All Roads Lead to Rome
Or to New York

All Roads Lead to Rome--Or New York

How can you fairly be described as an exile for one with the blood of Senators in his veins and with effigies of ancestors in the trabea daily forced upon his sight, to visit Rome once in his prime--Rome the abode of law, the training school of letters, the fount of honors, the head of the world, the motherland of freedom, the city unique upon earth, where none but the barbarian and the slave is foreign? Sidonius Letters, Book I, Letter VI, AD 467.

Why has thou given me seven hills and such a population as a small supply cannot nourish? Happier I, had my power been less. Better to have put up with Samnium and Veii; in narrower bonds I passed securer days. My very magnitude undoes me; would that I could return to my former boundaries and the walls of poor Ancus. Enough for me then would be the ploughlands of Etruria and Campania…and at his country's prayer the rustic dictator [Cincinnatus] would bring his home-grown wheat. Claudian, The War Against Gildo.

Rome became a city of over a million people, but it was totally dependent on the resources it could command abroad. If the winds held off the grain fleets from North Africa, Romans began to worry about famine. As Claudian indicated above, it has not always been so. In fact it is highly likely that Romans embarked on their imperial conquests to begin with because the Roman settlement was too thickly populated, and local methods of agriculture had robbed the fertility of the soils of central Italy. Empire aggravated this condition, since the hordes of slaves brought back from conquest enabled Senators to convert marginal small-holdings to huge latifundia. The former small-holders swelled the ranks of the plebs in Rome, where they were dependent on the dole--imported wheat, oil, wine and pork brought in from greater and greater distances. And what could they do to support themselves? There was an "immense increase of corrupt and corrupting professions, as actors, pantomimes, hired gladiators, political spies, ministers to passion, astrologers, religious charlatans, pseudo-philosophers, which gave the free classes a precarious and occasional subsistence and hence, too, the gigantic dimensions of the system of clientage."

That reads like the "post-industrial" society of today: all services, no products! It also reads like the occupational register for Washington, if not of New York. Both cities are highly dependent on the outside world, as well. Since New York harbor has become more of a tourist attraction than a working port, it would be more affected by the disruption of truck routes than by shipping, but still there are parallels.

The port of Ostia, the ancient port of Rome , now lies miles from the sea. The beaches of ancient Ostia are now wheat fields, the docks that lined the Tiber are also buried in fields. The same is true of Ravenna, which was the functioning capital of Italy during most of the fifth century; now it is miles from the sea, on dry land; it was surrounded by swamps, which is why Honorius fled there: it was more easily defended, and its harbor at Clasis was on the seashore; it is no longer.

What happened? Did the sea-level fall? No, what happened is a small microcosm of what is happening to our world today. The harbors and seaports were silted over, filled in because of Rome's insatiable appetite for lumber and for energy in the form of wood. Think of all the huge baths that had to be heated, think of all the concrete forms that had to be built, think of all the boats needed to bring grain and to protect the empire from attacks by sea. The forests of Italy were destroyed by over-cutting, and the soils of the Appenines, and of the lands in between ended up in Clasis and Ostia, and in many other Italian ports, as well. It is estimated that there were over 900 baths in Rome alone; they were perpetually stoked with wood. Initially, the wood was floated down the rivers from the Appenines, until there was little left and the Empire had to seek elsewhere. The deserts of North Africa probably grew much more rapidly than they would have from the natural climate cycle because of all the timber exported to Rome; shipping was cheaper across Mare Nostrum than all the way from the Baltic. The arid North African countries of today: Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Libya were the bread basket of Rome. Romans and then Vandals produced wheat and olives in North Africa through irrigation made possible by the construction of vast aqueducts, but as North Africa lost its forests, its sources of water also dried up.

What the silted harbors and arid countries illustrate is the environmental costs of Empire, all sustained in order to glorify and enrich those in power.

Actually, by the fifth century Rome was more comparable to a New York or a London than a Washington. Imperial government had been transplanted to Ravenna for the West and to Constantinople for the East. However, when Rome was still at the center of "the known world," in the first century, Claudius (48-54) and Trajan (98-117) did mount efforts to dredge the harbors. What is significant is that no one else did, not even when the Empire was controlled by the autocracy created by Diocletian. So, one of the sources of decadence was the environmental damage that clogged up the navigable rivers and harbors, and then went un-addressed.

