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“I often think about how I would want to die. My own father recently died a slow death of lung disease. He lost control over his own life, and his last year was painful. I don’t want to die that way. It may seem cold-blooded, but here is my fantasy of how I would die if I had my choice. In my fantasy, Pat would die before me. That’s because, when we got married, I promised to love, honor, and take care of her, and if she died first, I would know that I had fulfilled my promise. Also, I have no life insurance to support her, so it would be hard if she outlived me. After Pat died—my fantasy continues—I would turn over the deed of the house to my son Cody, then I would go trout-fishing every day as long as I was physically in condition to do it. When I became no longer capable of fishing, I would get hold of a large supply of morphine and go off a long way into the woods. I would pick some remote place where nobody would ever find my body, and from which I could enjoy an especially beautiful view. I’d lie down facing that view and—take my morphine. That would be the best way to die: dying in the way that I chose, with the last sight I see being a view of Montana as I want to remember it.”

In short, the life stories of these four Montanans, and my own comments preceding them, illustrate that Montanans differ among themselves in their values and goals. They want more or less population growth, more or less government regulation, more or less development and subdivision of agricultural land, more or less retention of agricultural uses of land, more or less mining, and more or less outdoor-based tourism. Some of these goals are obviously incompatible with others of them.

We have previously seen in this chapter how Montana is experiencing many environmental problems that translate into economic problems. Application of these different values and goals that we have just seen illustrated would result in different approaches to these environmental problems, presumably associated with different probabilities of succeeding or failing at solving them. At present, there is honest and wide difference of opinion about the best approaches. We don’t know which approaches the citizens of Montana will ultimately choose, and we don’t know whether Montana’s environmental and economic problems will get better or worse.

It may initially have seemed absurd to select Montana as the subject of this first chapter of a book on societal collapses. Neither Montana in particular, nor the U.S. in general, is in imminent danger of collapse. But: please reflect that half of the income of Montana residents doesn’t come from their work within Montana, but instead consists of money flowing into Montana from other U.S. states: federal government transfer payments (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and poverty programs) and private out-of-state funds (out-of-state pensions, earnings on real estate equity, and business income). That is, Montana’s own economy already falls far short of supporting the Montana lifestyle, which is instead supported by and dependent on the rest of the U.S. If Montana were an isolated island, as Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean was in Polynesian times before European arrival, its present First World economy would already have collapsed, nor could it have developed that economy in the first place.

Then reflect that Montana’s environmental problems that we have been discussing, although serious, are still much less severe than those in most of the rest of the U.S., almost all of which has much denser human populations and heavier human impacts, and much of which is environmentally more fragile than Montana. The U.S. in turn depends for essential resources on, and is economically, politically, and militarily involved with, other parts of the world, some of which have even more severe environmental problems and are in much steeper decline than is the U.S.

In the remainder of this book we shall be considering environmental problems, similar to Montana’s, in various past and