Mian Crist
speaker
152 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then it fell apart.
And some people argue that it fell apart because of a climactic event.
There was a drought that lasted about 50 years.
And some people say that drought just was the thing that sort of killed the civilization off.
But he argues, drawing specifically from the work of anthropologist Joseph Tainter, that this civilization had gone through other ecological crises and survived.
So this one, he thinks, can't have been the only thing to have done it in.
And he surmises that the civilization was essentially doomed by its own complexity, that it got too complex to be able to address a problem like a 50-year drought.
So I'm going to read just a little bit, maybe to give us a sense of how Scranton is thinking and what his voice sounds like.
This is from the preface.
He writes, How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?
Why do some societies collapse and others not?
Are there consistent reasons why different societies fall apart?
Numerous archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have tried to answer such questions, and Tainter's answer is among the best, as elegant as it is illuminating.
In short, he argues, the problem is complexity itself.
As the energy costs of social complexity rise, Tainter theorizes, the returns on that complexity decline to the point where simplification becomes more economical than additional complexity.
When societies reach such an impasse, they face three possibilities.
The discovery of new energy sources, slow managed simplification, and the sudden unmanaged simplification, or what Tainter calls collapse.
I think this passage is important in part because it's the first place that he uses the word impasse.
I think he's a very careful writer, and I think he knows that he's introducing that idea in this context.
And I think he's also arguing that the problem that we face today in our society
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