Sidonius describes the problems faced by Ravenna in the fifth century:

In that marsh of yours the laws of everything are always the wrong way about; the waters stand and the walls fall, the towers float and the ships stick fast, the sick man walks and the doctor lies abed, the baths are chill and the houses blaze…the powers are asleep and the thieves wide awake, the clergy live by usury and the Syrian chants the Psalms…a place that may boast a territory, but little solid ground.

This was the capital of the western Empire!

When Alaric the Goth surrounded Rome in 410, Emperor Honorius was in Ravenna, safe behind the marshes that could not be attacked by Gothic cavalry. Within less than 75 years, Ravenna was successfully taken by Theodoric the Great, an Ostrogoth, although it is not clear whether the marshes had been filled in enough to be passable.

By the fifth century, manufacturing that had been centered on Rome had long since left the city. Note: Roman "manufacturing" was by hand, of course (manu means hand, facture means make) since industrial machinery was not invented until the Industrial Revolution. The Romans did have factories, places where large numbers of people made the same thing, whether it was metal helmets, or swords, or trinkets for the barbarian market. Large numbers of gold-plated medallions were sold to the Huns, for example, who decorated their tunics with them. In the fifth century, the autocracy bound factory workers to their places, and even branded them to prevent them from running off (which they did anyway). However, the most critical centers of manufacture had migrated further and further away from Rome. By the fifth century, arms manufacture for the armies of the west was found in the Danube and Rhine valleys, near the barbarian frontiers, probably because the army preferred to have their sources closer to likely conflicts, and possibly because officers and local gentry could more easily prevent workers from escaping. (Where would they run to? To Attila?) Furthermore, they could probably more easily siphon off the profits when the factories were far from the center.

In any case, the great city of Rome was neither a center for manufacturing, nor an administrative center by 401. It was still massively dependent on the imports of practically everything: food, energy, defense, and even talent, as the careers of people like Sidonius and Claudian readily illustrate: both ended up in Rome (Sidonius only until his connection, the Emperor, was done away with), both came from elsewhere as did most other talent.

Once the Vandals took over North Africa, conquering Carthage in 439, Rome was living on borrowed time. The passage from Sidonius on Rome does not indicate any such thing, however. He and his contemporaries acted as if the sack by Alaric in 410 never happened, and as if the Vandal takeover of North Africa was of no consequence. Rome the Immortal.

To back up a bit, think of how Rome got this way. It had been the center of Empire even before there was a formal empire; it had been expanding outward during most of the Republic, and had conquered North Africa as early as 202 BC, conquered Spain in the same (Punic) war and went on to conquer Greece not long after. It didn't become a formal Empire until Octavian became Augustus in 27 BC. But Rome was the recipient of triumph after triumph, and of the spoils those military victories represented. Roman soldiers carried off everything portable of any value. The most famous spoil was the golden candelabrum from the temple of Jerusalem, carried off when Jerusalem and the temple were razed in 71 AD, but Romans had been doing this for centuries before, and for several hundred years afterwards. That candelabrum was carried off by the Vandals, by the way, in 455, and then disappeared; they probably melted it down.

As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, the most valuable spoils were human: slaves, and captives subject to ransom. The slaves and the wealth Romans carried off completely changed the economy of Rome and of Italy. Rome became a large-scale slave economy, small-holders were driven off their lands because they couldn't compete against slave labor, and Rome became a massive importer of virtually everything. It is useful to remember that the Roman Empire, for all its rhetoric about law and Roman peace, was first and foremost a conquest society which battened off the exploitation of the rest of the Mediterranean and much of Europe. When a young man went out to govern a province, he was expected to come back a very rich man; he usually did--and he brought the riches back to Rome. Those provinces did eventually get Roman roads and monuments, and political stability; they eventually were absorbed as citizens, an innovation by Romans that was pretty extraordinary, but they also paid a high price, and the Roman economy was permanently distorted by being the Imperial seat.

New York, not Washington, is most like Rome, especially the Rome of the fifth century when it was no longer the capital of Empire. New York is not only the largest city in the United States, it is the financial center, publishing center, media center and cultural capital of the country, perhaps the world. Think about it for a moment; the glitz and glitter of Fifth Avenue, the tawdry sparkle of Times Square and Broadway, the crowded skyscrapers of the financial center, would they be possible without the wealth pouring in from the rest of the world?

