Collapse

Sometimes a book comes along that is just a must-read for any educated person--this is one of those. My brother Joseph recommended this book to me almost a year ago; maybe that is why it took me so long to get to it!

Jared Diamond, “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed”, Viking: Penguin Group, 2005, 525 Pages

Diamond explores how past societies, as well as current societies, failed and how our world can avoid committing ecological suicide. He covers Polynesian cultures on Easter Island, and American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, as well as the Viking colony on Greenland. In all these failed societies common themes emerge: environmental damage (particular deforestation), climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices. Yet other societies faced similar challenges and survived due to their more environmentally sound choices which Diamond shares with the reader. Some of the current failures have occurred in Rwanda, Somalia, and Haiti. China and Australia are trying to avoid failure. Even Montana is facing some serious environmental challenges.

Pg. 6: The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.

Pg. 7: The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, a buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would 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. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by a scarcity of environmental resources. If this reasoning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generation of children and young adults live out their middle and late years.

Any people can fall into the trap of over exploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems: that the resources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it’s difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused disturbances virtually impossible to predict even for a professional ecologist. Environmental problems that are hard to manage today were surely even harder to manage in the past. Especially for past non-literate peoples who couldn’t read case studies of societal collapses, ecological damage constituted a tragic, unforeseen, unintended consequence of their best efforts.

Pg. 11: Diamond arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors when trying to understand any environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors--environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—-may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors—-the society’s responses to its environmental problems—-always proves significant.

It would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 b.c. is an ancient one. It’s obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice.

Issues of human environmental impacts today tend to be controversial, and opinions about them tend to fall on a spectrum between two opposite camps. One camp usually referred to as “environmentalist” or “pro-environment,” holds that our current environmental problems are serious and in urgent need of addressing and that current rates of economic and population growth cannot be sustained. The other camp holds that environmentalists’ concerns are exaggerated and unwarranted, and that continued economic and population growth is both possible and desirable.

Greenland provides us with our closest approximation to a controlled experiment in collapses: two societies (Norse and Inuit) sharing the same island, but with very different cultures, such that one of those societies survived while the other was dying. Thus, Greenland history conveys the message that, even in a harsh environment, collapse isn’t inevitable but depends on a society’s choices.

Chapter 16 summarizes the types of environmental dangers facing the modern world, the commonest objections raised against claims of their seriousness, and differences between environmental dangers today and those faced by past societies. A major difference has to do with globalization, which lies at the heart of the strongest reasons both for pessimism and for optimism about our ability to solve our current environmental problems. Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote—think of Somalia and Afghanistan as examples—can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past.


My Notes:
Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills around 50,000 years ago.

Pg. 139: The first humans to reach the Americas, living as hunter-gatherers, arrived in the U.S. Southwest by 11,000 B.C. but possibly earlier, as part of the colonization of the New World from Asia by peoples ancestral to modern Native Americans.

Pg. 283: New Guinea and Australia were first settled around 46,000 years ago by humans moving eastwards from Asia through Indonesia’s islands on rafts or canoes. At that time, New Guinea was still joined in a single landmass to Australia, where early human arrival is well attested at numerous sites.

Pg. 373: If China could achieve a First World standard of living this would approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. It is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained. Something has to give way.