ABSTRACT
Technological societies adept at mathematics, engineering, chemistry, physics, botany, agronomy, and molecular biology have recently developed tools that have the potential to mitigate the impacts on sustainability caused by our population growth and activities. Many of these technological innovations also have had untoward “side effects,” requiring that the innovators rethink their approaches to avoid the more dire effects of the law of unintended consequences. The promise of technological mitigation of problems based on population growth has led some economists (e.g., Julian Simon 1998) to assert that population growth is not important; technology will save us from our excesses. The fallacy of this assertion was revealed by US anthropologist and historian Joseph A. Tainter in his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter considered the collapses of the Western Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization, and the US Chaco Canyon culture. We consider societal collapse as the ultimate manifestation of unsustainability. Tainter outlined four principles about why complex societies collapse. These are the following:
1. “Human societies are problem-solving organizations; 2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance; 3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and 4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response
often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.”
