Why Nations Die
The Vikings of Greenland refused to eat fish, disdained the hunting techniques of the Inuit, and consumed too much wood and topsoil. As a result their colony collapsed during the 15th century and they all died.
The Easter Islanders chopped down all their palm trees and the Mayans of Central America burned their forests to build temples.
Given that America returns land to the wilderness each year, the danger from deforestation is small.
The world is not breeding too fast — birthrates are everywhere falling — and the industrial countries (except for the Anglo-Saxons) are failing to reproduce at all.
Sparta, the model of slave-based military oligarchy, had 5,000 land-owning families at the time of the Peloponnesian War, but only 700 by the third century AD after Epiminondas broke the Spartan hold over its helot population. Rome’s population fell to perhaps 100,000 during the seventh century from 1 million in the second century. Between 150 AD and 450 AD, the population of Rome’s Western empire fell by about four-fifths. Constantinople held 250,000 people in the ninth century and between 600,000 and one million during the 12th century, yet it had fallen to only 100,000 when the Turks took it, at least in 1453. After Constantinople, the world’s largest city west of the Indus, well may have been the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Estimates of the annual number of humans sacrificed by the Aztecs range from 20,000 to a quarter million per year.
The Romans did not so much conquer Greece as to occupy its shell; the Germanic tribes did not so much conquer Rome so much as to move into what remained of it; and the Arabs did not so much conquer the Byzantine hinterland as migrate into it.
“Why nations die” by Spengler