I recently finished Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How societies choose to fail a succeed.

The book covers a numbers of examples of socieities that have collapsed, or have avoided collapse, because of environmental problems and overpopulation. In today’s globally interconnected world, those lessons could be valuable on a global scale. Diamond describes the world as being in an exponential horse race of uncertain outcome, between exponentially growing population and enviornmental impact on one hand, and increasing environmental concern and activism on the other hand.

In the cases where societies did choose to adapt and survive, the foresight and action of cultural elites was an essential factor, which typically required that the elites experience the effects of their actions directly rather than being insulated, and that they take a long term view.

Today’s announcement that Warren Buffet will donate $37 billion to the Gates foundation, and the announcement that Gates will be spending most of time on the foundation, are encouragings bets in this exponential horse race. Education and health will help improving living conditions, reduce overpopulation, and create sustainable food production.

Even if the Gates Foundation succeeds, we still face difficult choices. Diamond puts the argument starkly but convicingly. The world cannot sustain first world levels of consumption, for most of its population– or even for the first world plus China. This is not an abstract argument– China is clearly on a pace to hit those levels of consumption, and we are already feeling the pain in areas like high oil prices and pollution with global reach.

“There are many ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards… Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World lving standard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would double our human impact on the world.”

Can we make a soft transition to a more sustainable form of life, or will we have an unpleasant crash landing?

Because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.

For all of these reasons, I hope that the Gates Foundation and organizations like it can help to not only address the incredibly difficult problems of third world health, education, and living conditions, but also the even difficult issues of global sustainability.

Clearly, to have any hope of addressing these problems, the Gates Foundation must not only leverage their substaintial financial assets but also create a viral “platform” for attacking the problems. By “platform”, I mean platform in the software sense, allowing third parties to contribute in a way that adds value to the system. By “viral”, I mean that the message and incentive to participate in the program needs to be viral and fan out exponentially, in order to have hope of competing against the inevitably exponential growth of population and enviromental impact. (Windows, the Open Source movement, blogging, and Google are interesting points of comparison in the software world and some or all of these might even play a role in the solution.)

(While I’m on the topic; do check out gapminder.org for an essential set of visually illustrated global statistics.)