Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HOW SECURE IS OUR CIVILIZATION
'
S ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE
? It is a question that, in a
fundamental sense, transcends many of the life-and-death concerns (threats of sickness, natur-
al disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and
weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths
to delay the event as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest in making sure
that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music,
invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the
cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives.
Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire
people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contem-
plate.
Yet cultures do die. The examples from history are legion. Anthropologists and archaeologists
have identified more than ten thousand distinct human cultures, most of which have perished, many
by absorption into one multiethnic civilization or another. Linguists have catalogued more than
six thousand human languages; again, most are extinct or endangered, often for a similar reas-
on—absorption of indigenous populations into multiethnic urban civilizations. But civilizations are
also mortal: about 24 are known to have existed over the past few thousand years, and again, most
are now dust.
Here is perhaps the most salient fact: when past civilizations were in the process of decline and
collapse, they seem to have given insufficient thought to preserving the best of their achievements.
Indeed, the reverse often happened—libraries were burned, statues defaced, tombs looted. Archae-
ologists make heroic efforts to piece together the histories of these vanished empires, but they face
enormous hurdles. Even the monumental and long-lasting civilization of ancient Egypt left behind
more questions about itself than answers: we're not even sure how much arithmetic and geography
the average educated Egyptian knew.
It might seem that our own civilization's achievements are less vulnerable. After all, the sheer
weight, volume, and variety of contemporary cultural materials is unprecedented, including hun-
dreds of millions of topics and more hundreds of millions of newspapers, magazines, paintings,