New York was built into a great metropolis because of the farsightedness of people like DeWitt Clinton, who promoted the Erie Canal. The canal opened up the interior of the nation, the Ohio valley and the whole midsection of the nation to a seaport, creating markets where there had been none. Railroads and highways followed those earlier domestic trade patterns, but growth today comes from elsewhere. The Ohio valley has been part of the "rust belt" for decades, but New York has become even wealthier; it imports goods, but especially, it imports money, from the rest of the world. Wherever capital has been in danger, anywhere in the world, it has come to New York as a safe haven. If an African dictator worries about the future, he will send an underling to New York to open up a discreet account, probably situated in some offshore bank in places like Dominica or Grenada. Or perhaps, now, he will do the same thing on the Internet, except that Internet trades are more easily traced--as the NSA spying scandal illustrates. Not only will the dictator seek to bring his ill-gotten gains to New York, the merely wealthy, whether they are from Venezuela, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia or Brunei will also send their money to New York; they have no need to hide it, but they seek safe markets as well as safe havens. They seek liquidity and US protection against export taxes and currency restrictions plus the US government's warranty of the value of the US dollar: "The good faith of the US Government…."

But we may have constructed a house of cards. The US has been so unrestrained in its borrowing that the Wall Street financial system may undergo much strain. The US experiences record trade deficits year after year , near record government budget deficits year after year, and chronicles the poorest savings rate of any developed country: it is now negative, reflecting the growing indebtedness of nearly everyone except those at the top of the income pyramid. A good question might be: what will happen to Wall Street if the dollar plunges on international markets, an event that seems increasingly likely? This may be why the maintenance of an imperial presence in the rest of the world is necessary. If we can control Iraq, Iran and… then perhaps the credibility of our dollar will be maintained, and Wall Street will continue to boom. If not, then what will become of New York?

New York is completely dependent on imports, even its water. It imports its water much as Rome did, through an expansive network of reservoirs and tunnels. Question: why isn't New York forced to privatize its water as have many third world cities like Soweto by the World Bank? Answer: New York's private water company in the 19th century was a disaster. Reportedly, New York was the smelliest city in the world, as well. Public water has served it well, so far.

Rome imported water on 11 aqueducts only the latter parts of which were on the raised arched structures we associate with the word aqueduct. For most of their length the aqueducts were bored through rock, in some cases carried underground in lead pipes. And the supply of water was plentiful, more than one cubic meter per person. However, when Romans were besieged by the Goths, the raised aqueducts were cut off, demonstrating how vulnerable the city was. Only one aqueduct continued operating, because it was underground for its full length. This was why the medieval city settled almost entirely within the loops of the Tiber, so that it could depend on the river for its water.

Just as Rome was dependent on its water, so is New York. The reservoirs and channels into the city are more vulnerable to attack than most people realize. A road across one reservoir was closed after 9/11, and other precautions have been taken, but still the Taconic parkway passes over one reservoir; if terrorists wanted to toss vials of biological agents into the water there, who would know to stop them? I am sure there are other vulnerable points as well.

While all roads led to Rome, what was most critical for supplying the city with food, supplies and fuel was its harbor and its river barge traffic. For New York it is likely that the most crucial links are the highways that cross Connecticut, New Jersey and upstate New York, but New York's vulnerability to disruption is much greater than Rome's ever was. That is in part because modern societies are much more vulnerable than classical ones, but it is also because New York is the center of so much, and yet creates so little of its own substance.

Global warming could affect New York more dramatically than the silted harbors affected the cities of the fifth century, and now most people recognize that, just like the silting of harbors, this global process is largely human-created.

How could global warming affect New York City? While Roman harbors filled in, New York (and LA…) harbors will be flooded--as will parts of downtown Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn and parts of Queens. Will the powers-that-be build levees as insubstantial as the ones that broke in New Orleans? After all, if we apply what I called the Hummer syndrome in Chapter One, then the wealthy and upper middle class will be able to move to higher ground, so why worry? There is some evidence--including the huge rise in the real estate markets in the suburban and exurban counties north of New York City--that the wealthy are in the process of doing this already.

