After many months of oft-inturrupted reading, I finally finished up Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
I was a huge fan of Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, & Steel; it has influenced my world history and geography classes significantly (I like to have my students consider to what degree societies are bound to environmental determinism). Collapse, on the other hand, sometimes left me cold. By the end, I felt like I was taking my medicine, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop reading a book once I’m 400 pages in.
The best stretches of the book are detailed historical accounts of the collapse of ancient societies like the Maya, the Greenland Norse, and the inhabitants of Easter Island. I was totally engrossed in these sections and haunted by his accounts of their demise. However, I felt that the constructs Diamond used to analyze these collapses were usually too complex to be very insightful – a 12-part inventory here, a 9-catagory breakdown there, etc. Somewhat less interesting, but still worthwhile were sections devoted to contemporary failings in Rwanda (overpopulation leading to genocide), China (overpopulation leading to environmental crises) and Australia and Haiti (deforestation and alien species leading to near ecological collapse). In the end, the most compelling issue to me was that those societies failed to recognize the limitations of their circumstances and adjust their lifestyles and values accordingly. Diamond concludes by attempting to connect the (overly complex) lessons of these collapses and crises with the environmental and demographic issues across the planet today with varying degrees of success.
Here are some other noteworthy tidbits about and from the book:
-One of the things I appreciate about Diamond’s work is that he is an environmental and philosophical realist (unlike the insufferable true-believer, environmental idealists suckling at Al Gore’s bloated paunch). His breakdown of the environmental issues surrounding the logging, mining, and oil drilling industries was refreshing in that he understood that businesses exist in order to create a profit for their shareholders. What’s more, he didn’t write as if to do so is somehow immoral. Diamond laid out how future of the logging, mining, and fishing industries must rely on models that allow sustainable use of natural resources while maintaining or increasing business profits. These rely in large part on the mechanism of an environmentally-engaged buying public.
-Prior to their society’s collapse, the Mayas built enormous pyramids, developed a written language and some fairly sophisticated mathematics. They also predicted, with eerie accuracy, the arrival of a truly terrible disaster film in the fall of 2009. They even carved the name “Danny Glover” onto one of their human sacrifice altars.
-It was Diamond’s contention that much of the logging and oil drilling in the modern first world in the last several decades has been done responsibly (this contention has angered many of his admirers on the left) but pointed to various reasons why companies operating in the third world continue to take a short-sighted, destructive approach. Particularly facinating to me was his analysis about why the convoluted business and distribution model of the mining industry tends to prevent market pressure for responsible practices from reaching the companies. Think about it, do you have any idea where the copper in your car or cell phone came from? Do you have any reasonable way of sending a message to that supplier with your money?
-Do you remember that movie “The Postman” starring Kevin Costner, about a reluctant mail carrier in a post-apocalyptic society who brings salvation to a desperate band of refugees? Well, turns out it will soon prove to be 100% accurate, right down to Kevin Costner’s hair plugs.
-Diamond’s section on the collapse of Greenland’s Norse colony around the year 1400 after over 500 years of existence is wonderful and haunting. He paints a vivid, grim picture of Norse life in Greenland, as they did their best to transpose their European style of life onto their frozen, tenuous environment. Here’s a photo I reflected on for along time of the largest building on their colony – the Hvalsey stone church:
-The Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, unless they don’t. Either way, anthropogenic global warming is irrefutable, and every weather phenomenon of any sort proves this. On an unrelated note, this Kool-Aid is green flavored!
-There were numerous reasons for the collapse of the Norse Greenland society. One of them is the fact that they were unable or unwilling to adjust their European values and lifestyles to suit a vastly different set of circumstances. Whereas the values and hierarchy of the Catholic church and European society served them well in Scandanavia, they proved destructive on Greenland. Large areas of premium (and scarce) land, crops and resources were collected as tithes and sent back to the archbishop on the European mainland. They immediately seem to have had an antagonistic relationship with the pagan Inuit (whom the Norse referred to as “skraelings”, or wretches). Either out of a desire to separate themselves from the Inuit or to cling to their Europeanness, they did not adjust their diet to what was sustainably available (i.e. fish, seal, and walrus), and continued to graze sheep and other livestock. This grazing eventually led to catastrophic soil erosion as the vegetation was eaten away. In the end, the Inuit outlasted the Norse on Greenland, mostly thanks to the fact that their lifestyle matched their environment.
-The Norse settlement on Iceland proved far more successful than their Greenland counterparts. This was the result of Iceland’s less severe environment, the lack of an outside enemy to compete for resources, and Icelanders greater willingness to drop economic activities and values that didn’t prove tenable. Not to be discounted are the sweet, sustaining refrains of Sororicide, Iceland’s favorite Satanic black metal band.
-The mysterious collapse of the Easter Island society is another facinating section of the book. Diamond traces how the inhabitants of the island gradually deforested the entire island until their own survival was doomed. Their society was divided into warring clans led by chiefs and priests who practiced a primitive form of conspicuous consumption. The famous stone heads found on the island are one result of this gaudy competition, as enormous amounts of energy and resources were put into the carving and transportation of these heads, believed to represent an appeal to the gods to save them. Slowly but surely, as the trees were removed, their ecosystem collapsed to the point where the island was nearly uninhabitable. When they were discovered by Europeans in the 1770s, the inhabitants were a lean, miserable people relying on fish that could be caught from shoreand cannibalism to stay alive.
-In an attempt to make their unfamiliar surroundings resemble home, short-sighted British colonists actually tried and failed to introduce rabbits to Australia’s ecosystem 5 times before finally succeeding with a different breed of hare from Spain. These rabbits then proceeded to overpopulate and infest the Australian countryside and remain a menace. Australians have since attempted to exact revenge by stealthily introducing kangaroos to the British Isles, but the wretched beasts are invariably trampled to death by mobs of soccer hooligans.
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