Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail

Jared Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. I read Guns a few years ago so my memory of it is fuzzy. What I do recall is this: Diamond sets out to explain why Europeans took over the world and not South Americans, Africans or any other subset of the human race.

Diamond suggests that the root cause of the Europeans success was climate and soil fertility coupled with a ready supply of plants and animals suitable for domestication.

There is more...

The availability of lots of food meant people could devote energies to things other than food gathering, like metal invention, volume production, and printing. (If, for example, Guttenberg had to gather food everyday, would he have had time to invent the printing press?) High food production, led to population growth. Population growth and close living led to disease immunity. Once Europeans, with their strong immune systems and nasty diseases left shore with their superior steel weapons and written words, few other cultures could compete.

on Page 44:

"disease spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and 1600."

With diseases like that, who needed weapons?

Guns Germs and Steel fascinated me.(though others told me they could not get through it - I guess I am weird that way.)

Thanks to my iPod, I have just finished Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The tone of Collapse is quite different. While it is a history book like Guns, Diamond focuses on collapsed societies. Diamond's examples range from the long past to the near present including Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, Anasazi Indians (of New Mexico), Mayans, Vikings, Rwanda, and Haiti. His examples span about 1700 years from Easter Island to the present Rwanda.

When I picked it up, I expected this book to be about environmental damage. An early statement by Diamond surprised me:

When I began to plan this book, I didn't appreciate those complications, and I naively thought that the book would just be about environmental damage.

Diamond sets out a framework for collapse and describes five sets of contributing factors. Then, in each of his chosen collapse cases, he identifies the role, if any, the factors played.

The factors he describes are: Environmental damage inflicted by people, Climate Change, Hostile neighbors, decreased support by friendly neighbors, and society's response to problems.

Environmental damage inflicted by people - this includes deforestation, salinization (a process, often a result of over watering, that causes salt buildup in soil and decreases soil fertility), overgrazing, contamination, and a number of other serious self-inflicted wounds.

Climate Change - The Anasazi Indians, for example, settled parts of what is now called New Mexico during a wet period. However, as rainfall trended back to normal, water supply, and thus survival, became an issue.

Hostile Neighbors - The Norse, for many reasons, did not "get along" with the Greenland's native Inuit. Thus, they did not learn the survival techniques of the Inuit and battled with them from time to time.

Decreased support by friendly neighbors - The story of Pitcairn and Henderson Islands is, at first, one of complimentary relationships; each island filled key resource needs of its neighbor. However, as one island died from deforestation, the second island died as well.

Society's response to problems - A number of cultures suffered from deforestation. Yet the response by these cultures varied widely. On Easter Island, it appears as though residents took no action. On Japan however, rulers enforced a strict forest management program.

After introducing us to these contributing factors, Diamond uses a loved location, The Bitterroot Valley of Montana to illustrate the contradictions and challenges of modern society, and, not surprisingly, the rest of our nation.

While the book is dense and a bit slow at times, the histories of collapse are fascinating. As you read these stories, you find yourself in the time and place of the ill-fated peoples feeling helpless to divert them from their inevitable end. Furthermore, you begin to appreciate the effort Diamond must have expended to construct these stories. It is also hard not to imagine the millions of anthropologist-hours devoted to these missing societies

As expected, seeing parallels to our situations today is unavoidable. However, our imagination is not required. Diamond takes a hard look at a quite fragile Australia; the country/continent that is perhaps closest to environmental collapse on this planet. From Australia, he moves to China. With little effort, Diamond made me worry about China's "successful" economy. Should the Chinese reach the standard of living enjoyed by citizens of the U.S.:

But China is progressing rapidly towards its goal of a first-world economy. If China's per-capita consumption rates do rise to First World levels, and even if nothing else about the world changed - e.g., even if population and production/consumption rates everywhere else remained unchanged - then that production/consumption rate increase alone would translate (as multiplied by China's population) into an increase in total world production or consumption of 94% in that same case of industrial metals. In other words, China's achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world's human resource use and environmental impact."

Diamond moves from looming crisis of China to discuss management of the commons including Forests, Fisheries, and Mineral resources. He also describes the role corporations play - both the good guys and the bad - in environmental health.

The final chapter, The World as a Polder summarizes the most serious problems (Diamond identifies 11), addresses some of the more common objections to claims of societal collapse, and ends with reasons for hope.

Diamond's analysis is compelling, meticulously well researched, and well written. "Enjoy" however, is not a word I can use to describe this book. While I think everyone should read it and understand the implications of this book, I do not believe anyone will "enjoy" what Diamond has to say.

Cross posted at A Rational Being

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