And yet the political powers that be refuse to embark on the most immediate and effective measures to respond: like raising CAFE standards for vehicles so that we burn less fuel, and pollute less. There is evidence that the current administration, friendly to the oil industry, is not only refusing to consider mandatory reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (at venues like the meeting of the Eight in Scotland in 2005), it has been caught leaning on scientists who disagree with them, trying to cut off their funds, or, if they are on government payrolls, trying to censor their public statements. For example, requiring the chief climate scientist for NASA to submit all statements for review, after he said publicly that global warming was a fact, was human-created, and that we had to reduce emissions promptly.

Skewing scientific findings and censoring evidence you don't like, is the quintessential stance of a selfish class concerned with its own profits and power and totally unconcerned with what will happen years from now. It is the essence of the Hummer syndrome. It is also not too different from the attitudes of the Romans, when it came to deforestation and silting. Read the statement by Sidonius on Ravenna again, and you will see that he finds Ravenna's plight rather funny. Of course environmental science wasn't a glimmer in the eye of even the most enlightened and educated Roman, nor was it thought of in the US and Europe until the 1960's, but now it is; to the selfish class it is inconvenient, maybe even threatening.

How can you make money (more and more money) on pumping oil, or cracking shale oil, or gasifying coal if these science jerks are telling everyone we have to cut back on emissions? While Democrats and Europeans are more cautious, while some like former Vice President Al Gore have mounted a campaign for action against global warming, it should also be noted that even though the EU is generally in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, not all of its members are (Spain and Portugal saw large increases in CO2 emissions), and the reductions achieved so far are now considered far from adequate to prevent or reverse global warming. In other words, even the more enlightened of leaders among the political powers are probably too cautious, and too indebted to, or controlled by, the large corporations to embark on policy changes that would be drastic enough to address global warming.

According to some estimates, the "tipping point" beyond which a rise in global temperatures of 2C cannot be avoided, has already been reached. It is interesting to note, however, that many others, like the National Association of Evangelicals, refuse to admit that global warming is a recognized problem and the Institute for Religion and Democracy commends the NAE for not taking a position. Others even editorialize that evangelicals shouldn't take any position on things like global warming, that they should only concern themselves with spreading the word and feeding and clothing "the hungry."

And yet, a city like New York, the people in New York, could face many different disasters, not just global warming: flooding, financial collapse and rising energy costs are just some of them. Because New York is highly energy intensive, energy shortages and high prices will be felt disproportionately by New Yorkers, even though most of them do not drive. Everything in the city will cost more simply because it has to be brought there from somewhere else, mostly by truck, and the city's expenditures on heating and cooling will have to rise sharply.

New York is vulnerable the way Rome was vulnerable, to the loss of control of its resource base. While basic food needs are met mostly by domestic sources (unless you consider winter tomatoes a basic food need), that is not the case for energy, which increasingly comes from anywhere else. New Yorkers may not be driven to famine conditions quite as easily as were fifth century Romans, although fresh foods might be difficult to get if major highways were blocked, but New York has been shut down when its electricity grid malfunctioned--remember the blackouts of 1965, 1977 and 2003? Of course New York will probably not face barbarian armies attempting to cut off its water and food, but international terror may be the 21st century equivalent. And it may be inspired by similar reasons: not "hatred of our freedom," President Bush's facile explanation, but resistance to the current arrangements (financial, trade, military) which funnel so much of the wealth of the rest of the world to places like New York, and into the hands of our 21st Century "Senators," the people who own and control global corporations.

Terror is a strategy that is especially well-adapted to the disruption of cities like New York, just as Goths and Vandals were particularly well-suited to overcoming Roman defenses in the fifth century. Terrorists are unlike Goths and Vandals, however, in that they do not seek the riches of the cities they disrupt. One of the interesting aspects of "Islamist" terror networks, and of the nationalist terrorist groups that developed in the last century, is that they did not seek riches per se; they strike to make a point: advanced societies are vulnerable, they are saying, and the wealthy need to take into account the interests of the disadvantaged elsewhere in the world--or simply leave them alone.

While Islamists reject modern comforts and "western decadence," the surest way to combat them would be to more effectively share the wealth. But then the selfish class would get less--at least in the short term--which is another reason why selfish class dominance is destructive to the long-term health of modern society; selfish class leaders would be the last ones in the world to agree to an equitable division of resources. Apparently they are also among the last to be willing to recognize that something must be done about climate change. They can buy houses uphill from rising seas, and can afford to run their 7 mpg Hummers. In addition, their very power and wealth depends on the maintenance of current industrial structures.

