Catton has taught us that any species that experiences frenzied growth on an accumulated supply of resources will overshoot the long term carrying capacity of it's environment and eventually experience collapse.

Tainter has shown us that the most directly quantifiable mechanism for that collapse in complex human societies is the diminishing marginal returns of attempts to mitigate the problems faced by that society. Ironically, problems that are made increasingly worse by those very attempts to solve them using a world view that is not appropriate to the actual situation.

Meadows, et al. have demonstrated that our current industrial society, if it remains committed to exploiting our abundant accumulation of non-renewable resources, will experience greatly diminished marginal returns on the amount of capital that must be expended to continue extracting those resources, as well as to mitigating the problems created by the frenzied growth enabled by those resources. Further, because the short term carrying capacity of our environment was so dramatically increased by the abundant accumulation of non-renewable resources the resulting overshoot will severely degrade the long term carrying capacity and the eventual collapse will reduce the population to a much lower level than might otherwise have been sustainable

Odum further elucidates that such cycles of frenzied growth on accumulated resources followed by collapse are found at all scales of complex systems, both living and non-living, and are repeated at regular intervals at various time scales in "pulses". In fact, complex systems emerge quite naturally around flows and accumulations of resources and self organize to fully maximize those resources, eventually dying-off when the resources are exhausted, only to begin anew after another accumulation or flow has built up. Such pulses, while they might be viewed as a disaster from a limited perspective, actually seem to increase the eMergy of the whole system as seen from a larger perspective and longer time scales.

Therefore, anyone who thinks our current drama of overshoot and collapse, with the global economy evaporating into a black hole, billions of human lives being rendered redundant, and entire ecosystems wiped off the face of the Earth, is some sort of freakish calamity that must be avoided AT ALL COSTS..., well, they are quite simply dead wrong.

Office:

Department of Environment and Society, Utah State University, 5215 Old Main Hill, Logan,
Utah 84322. Telephone: 435-797-0842. Email: Joseph.Tainter@usu.edu
Date of Birth: 8 December 1949.

Education:

B.A., Anthropology, with honors, University of California at Santa Barbara, March,
1972.

M.A., Anthropology, Northwestern University, June, 1973.

Ph.D., Anthropology, Northwestern University, June, 1975.

Professional Positions

Professor, Department of Environment and Society, College of Natural Resources, Utah State
University, Logan, Utah, 2009– .

Guest Professor, Center for Studies of Science and Humanities, Beijing Normal University, Beijing,
China, 2009-

etc

Few questions of history have been more enduring than how today’s complex societies evolved from the foraging bands of our ancestors. While this might seem of academic interest, it has important implications for anticipating our future. Our understanding of sustainability depends to a surprising degree on our understanding of the human past. My purposes today are to show that the conventional understandings of cultural evolution are untenable, as are assumptions about sustainability that follow from them, and to present a different approach to assessing our future.

The fact that complexity and costliness increase through mundane problem solving suggests a different and startling conclusion: Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase. As illustrated by the Roman Empire and other cases, this has commonly been the case.

Many advocates of sustainability will find it disturbing that long-term conservation is not possible. Naturally we must ask: Are there alternatives to this process? Regrettably, no simple solutions are evident. Consider some of the approaches commonly advocated:

1. Voluntarily Reduce Resource Consumption.
2. Employ the Price Mechanism to Control Resource Consumption.
3. Ration Resources.
4. Reduce Population.
5. Hope for Technological Solutions.

Social complexity and sustainability emerge from successful problem solving, rather than directly from environmental conditions. Social complexity develops from problem solving at all scales from local to national and international.

Complexity in problem solving is an economic function, and can both support and hinder sustainability. Sustainability outcomes may take decades or centuries to develop.

Historical studies reveal three outcomes to long-
term change in problem-solving institutions:

1. collapse,
2. resiliency through simplification, or
3. continuity based on growing complexity and increasing energy subsidies.

The slow development of complexity in problem solving makes its effects difficult to perceive, especially over short time periods. Long-term social sustainability depends on understanding and controlling complexity. New strategies to mitigate or control complexity are offered.