Environmental Engineering Reference
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of the two opposed nuclear-armed sides in the Cold War, and then by American global hegemony.
Pinker calls this the Long Peace. Wars have become less frequent and less violent, and most soci-
eties have seen what might be called a decline of tolerance for intolerance—whether manifested in
schoolyard fights, bullying, or picking on gays and minorities.
But there is a problem with Pinker's implied conclusion that global violence will continue to
decline. The Long Peace we have known since World War II may well turn out to be shorter than
hoped as world economic growth stalls and American hegemony falters—in John Michael Greer's
words, as “the costs of maintaining a global imperial presence soar and the profits of the imperial
while some merely point to the rise of China as a global rival, others describe the looming failure of
the essential basis of the US imperial system—the global system of oil production and trade (with
its petro-dollar recycling program) centered in the Middle East. There are any number of scenarios
describing how the end of empire might come, but few credible narratives explaining why it won't.
When empires crumble, as they always eventually do, the result is often a free-for-all among
previous subject nations and potential rivals as they sort out power relations. The British Empire
was a seeming exception to this rule: in that instance, the locus of military, political, and economic
power simply migrated to an ally across the Atlantic. A similar graceful transfer seems unlikely in
the case of the United States, as 21st-century economic decline will be global in scope. A better
analogy to the current case might be the fall of Rome, which led to centuries of incursions by bar-
barians as well as uprisings in client states.
Disaster per se need not lead to violence, as Rebecca Solnit argues in her topic
A Paradise Built
in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
. She documents five disasters—the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City; a giant ship ex-
plosion in Halifax, Canada; and 9/11—and shows that rioting, looting, rape, and murder were not
automatic results. Instead, for the most part, people pulled together, shared what resources they had,
cared for the victims, and in many instances found new sources of joy in everyday life.
However, the kinds of social stresses we are discussing now may differ from the disasters Solnit
surveys, in that they comprise a “long emergency,” to borrow James Kunstler's durable phrase. For
every heartwarming anecdote about the convergence of rescuers and caregivers on a disaster site,
there is a grim historic tale of resource competition turning normal people into monsters.
In the current context, a continuing source of concern must be the large number of nuclear
weapons now scattered among nine nations. While these weapons primarily exist as a deterrent to
military aggression, and while the end of the Cold War has arguably reduced the likelihood of a
massive release of them in an apocalyptic fury, it is still possible to imagine several scenarios in
which a nuclear detonation could occur as a result of accident, aggression, preemption, or retali-
ation.
3
We are in a race—but it's not just an arms race; indeed, it may end up being an arms race in re-
verse. In many nations around the globe the means to pay for armaments and war are starting to dis-
appear while the incentive to engage in international conflict is increasing, as a way of rechanneling
the energies of jobless young males and distracting the general populace, which might otherwise be
in a revolutionary mood. We can only hope that historical momentum can maintain the Great Peace
until industrial nations are sufficiently bankrupt that they cannot afford to mount foreign wars on
any substantial scale.