An interesting point was made by Tom Paine in Commonsense (Feb. 15, 2006): the primary reason why companies like Exxon are so invested in resisting climate change science is because the most common sense response would set up structures inimical to centralized corporate control. (Exxon-Mobil is one of the major funding sources for scientists who still deny that there is global warming or that it is human-driven). The best way to combat global warming, according to Tom Paine, is with solar power, but that would decentralize sources of power. Conceivably, even a city like New York could be close to energy self-sufficient with solar and wind technology. Corporations like the oil companies and the power companies have much invested in centralized sources of power; centralization also gives them political power and public subsidies, and they are in danger of losing it all if home generation systems like the one recently unveiled by Honda (which would provide heat and electricity for the home and hydrogen for the car, all from solar power) became alternative energy sources.

Centralized sources of power are the large hydro-electric, oil and gas-fired power plants. With talk of global warming, however, there are now plans afoot to subsidize new nuclear power plant designs, and to use India as the guinea pig for trying them out. Nuclear power has only one thing going for it: it does not emit greenhouse gases, but it creates nuclear waste (we still have not figured out what to do with ours from our old plants), and makes proliferation of nuclear weapons easier. It also creates a need for an authoritarian state, since security surrounding a nuclear industry has to be high to prevent proliferation, or sabotage. The reason it is promoted by groups like The World Business Council on Sustainable Development is that nuclear power (and hydro- and "emissions-free" coal plants) would maintain the model of centralized power. It is a source of power and wealth that the selfish class must continue to control.

And then there are the developing countries that are in a hurry to industrialize their economies. India is eager to go nuclear, with US support, which would aid the spread of nuclear power as the alternative to oil and coal. "The [Malaysian] premier has regularly labeled Western environmentalism as a form of neocolonialism, a tool to keep developing countries from achieving economic growth." In consequence, 80,000 acres of virgin rainforest in Borneo were submerged for a power company. The Amazon is cleared by Brazilians wanting to cash in on the demand for tropical timber and rainforest beef, while Indians spray their nation with DDT, and the Chinese incur massive pollution with their coal and oil-based drive to industrialize.

In all these cases, these nations' selfish classes collaborate with the global corporate elite: they want a part of the global power and wealth. But their energy policies, industrial policies, economic policies and environmental policies are just as destructive as those of the Bush administration's. In fact, they are collaborators in evading even the minimal, inadequate controls of the Kyoto Protocol and for the same reasons: they want to keep their hands on the power that enables control of their countries. Think of how the Chinese Communist leadership would view widely dispersed power generation controlled by their 1.3 billion people. Better to poison China than to let that happen! Expect many new nuclear power plants in both China and India.

The story of climate change might have a happy ending, however. It might force societies to make massive investments in just those kinds of power that will decentralize both power sources and social power: like those home generating systems unveiled by Honda, and also promoted by BP, which is in the process of putting solar power units in Home Depot for sale for household use. But, again, the power of the selfish class would have to be combated for anything like this to happen.

To come back to New York: Indian Point is a first generation nuclear power plant only 24 miles north of New York City. For the last several years it has failed to win approval from local governments for its evacuation plans: it is estimated that 25 million people live within 50 miles of the plant, including all of New York City, which would be in the peak injury zone. This means that if the plant had a meltdown like Three Mile Island, or if it were blown up by a terrorist attack, the city itself would likely be gravely affected.

Tell me New York isn't as vulnerable as fifth century Rome! Now, look again at Sidonius' statement about Rome that heads this chapter: it was written in 467, 12 years after the Vandals' devastating sack, 57 years after the sack by the Goths. To Sidonius it was still Rome the Eternal, and yet the city had undergone two major cataclysms within his lifetime; it would soon dwindle to less than a hundred thousand souls huddled about the loops of the Tiber. The high ground was left to the ruins of ages past, since those parts of the city no longer had reliable sources of water. About all the ancient sites were good for by the turn of the sixth century, was as a source of building material: good dressed stone and polished pillars that could be used, perhaps, in raising new churches. Reportedly, by the seventh century, shepherds grazed their sheep about the ruins.

Would the ruins of New York offer even as much?