Attendees of the 20th annual Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) Symposium, "Resources and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations," can be forgiven for taking shorter showers and not letting the tap run while brushing their teeth.
After all, the fate of civilization depends on our resources.
When Dr. Fred Pearce, author of "The Dammed: Rivers, Dams and the Coming World Water Crisis" told the audience that humans "have had a good run for 10,000 years," he reflected the mood of the entire symposium.
Human life requires a judicious use of resources, and the fall of civilizations results from the abuse of those resources, he said.
"We are entering a new era, the anthropocene, in which humans are major players" in climate change, Pearce said. Already we have come to dominate the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle.
"How vulnerable is our civilization to environmental disruption on a global scale?" he said.
"Resources and the rise and fall of civilization - that's a hell of a big topic," Pearce said. Panelists agreed that a historical perspective was necessary to examine natural resource use and abuse, and to prepare for what Pearce called the coming "crunch" of climate change.
"Usually the effects of [energy use] complexity last beyond the lifetime of an individual," said "Collapse of Complex Societies" author Dr. Joseph Tainter. Any research on the topic of environmental policy without the inclusion of history, Tainter maintained, was unsubstantiated.
"We know what was attempted, what worked, what didn't, and what the outcome was," Tainter said.
From that historical perspective, attendees learned that the Sumerians, the Romans and the Incans were all hoist by their own petards of unsustainable energy use.
The Sumerians, for example, took care of the Fertile Crescent and created a civilization based on agriculture and irrigation that eventually turned their land to desert.
"Manipulation of the rivers made the Sumerian cities, but it destroyed them, too," Pearce said.
The Romans overextended their resources by raising taxes and debasing currency to support an empire whose days of conquering for riches were long over. The Romans, according to Tainter, had failed to understand the complexity generated by their society.
By not changing the patterns they had grown accustomed to in times of prosperity, the Romans eventually caused their own demise in leaner years. The lesson, Tainter said, was that "a society or institution can be destroyed by the cost of sustaining itself."
Harvard Graduate School of Design professor and "Wetlands of Mass Destruction" author Robert France emphasized that resource use is often political. In ancient Sumer, "one city was always choking off water from another," France said. "The playing of water as an element of war goes back millions of years."
In an age where the Colorado River is sustaining the entire Southwest, when a sixth of the world's population are drinking dammed water in China, and when the Indian government is spending six billion dollars on a new dam, these lessons grow more relevant.
"We need to be aware that some of the responses of people over the past 10,000 years may be relevant to how we want to respond to the coming changes," University of Maine professor Daniel Sandweiss said.
Cities such as Phoenix, Ariz., which depends on man-altered natural resources for existence, Pearce said, are "living on borrowed time." He offered as a model for survival the city of Jericho, which has existed for almost 10,000 years by using water judiciously.
"Cities built on intensive use of water often find themselves vulnerable to climate change. Less intensive uses of water can be more flexible in the face of change," he said.
"As a planet, we face the choice: do we innovate, or do we die?"
