "Governments default." "Millions of people lose their jobs and homes." "In a matter of days, trillions of dollars of people's savings are written off." "gilbert:" "Financial systems are a system of human trust." "Money is nothing but a piece of paper that two people have put their trust in." "When financial systems collapse, it's the harbinger of things to come." "When trust is gone, you don't have a society, you have a group of individuals, all of whom are looking out for themselves." "NARRATOR:" "Economists are divided:" "is the recent financial crash just a bump on the road to greater riches or a sign of bigger flaws in the world economy?" "Around 2,000 years ago, the Romans may have been asking themselves that same question." "For centuries, Rome amasses enormous wealth, giving rise to a middle class that bolstered the Empire." "But by the third century AD, Rome's economy begins to falter." "diamond:" "We know very well that Rome supposedly was done in by the barbarians, but we also know that Rome had been fighting against barbarians for three or four centuries, and usually beating the barbarians." "So why did the barbarians finally conquer Rome?" "NARRATOR:" "In hundreds of coliseums throughout the empire, gladiator contests are a melting pot of Roman society." "The games attract everyone from senators to merchants to the poorest laborers and are a symbol of Rome's democratic ideals." "[crowd cheering]" "But as the empire begins to corrode, these contests to the death become a facade." "Behind the scenes, power and wealth are entrenched with the emperor and Rome's elites." "diamond:" "The Roman emperors were enjoying a luxurious good life at a time when the soldiers in the Roman army were not getting paid." "TAlNTER:" "Many lands were coming into the possession of a few senatorial families as small farmers fell into debt and lost their lands." "NARRATOR:" "At the root of it is a simmering economic crisis." "Border skirmishes, along with a deadly plague and a series of bad harvests, begin to empty Rome's treasury." "With their backs up against the wall," "Rome's rulers make a series of decisions that would seal the empire's fate." "[crowd cheers]" "To maintain control," "Rome has to bolster the size of its army and bureaucracy." "But paying for it drives the Empire towards bankruptcy." "Making matters even worse, over the next centuries," "Rome's rulers faced waves of foreign attacks and violent uprisings." "TAlNTER:" "Late in their history they increased their expenditures in order to simply to survive, and this is an analogy for our situation today." "We can see in the next few decades a convergence of several problems." "These will all cause our society to have to spend more and more and more simply to maintain the status quo." "It's like the figure in Alice in Wonderland says, running faster and faster just to stay in the same place." "NARRATOR: higher and higher taxes are imposed on Roman citizens." "As the empire runs short of funds, the treasury dilutes the silver and gold content in their coins... leading to runaway inflation." "Rome soon becomes a city of palaces amidst a sea of slums." "By the time Germanic forces sweep the last emperor out of Rome in 476 AD, many citizens see it as a godsend." "TAlNTER:" "The end conclusion is that everything they did in the short term was rational, but it set the stage for greater problems later." "It was the cumulative impact of many rational decisions that proved in the end to be disastrous." "NARRATOR:" "While the parallels to Rome aren't absolute, some economists are concerned that we might be heading down a similar path of mortgaging the future." "Governments are already leveraged to the hilt from trying to fix our short-term problems." "Today, global government debts are in the trillions of dollars and mounting at an alarming rate." "diamond:" "Rome faced economic problems, environmental problems, political problems." "We're like Rome in that respect." "And Rome's getting weakened by its internal problems, meant that Rome was less able to fight off those terrorists on the borders." "We have lots of enemies out there who are just waiting for the opportunity to conquer us." "That's why the fall of Rome hits us in the pit of our stomach." "NARRATOR:" "But our civilization is different." "We know where the Romans went off course and can avoid going down the same destructive path." "When Rome and many other past civilizations began to crumble, violence often tore them apart." "Will future scientists wonder if we suffered the same fate?" "If modern civilization should unravel, future scientists may find the ruins of a border fence that used to separate Mexico and the United States." "They could discover a trail of guns and spilt blood... the remains of a border conflict dating back to the time of our collapse." "Across every inhabited continent, there may be evidence of a sudden rise in violence." "Was this the endgame as our civilization dissolved into chaos?" "TAlNTER:" "A collapse today would be far more extensive than anything that happened in western Europe in the Dark Ages after the end of the Roman Empire." "It would have consequences that are so far-reaching they're unimaginable." "hundreds of millions of people would die over very short periods of time, mostly from famine, some from disease." "It's not something that we want to go through." "The Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages for a reason." "NARRATOR:" "From their evidence the investigators could conclude that the converging forces of water shortages, famine, environmental disaster, and financial ruin finally broke us." "They were searching for one single factor but realize that like the Romans, Maya, and Anasazi, it was the combination of many factors that could lead to collapse." "[gunfire]" "Today, in cities like Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, when society falls apart, a chain reaction of violence often erupts and spills over the borders." "diamond:" "Competition has been the source of some of the nastiest wars in modern times." "If we fail to cooperate, future scientists will find what visitors already find in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia." "And they'll see the skyscrapers of New York and Los Angeles, and there'll be obvious signs of fires and explosion." "The archaeologists will figure out that what ended New York was a war for limited resources." "NARRATOR:" "If future investigators