Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive [Paperback]

He begins with modern Montana, specifically Bitterroot Valley, a society in danger of failing because of deforestation, pollution, loss of productive top soil, and other factors. He follows this with Part 2, "Past Societies" in which the melancholy history of Easter Island and some other Pacific Islands is retold in fascinating detail. I was especially interested in the material on Easter Island, which, because of its relative isolation from the rest of the world over many centuries, has always served in my mind as a microcosmic cautionary tale for the entire planet. Although I have read other books about Easter Island and have seen a couple of documentaries, I found Diamond's exposition full of new information, offering fresh insights into how that society collapsed.

Also delineated in remarkably readable detail are the collapses of the Anasazi of the US southwest, the Maya in Mesoamerica, the Viking-founded colonies in the north Atlantic and especially in Greenland. There is some excellent material on how Iceland succeeded (barely) and how the New Guinea highland people managed to avoid the fate of some other Pacific Island societies, and why Japan succeeded in saving its forests and croplands in the time of the Tokugawa. Note that these stories are primarily about ecological successes or failures, not successes or failures due to political or military misadventures.

What surprised me about the failed societies is that the most destructive thing the people did was cut down their forests to plant food crops. Again and again, from Easter Island to Greenland, the effect of cutting down trees was devastating because it allowed wind and rain to remove the topsoil, either blowing it away or washing it down gullies and rivers into the sea. In the case of Easter Island, using up all the timber resulted in an inability to fish since without wood the people could not build boats.

People also clear forests to create pastures for grazing their livestock. This also proved disastrous in some cases, especially when the animals were sheep and goats, who typically graze right down to the roots of plants, and can thereby quickly strip the vegetation from great tracks of land.

But the common link between all societal ecological disasters is simple, and one of great importance to us all today. All those societies--Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, etc.--allowed their populations to grow beyond the carrying capacity of their environment. That is the bottom line for all of humanity. Hungry people do desperate things, as Diamond recalls in the chapter on Rwanda. When too many people share too little space and resources, laws and morality break down, governments fall and people kill one another massively. All peoples do this. No human race or ethnic group is exempt. It could happen here. Diamond's book is a warning that we all need to hear and appreciate. We are part of the ecology, and not above it. We need to live in harmony with the rest of the planet and not imagine that we can treat the planet and its resources with carelessness, abuse and neglect.

Toward the end of the book, Diamond gives his prescription on how we might avoid the fate of the failed societies. He notes on page 214 that bad things can happen "when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children's future." He is referring to the parents of friends "who bought life insurance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children," but "blundered into the disaster of World War II."

I think Diamond nails it with this observation. Today's soccer moms (and dads) with all our affluence and all the care we put into our children's and grandchildren's future may be failing because we are not electing the kind of leadership that will provide for their future. High deficients (greedily borrowing from our children and grandchildren) and lack of consideration for the environment, through the depletion of fossil fuels and the pollution of fresh water sources and the air, etc., may completely override anything we might do for our children.

Diamond also says that at some point societies have to realize which core values are worth maintaining and which no longer make sense in light of current circumstances (p. 440 and elsewhere). He cites the example of the Greenland Norse who maintained their European values and lifestyles and died out when they might have survived had they taken on the Inuit lifestyle and learned to hunt ringed seals and whales and build igloos. Additionally there is the sad example of Easter Island where they continued to worship greedy gods (and their priests) and built statues instead of using their resources to maintain their forests and topsoil.

I think Diamond's argument especially applies to the false gods some people follow today, the Bronze Aged gods of fundamentalist religions who fear progressive change and continue to seek solutions through violence, intolerance, and the defeat of "enemies."

In reading about the various collapses here one is struck by what they had in common. In every case there were too many people chasing too few resources. At peak times on Easter Island or among the Maya, great monuments were build to celebrate the society's success. And then came the fall soon after. Diamond warns that the crash is typically not gradual like human senescence, but abrupt, following fast on the heels of the society's finest hour.

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The book starts by setting out those questions which soceities must address if they are to survive and flourish. Basically these involve how they respond to changes in the environment (including trying to prevent detrminental changes), their degree of adaptability and their relations with other nearby or related societies. The hypothesis is that by studying these factors in relation to societies which have failed over time, it is possible to develop a theory of how societies fail, or decide to fail.

This is fascinating: history books normally focus on political processes, but Diamond's approach goes one step further back in identifying the material forces promoting certain types of political change (or indeed inertia). The account of the decline of societies in Easter Island and Greenland are as good as anything Diamond has written before and make for compelling reading. We are left with a rather more realistic view of our ancestors than is sometimes promoted: rather than living in harmony with mother nature they often made more shocking environmental mistakes than we do today; rather than being driven by primitive, mystical or religious motivations their social choices were largely determined by the material and economic priorities of governing elites.

The most important message from this book is a warning of what happens when societies throw caution to the wind and adopt unsustainable policies, living off preciouc environmental capital rather than limiting themselves to its fruits. The collapse of society on the isolated Easter Island may be a chilling precedent for the future collapse of planetary society on Earth.

Why 4 stars? Well, basically because there are two parts to this book, one in which the author speaks as a professional scientist and the other in which he sounds like some geezer from down the pub. The analysis of historical decline is clearly the work of an expert in the field with decades of experience. The analysis by contrast of current problems (from the opening chapter on Montana to closing treatments of big business) seem to consist of references to his mates and own anecdotal experiences. Which is all well and good, except that you can get these sorts of opinions from millions of people, whereas Diamond's scientific work is rather more specialist.

Moreover he maybe pushes the boat out a bit too far in claiming an ecological basis to the most important political problems in the world. Whilst he makes a compelling argument for the impact of material and economic factors in the Rwandan genocide, there's a danger of overstressing the point. He only picks examples of conflicts which have an identifiable environmental angle, but ignores others which demonstrably do not. How would he explain the break-up of Yugoslavia?

But as long as we recognise the limits to the application of Diamond's ideas and skip over the excessively personalised biographies of his various (interesting) pals accumulated over the years this is a highly readable book. Recommended.

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Some of the later chapters of the book are rather too heavily dependent on anecdote; a few appendices with some more detailed empirical analysis to support some of the author's assertions (e.g. on the economics of USA mining companies, climate change and Australia's dodgy economic structures) would have strengthened his case greatly. Nevertheless, this is a must-read for anyone interested either in the collapse of ancient societies or the future of our globalised world.

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