A recent story on Slashdot pointed out a paper that looks at human population cycles in terms of environmental availability as a predator-prey relationship. Supposedly it was meant as a commentary on the present economic climate, but it is... uniformly lacking in that department. It's missing a lot of important parameters and assumes constant values for things that fluctuate all the time. (Watch out for section 5.3, where the authors multiply the line representing the Bad Guys by their resource usage in order to make them look more menacing, and note also the incredible introduction, which more or less implicates resource depletion as the key factor in the decline of all civilizations.)

However, what this paper does provide is a rough outline of what might be some very simple (and I mean Easter Island level) rises-and-falls. Anyone who's ever thought about modelling population dynamics for an Iron-age civilization (or earlier) may want to consider taking some inspiration from this. I think it could be neat to define annual population tables for a tribe or village or something.

reminds me of the fertile crescent. it used to be fertile, and now it's all shitty land, apparently because people did too much irrigation on it and made the earth salty. come to think of it, i remember there being salt crusts on irrigation channels in a few moroccan towns i visited. it's funny how such a little thing as salt can move the world, and there's surely nine dozen economic-ecologic phenomena that behave in just such an exhaustion-decline-replenishment-increase cycle.

I'm gonna be a good marxist and argue with you, however: why *wouldn't* resource depletion be a factor in civilization decline? i mean, civs are highly dependent on resources to support the level of division of labour that makes them, well, civs!

I think the point was more 'the key factor in the decline of all civilizations.' I really should finally go read that, can't remember why I didn't.

sure, i just think that it's tenable to hold an argument along the lines of " given that civilizations are fundamentally schemaSCHEMATA <!>ADMINISTRATIVE EDITORIAL EDIT<!> of production and distribution of production, fluctuations in the availability of such resources as are necessary for production itself can easily be assumed to be a key, perhaps the key, factor in their emergence and decline "

<i almost wrote schemata but decided against such pedantry>

Please, show us your schemata. I like schemata.

quoting Torco:

<i almost wrote schemata but decided against such pedantry>

schematata

quoting Nessari:

schematata

scheming tatas

(It has been done.)

When I decided to criticize the paper for that, I meant to suggest specifically that other things can cause the collapse of a civilization—surely, for example, the Eastern Roman Empire is generally regarded as a victim of invasion and political decay rather than resource exhaustion. I guess it requires a very over-broad definition of "civilization", one that includes any adiabatic system of resources... which basically means that the entire world, excluding uncontacted peoples, is now one civilization.

quoting Rhetorica:

I guess it requires a very over-broad definition of "civilization", one that includes any adiabatic system of resources... which basically means that the entire world, excluding uncontacted peoples, is now one civilization.

this is not an unpopular, nor particularly indefensible opinion

Indeed it is—but it is nowhere nearly as useful for conworlding.

quoting Rhetorica:

(It has been done.)

When I decided to criticize the paper for that, I meant to suggest specifically that other things can cause the collapse of a civilization—surely, for example, the Eastern Roman Empire is generally regarded as a victim of invasion and political decay rather than resource exhaustion.

that only makes sense if you look at very proximate causes and stop there. the roman empire *had* seen significant deurbanization which might indeed have been due to soil exhaustion, for example. the empire had seen armed conflicts with the various 'barbarians' in the region since way before the empire was an empire, and it did okay for the most part, and the late roman barbarian invasions were part of broader, global displacements which may have been associated with chinese campaigns against xiongnu polities in a domino migration effect... further, 535 was a terrible year with crop failures around the world that might well have had something to do with people abandoning Teotihuacán... i'm not saying, necessarily, that economic factors are necessarily the key to any civilizational collapse, but i'm saying that, well, we are not separate from the earth and climate and resource depletion will necessarily shape history.

quoting Rhetorica:

Indeed it is—but it is nowhere nearly as useful for conworlding.

i again disagree... making a conworld from a world-system perspective influenced by like cardoso y faletto and the recent "global history" trend in historiography instead of the more classical nationalistic toynbee-school-of-historiography perspective sounds interesting. if i ever go back into being productive at conworlding i might try to in future.

I don't even understand what you guys are talking about. Does that mean all the conworlding I've been doing I've been doing wrong?

Do you care about realism in your conworlding? If not, then no you haven't. If you do, I'd try to wrap your head around these concepts.

I *might* explore these ideas further in writing... like, i like the basic thought but i'm not terribly sure what it would look like. i think it unduely flatters the discussion to say that it means that all conworlding until now has been wrongly done, like this was a revolution or something.

quoting Torco:

I *might* explore these ideas further in writing... like, i like the basic thought but i'm not terribly sure what it would look like. i think it unduely flatters the discussion to say that it means that all conworlding until now has been wrongly done, like this was a revolution or something.

would u nevertheless provocatively suggest that it would be interesting if this were the case?

It is p much a certainly that conworlding is always being done wrong, mainly because our silly simulations generally cannot hope to capture the full complexity of whatever system we are making up. The fact that you cannot possibly know enough about ALL THE SCIENCES feeds this, of course.

(nb I hold that this is also true for conworlds that run on fairy dust of some kind)

However I am equally pretty sure that this idea is not new (in fact I thought of it myself, and I am not some kind of super economopolitical genius so it is very probable that at least a few other people thought of it long before me), but a) rarely implemented because it is more annoying to work with than slowly doing one culture at a time and b) probably not something the grand majority of conartists must be assumed to have thought of.

quoting Hallow XIII:

It is p much a certainly that conworlding is always being done wrong, mainly because our silly simulations generally cannot hope to capture the full complexity of whatever system we are making up. The fact that you cannot possibly know enough about ALL THE SCIENCES feeds this, of course

Challenge accepted.

studies for decades
*insert picture*
dies before doing any actual conworlding

Lol. Studies for decades and, while doing it, also conworlds.

And doing that discovers that many of his/her original teenager-era ideas are crap and the ones (s)he discovers learning, based on actual facts, are much much better.