Gloomy books about our environmental problems are pouring off the presses. They have immediate pertinence to our lives, but few people seem to be reading them except the already anxious. Scholarly monographs about various facets of the human experience from Homo erectus to Donald Trump are likewise piling up without generating much concerned interest. Jared Diamond, in his new book, has woven together materials from these two genres in hopes of delivering a credible (and loud) warning to the ecologically oblivious. He does so by providing examples of disasters that illustrate how often and how thoroughly we have achieved environmental collapse and how we have also, occasionally, avoided it.
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Societies' five fear factors
Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond Viking: 576 pp., $29.95
The book's title, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," may strike some as sensational. The author himself, pining for 18th century clarity and comprehensiveness, claims that the full title should be "Societal Collapses Involving an Environmental Component, and in Some Cases Also Contributions of Climate Change, Hostile Neighbors, and Trade Partners, Plus Questions of Societal Responses." How many bookstore browsers would pick up anything with that on the cover? Hence, the melodramatic "Collapse."
Readers learn on Page 1 that they are in for quite a ride. Diamond starts out by describing two similar dairy farms with roughly the same number of cows. One is in Montana and the other in Greenland. The former isn't particularly successful, climate and dairy prices being what they are, but it's stumbling along; the latter failed more than half a millennium ago. Before you take comfort from the contrast, note that medieval Norse settlements in Greenland lasted 450 years, a lot longer than the English-speaking settlements have in North America, much less Montana, and a whole lot longer than we moderns have been industrialized, globalized and, in our modest estimation, kings of the biosphere.
No reader may carp that Diamond has provided a set of examples that is too limited chronologically, culturally or geographically. He takes us on an educational excursion through the millennial experiences of Easter and other Pacific islands, the American Southwest, the Maya regions of Mexico and Central America, the New Guinea highlands, the Inca empire, Rwanda, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Australia, China and more. (The pages devoted to China's prospects provide enough material for a full quota of sleepless nights.) These accounts are based on extensive readings in secondary sources, on archeological records and on the written histories of the lands and peoples concerned -- and even on some original research, a rarity in publications aimed at the general public.
Diamond, an ornithologist and a UCLA professor of physiology and geography, has been to most of the lands cited, often staying for months or even years, and what he writes about them and their populations is informed and engagingly colored by personal observation. Organizing such a motley crowd of examples is a challenge, which he meets by looking for the same five factors in each: environmental damage inflicted (usually unintentionally), such as the Greenland Norse cutting down all their trees and tearing up sod for fuel; climate change, which these Norse suffered with the return of Ice Age temperatures; hostile neighbors, for example, the Inuit (or Eskimo) rivals of the Greenland Norse; decreased support from friendly neighbors, as when expanding sea ice and a decreasing European market for walrus ivory severed the Norse Greenlanders from outside support; and finally a society's response to all or any of the above problems. The Greenland Norse could have adopted Inuit technologies -- for instance, burning blubber instead of wood, constructing watercraft (kayaks) from animal skins -- and survived. Instead, they clung to European ways in a very un-European place, even building an impressive cathedral, and expired a few generations before Columbus and 1492.
If all five of these factors figured actively in your situation, then you were pretty surely done for. If only four or fewer did, then you might survive, but not necessarily and not comfortably. The Easter Islanders had no nearby neighbors, hostile or helpful -- which in the Pacific means no one within 1,000 miles -- and managed their collapse unilaterally. They mowed down all their trees for fuel, shelter and the transport of their giant stone statues. This was followed by severe erosion and the run-off of their best soil into the sea. They adjusted to their new situation chiefly by way of population crash, a technique open to us all.
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