Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Viking Press, New York, 2005
356 pp. Trade, $29.99
ISBN: 0-670-03337-5.
Reviewed by George Gessert
In Collapse, Jared Diamond tries
to answer a question that shadows almost
everyone today: Will we survive? Diamond,
who is a professor of geography at UCLA,
and well-known for his writings, including
the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs
and Steel, proceeds by examining cultures
that collapsed and others that survived.
He identifies key factors in failure or
longterm success, and using these as guides,
sketches our probable future.
Diamonds examples of collapse include
several small, isolated societies, among
them Easter Island. Small societies are
relevant to us, he believes, because the
processes that led to their demise "unfolded
faster and reached more extreme outcomes"
than generally occurs in larger societies.
Especially relevant is Norse Greenland,
a society of several thousand people that
endured for almost 500 years, then disappeared,
leaving no survivors. But the Greenlanders
did leave artifacts and written records,
which, because the Norse were culturally
European, are relatively easy for contemporary
scholars to interpret.
Diamond also examines two larger collapses,
of the Anasazi, who had a culture that
flourished in the US Southwest, then fell
apart about 800 years ago, and the Maya,
who had a large, sophisticated society
with a written language, and an extraordinarily
refined calendar. Different Mayan city-states
collapsed at different times. Mayan culture
survives today, but many achievements
of the classical era lie literally in
ruins. Even the indigenous tradition of
writing was lost.
Rome is mentioned only in passing, perhaps
because the reasons for its fall remain
highly controversial. Diamond suggests,
however, that widespread environmental
degradation may have severely weakened
the empire before barbarians delivered
the coup de grace.
Diamond identifies five main factors in
social collapses: environmental damage,
climate change, hostile neighbors, difficulties
with trading partners, and social responses
to each of these problems. Not every factor
comes into play in every collapse, but
historically environmental problems (which
includes such things as soil degradation,
poor water management, human population
growth, increased per capita consumption
of resources, and humanly caused climate
change) have been the most important contributor.
Diamonds primary concern is not
the environment itself, but its effects
on humans. He does not think that overexploitation
of resources occurs because human beings
are by nature willfully blind, incapable
of longterm planning, or dominated by
greed. Rather, overexploitation begins
because many resources initially seem
inexhaustible, especially biological resources.
When signs of impending depletion appear,
they may be masked by normal fluctuations
in resource levels from year to year or
decade to decade. Even with knowledge,
people may not exercise restraint in harvesting
shared resources if individual self-interests
and group self-interest widely diverge.
Harmonizing the two is critical for almost
every society.
In some societies, elites insulate themselves
from the rest of society and ignore its
problems, maintaining power through activities
that exhaust essential resources. Such
short-sightedness may have contributed
to the collapse of classical Mayan civilization.
Mayan kings derived status and power through
monument-building, extravagant displays
of wealth, and ceaseless war, activities
that mitigate against population control
and careful management of resources. At
Copan, population grew rapidly and filled
the valley where the ceremonial center
was situated, forcing farmers to clear
and cultivate surrounding hillsides. The
steep slopes eroded, blanketing the valley
floor with low-nutrient, acidic sediments.
Demand for wood, especially to make plaster
ornamentation for monuments, resulted
in massive deforestation, which in turn
increased erosion and may have exacerbated
drought. Because the king was responsible
for bringing rain, he might have become
a scapegoat when it failed to arrive.
The royal palace was burned around 850
AD.
What exactly happens during collapse?
In the examples Diamond gives, environmental
degradation leads to severe food shortages,
famine, violent struggles for scarce resources,
and overthrow of elites by desperate commoners.
Starvation, war, and/or disease reduce
the population. Sometimes everyone dies,
as in Norse Greenland, but more often
there are survivors. In almost every instance
society loses a significant degree of
complexity. The trajectory from peak population
and social elaboration to collapse can
be gradual, but more often is abrupt,
taking place in just a few years. The
suddenness of collapse is usually a consequence
of exponential increase in resource extraction,
leading to a peak. This situation is followed
by a sharp fall, population overshoot,
and social disintegration.
