Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
For those of us who supposed that problems with the globe’s ecology were only a joke, here is a book determined to change our minds. Jared Diamond seeks to instill an awareness and a fear of the possibility of sudden societal collapse, by providing historical examples spanning the millennia and illustrating numerous modern-day parallels. Overall, the book’s conclusions invite the consideration and concern of any conscious global citizen.
The book opens with a chapter on Montana, a US state that Diamond personally knows well. He paints a sympathetic picture of its people and the issues they face, showing that, while not yet catastrophic, even Montana faces many environmental problems similar to the ones which have wiped out whole societies in the past.
Next Diamond draws on the latest research to describe the beginning, the rise, and the flowering of a complex society on Easter Island; then, its once-lush forests completely eliminated and its farms rendered useless by erosion, its disintegration and descent into cannibalism. He explains how Easter Island society reached the height of its size and complexity, and the largest of the famous Moai stone statues was erected, during the period just before this precipitous collapse. The first Easter Islanders arrived on large sea-going canoes; the first Europeans to visit the island encountered their timid, starving descendants, desperately paddling around on rafts so leaky they took on water almost as fast as it could be bailed out. Here Diamond first poses the question which will be revisited repeatedly throughout the book—how could people make decisions, such as cutting down every last tree on their island, that so predictably led to their doom?
In Chapter 3 Diamond describes three other small islands in the Pacific—Mangareva, the largest of the three, and tiny Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, which served as its trading partners. Europeans encountered Mangareva after its own deforestation-triggered collapse, with a few thousand survivors engaged in perpetual cannibalistic warfare. With no more canoes and trade goods arriving from Mangareva, the few hundred people left on tiny Pitcairn and Henderson islands survived only a few generations before dying out.
Chapter 4 describes the famous Anasazi in southwestern North America, who over-exploited their surroundings and were finished off by a drought. Their society, too, reached the peak of its size and complexity immediately before descending into warfare, possibly cannibalism, and eventually complete abandonment of the Chaco Canyon settlements. Chapter 5 describes the similar story of the classic Maya civilization, one of the most complex and intriguing Meso-American societies with its advanced architecture, astrology, writing and mathematics. The Mayans built their cities in jungle valleys, triggered erosion and destruction of valuable farmland as they cleared more trees for farms to feed more people, and were eventually hit by a bad drought, thus also collapsing catastrophically not long after reaching their peak.
Chapter 6 outlines the historical conditions for the Viking expansion (explosion) from modern Norway south to Europe and west across the north Atlantic. Several Viking colonizations of small northern islands are described, along with the problems settlers faced when they discovered their environments were more fragile than the one they had arrived from. The early settlement of Greenland is described, as well as Greenland Norse expeditions which landed in modern-day Canada. In the next chapter, Diamond tells the story of the medieval Greenland settlement, its initial expansion and prosperity, followed by hard times, and then complete extinction.
The Norse came to Greenland during good times, climatically-speaking, and also found it free of native inhabitants. They hunted walrus for its ivory, a valuable trade good in Europe, and established a society based on dairy and sheep farming. After a couple of centuries, however, the climate began to cool, reducing the production of farms and filling the seas with ice that made it difficult for European ships to arrive. Also, the Norse found they had new neighbors—the Inuit (i.e. Eskimos), who had been expanding across the Arctic sea from the Bering Strait. The Norse over-grazed the fragile Greenland soils, exacerbating the problems of a cooling climate, and eventually the sea ice became so bad that ship traffic with Europe ceased completely. In addition to relating these essential details, Diamond also provides much narrative describing the nature of Norse Greenland society, the notable personalities who made it their home, and what life must have been like for the average Greenlander.
In Chapter 8, Diamond examines the evidence to reconstruct a probable story for the extinction of Greenland society, and contrasts it with the contemporary Inuit society which has survived to this day. Eventually, the Greenland Norse ended up with a diminishing food supply and too many people, and may also have suffered from hostile relations with the Inuit. Diamond also explores the question of why the Norse did not adopt any of the effective Inuit technologies they must have observed, and why they did not make modifications to their own society and values that may have ultimately allowed them to survive.
After this succession of gloomy stories, the book pauses to note some examples of success. Diamond tells the story of tribesmen in the New Guinea highlands, who solved their deforestation through bottom-up management, and Tokugawa Japan, which halted and reversed deforestation through intensive top-down management. He also examines tiny Tikopia island, whose inhabitants adopted strict measures of population control and ecological management, and touches on other successes such as the Pueblo, the Inca, and the medieval Swiss.
Chapter 10 visits a well-known and grisly episode of modern history, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But Diamond argues that the slaughter of nearly a million Rwandans at the hands of their neighbors was not triggered only by ethnic hatred, but that Rwanda also suffers from a severe land shortage and ecological degradation. He cites sociological surveys from the years leading up to the disaster which show increasing competition for smaller, sub-divided plots of land, as population increased quickly but food production slowed due to drought and the degraded fertility of the land. He cites reports on the city of Kanama, which was ethnically uniform, but was still the site of widespread killings inflicted by residents upon their neighbors. The conclusion is that the genocide was as much a product of over-population and economic pressures as it was ethnic division. A French sociologist is quoted, who reports “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.”
Chapter 11 contrasts the fates of two societies sharing the same Caribbean island—Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the former being desperately poor and deforested, and the latter possessing forests, a poor but growing economy, and even a home-grown environmental movement. In relating the history of the Dominican Republic, Diamond notes the irony that the nation’s two modern dictators, who committed numerous atrocities and abuses against their people, also were responsible for their country’s exemplary record of conservation, due to a single-minded commitment to environmental protection.
Chapter 12 describes the horrendous ecological problems caused by rapid economic growth in China, and balances them against the ability of its strong top-down political system to impose solutions, if it chooses.
Chapter 13 describes a variety of worsening ecological problems in Australia, caused by invading rabbits and weeds, and a variety of poorly-managed agricultural enterprises that are probably unsuitable for the continent entirely.
Chapters 14, 15 and 16 seek to tie together all the main arguments of the book, and grant them a sense of urgency in our modern world. Diamond here tries to evoke a general sense of doom about global society’s fate, but balances this with optimism in describing many newly available solutions. The oil, mining, logging, and fishing industries are visited in sequence, with examples of bad practices that are destroying people’s lives as well as good ones which are sustainable into the future. Diamond also takes time to specifically refute many common objections raised by skeptics who doubt the danger of the present situation. In the end, as he repeats many times throughout the book, Diamond sees the world situation as “an exponentially accelerating horse race of unknown outcome.” He professes hope that armed with knowledge, global citizens can choose sustainable survival instead of over-consumption and collapse.