deconstruct the sequence of events, they may find that climate change displaced hundreds of millions of people, causing a human tidal wave that destabilized neighboring countries." "As nations tried to seal off their borders, tent cities could have become permanent fixtures of our world." "diamond:" "When you've got mass migrations of desperate, starving people, if those billions of people are not welcomed in the rest of the world, they're not going to sit down meekly at the borders, they're going to bang on the doors." "NARRATOR:" "Investigators discover that unlike other failed civilizations that came before us, we had a unique advantage." "The speed of our global communications and transportation allowed us to respond instantly to crises thousands of miles away-- a crucial factor that could help us avert a collapse." "But investigators also realize that globalization cut both ways-- the faster our connections, the more vulnerable we became." "TAlNTER:" "Nations are now more interconnected and interdependent than they have ever been before, so that problems occurring in one place tend to spread everywhere." "We can see this with the financial crisis, with energy costs, with pandemic diseases." "A collapse today would unfold probably over a period of only a few years, perhaps even a period of only a few months." "NARRATOR:" "Though globalization could hasten our fall, another great advantage we have is the scope of modern education." "diamond:" "I view our society today as being in the middle of a horse race between the horse of destruction and the horse of environmental sanity, and both horses are running faster and faster and they are neck and neck." "Among the things that give me hope, most of the population can acquire information, whereas in past societies only a small fraction of the population had much information." "We can acquire information from the whole world from all of human history." "NARRATOR:" "Our technology and globalization can be powerful forces for solving our long-term problems, rather than an accelerant to our demise." "Many experts believe that how we marshal these forces could spell the difference between our survival and collapse." "If our civilization collapses in the future, investigators sifting through our rubbish may find that our towns and cities had been picked clean by a generation of scavengers." "After all their searching, future scientists may come to a final realization-- our collapse, like all the others, came down to a psychological battle." "diamond: humans have a tendency for short-term thinking, which has frequently got us into trouble in the past." "What's different today is the combination of far more people, far higher consumption rates and far higher destructive power, that's what makes short term thinking much more dangerous." "We're at the most perilous moment in human history because we are the first society which is so interconnected that if there is a collapse, it's going to be a worldwide collapse." "NARRATOR:" "But it's possible to imagine a different outcome-- if we dare to think more deeply about where we came from and where we may be headed." "gilbert:" "For most of evolutionary history, all dangers were clear and present." "Our ability to think deeply into time about abstract problems that may threaten us or our children or our grandchildren is a very new ability in evolutionary terms." "But it's always the war within us, the war between our two basic natures." "One, the animal nature that got us here, and two, the logical nature that could possibly help us survive." "NARRATOR:" "The converging forces that destroyed the Maya, Anasazi and Roman civilizations are similar to those that confront us today." "But we have a huge advantage that those civilizations did not-- the ability to look deeply into both the past and future, to identify the forces of collapse, and use our knowledge to avoid that fate." "We have the vision to create a very different future." "But it will take a seismic shift to achieve it." "TAlNTER:" "One can see looking at the past that periods of distress are often also periods of innovation." "We can envision whole new industries, new technologies being developed, new jobs being created." "NARRATOR:" "With human innovation and technology, we have the power to chart a more sustainable course." "Centuries from now, scientists may look at the 1969 moon launch, not as the high point of our success, but the beginning." "Our downfall is by no means inevitable." "Jared Diamond and other experts argue that we still have time to choose whether we fail or succeed." "diamond:" "Our society is facing a crossroads." "The tracks of our civilization are stretching off into the future, but there are forks in the tracks, there are decisions to make, and there are big differences between whether we go this way or that way." "The train's already moving." "We have to be making our decisions now." "The Romans, the Maya, the Anasazi, they, too, faced choices and were coming to crossroads." "We've already been making decisions, and some are good decisions." "If we make more good decisions in the future, then the tracks of our own society will stretch off towards the horizon." "NARRATOR:" "Whatever we decide, the odds are humans will live on." "Our species has the uncanny ability to simplify in the face of hardship and adapt." "There are millions of descendants of the ancient Maya, Anasazi and Romans still living today." "In the big picture, the human experiment accounts for less than one percent of the earth's four-billion-year history." "Modern civilization, less than 200 years of that." "But in that brief time span, our imprint has been profound." "Now the future of the planet and everything living on it is riding on the choices we make." "diamond:" "So, are we going to collapse?" "I don't know what decisions we'll make, but what I can promise you is that if we don't get onto a sustainable course, first world society is not going to go on as it is now" "for more than a few decades at the outermost." "At least we've got a chance." "If we choose to solve the world's problems, we can do so." "NARRATOR: humans, above all other species, have a proven ability to make enormous leaps." "The legacy of collapse may be stacked against us, but our history is still a work in progress." "It could be that we're living through the defining moment in human evolution... the time when our civilization breaks the mold... and chooses to succeed."