Diamond includes examples of collapse
or partial collapse in our time. In Rwanda,
where almost a million people were killed
in 1994, and two million were forced into
exile, the ground was laid by colonialism,
a long history of ethnic strife, and ruthless
struggles among political factions. An
additional factor was that Rwanda was
one of the most densely populated countries
in the world. By 1985 all land except
for parkland was developed or used for
agriculture. Well before the genocide,
severe land shortages, environmental degradation,
and the threat of famine had so severely
damaged Rwandas social fabric that
the stage was set for disaster. Diamond
makes it clear that he does not excuse
those responsible for genocide. But with
dismay he quotes a recent observer: "It
is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans
argue that a war is necessary to wipe
out an excess of population and to bring
numbers into line with the available land
resources."
|
|Diamond thinks that Malthusian forces
operate in some situations, but what happened
in Rwanda is not inevitable. Many peoples
have found ways to live sustainably even
in environmentally fragile places, such
as Iceland, or on islands seemingly too
small to support permanent human populations.
Tikopia is a remarkable instance. It is
1.8 square miles, and 85 miles from its
nearest Polynesian neighbor, but has been
home to a population of roughly a thousand
people for 3,000 years. This has been
accomplished by people working together
to produce food, manage resources, and
very carefully regulate population. Other
success stories include Highland New Guinea
and Japan of the Tokugawa era, both of
which long before modern times faced deforestation
and collapse, but developed successful
forest management practices and methods
of population control. One of Diamonds
most telling examples of success is the
Greenland Inuit. They originally occupied
colder, more inhospitable regions of Greenland
than the Norse, but the Inuit survived,
while the Norse did not. The reasons were
largely cultural: Inuit culture was better
adapted to the extremely harsh environment
of Greenland than Norse culture.
Some societies do not collapse so much
as sag, which is what Diamond thinks may
happen to us. "Much more likely than a
doomsday scenario involving human extinction
or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial
civilization will be 'just' a future of
significantly lower living standards,
chronically higher risks, and the undermining
of what we now consider some of our key
values." Diamond thinks that this condition
is likely to happen within the lifetimes
of the current generation of children
and young adults.
He does not think that we need new technologies
to solve our problems. Most new technologies
are environmentally costly, but more important,
he believes that we already have the technologies
we need to produce a sustainable economy.
What we lack are the cultural conditions
and political will to use what we have.
Diamond ends Collapse on a note
of what he calls "cautious optimism."
By this he means that we may be able to
avoid the worst, and instead encounter
"only" the spread of Haiti-like conditions.
To write of "cautious optimism" in connection
with the spread of Haiti-like conditions
underscores how serious Diamond considers
our situation to be. And yet, his account
is not depressing. This is partly because
the prospect of steep economic decline,
along with crises arising from depletion
of essential resources, is not news. Warnings
from scientists, economists, and others
have been appearing regularly for more
than a generation. The prototypical report
was Limits to Growth, published
in 1972 and updated in 1992 and 2004.
Although written primarily for policy-makers,
it became a best-seller and was translated
into about 30 languages. For those of
us who are not policy-makers, Limits to
Growth, as well as most other technical
reports about the unsustainability of
industrial civilization tend to make depressing
reading, both for the news they bring,
and for how it is presented. These books
consolidate essential data and make projections,
often in the form of graphs, but do not
help us emotionally process the rising
and falling curves. Dire warnings are
delivered in dry tones. Usually the authors
offer a few assurances that it is not
yet too late to change the course of industrial
civilization, but most readers, I suspect,
are left feeling helpless, angry, and
guilty for being human.
Diamond avoids these pitfalls by presenting
not only a wealth of data, but an informed
and compassionate picture of what he believes
human beings are. He presents the Easter
Islanders, Greenland Norse, people of
highland New Guinea, Rwandans, and first
worlders today as all equally human. He
neither idealizes nor despairs. He confronts
the possibility of apocalypse without
being overwhelmed or seduced by his subject.
Most scientists ignore the aesthetic dimension
of apocalypse, or combat its paralyzing
spell with facts, but Diamond fights fire
with fire. He relates histories that are
not only well-researched accounts of actual
events but artful narratives, as compelling
as fairytales, ghost stories, and mythic
cycles. These provide rare opportunities
to let go of remnant illusions, especially
lingering hopes that nature can still,
somehow, maybe with the help of yet another
round of technological wizardry, support
limitless economic growth. Diamond carefully
clears away false hopes and opens up space
to choose again.