Entreprenuer, Founder and Chairman of the Virgin Group, Adventurist, Environmentalist, and Humanitarian

Since becoming a voracious reader of books about science, the environment and history over the last twenty years, I have always wondered why sophisticated societies collapse. It has been a fascinating riddle which historians have never explained well. The Marxists always saw it in revolutionary terms and the environmentalists have always seen it in climate terms, whilst the Malthusian biologists/historians have always seen it in population terms. Together they’ve explained the collapse of sophisticated cultures as a function of social pressures, population explosion and an adverse environmental kicker pushing a culture over the edge.

That view has always worried me and something sneaking in the back of my mind has often thought, “Why did clever people who could build pyramids and massive cities in different parts of the world manage to allow that to be destroyed over a few generations”.  If great ideas had built civilisations that advanced well beyond the flowering Tudor England of the 17th century what other factor was involved.

With her book, The Watchman’s Rattle, Rebecca Costa has made an extremely brave, spirited and well informed attempt to answer that question in the context of the seemingly insoluble problems facing a global civilisation of 2011, with its 6.5 billion human participants who are currently having enough babies to guarantee it will be a 9 billion person problem by 2040.

It is one of those rare books that one picks up and then knows within the first few pages is extremely important, but more than that it is also a fascinating read that challenges our very beliefs about how we solve the problems we face in a resource constrained world with a rapidly growing population.

Even in my own experience of modern business the most frustrating thing is people telling you why things can’t be done based upon beliefs rather than data, reaction to the past rather than analysis and a simple view that it is easier to file things in the “too difficult cupboard” rather than trying to manage the risk of achieving them. I remember when we were trying to get Virgin Trains off the ground in the UK with a new technology tilting train that could go much faster round the bends of the old UK rail network. All the experts said it couldn’t be done and the civil servants hated the risk. One almost got the impression that people thought it would be better to do nothing and pass the problem on to the next government. How was it that the country that had invented the railway and the first high speed trains could have such entrenched attitudes.

I’ve always believed that we will not get to where we need to be with short term fixes that pass one issue after another onto the next generation with each successive one left with less room for manoeuvre. Energy and its clean production are the key to a continuously developing civilization and Thorium fission reaction, clean fusion power, artificial photosynthesis or indeed solar power from space are all potentially viable solutions.

And if you want to know why none of them are being pursued with anything like the investment, vigour or attitude to risk needed then this book will help you answer the question. It will also help you reason with the fact that at the same time as the above solutions are largely ignored such enormous investment is poured into marginal and expensive hydrocarbon extraction despite the fact we now know we only have enough left to last 40 years tops!

Rebecca Costa has successfully challenged the prevailing view that our historic, scientific and economic progress since the dawn of capitalism will always be there to rescue the boat and she has done it by introducing our recent breakthroughs in our knowledge of neurological science to convincingly argue that we literally need to change and adapt the way we think about increasingly complex problems that the human ape has to solve in the next century.

I have taken what Rebecca has said very seriously and whether it be in space, in the air or on the ground I for one will look for solutions in future rather than falling back on simple truisms that may not be true. Let’s not leave it to future generations to blame us for a civilisation collapse we now have the tools to prevent, even if our ape-like brains don’t want to admit it!