 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed |
It took me all of 2006 to read Jared Diamond’s novel, setting it down several times.
So informationally dense, such a delluge of data, an avalanche of not just facts, but where the facts came from, how layers of archeological discoveries translated into Diamond’s conclusions was too overwhelming for me to consume in one sitting. Like eating an elephant, I had to tackle Diamond’s book in small bites.
From geographic locations including Montana, Easter Island, Iceland, Greenland, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Chaco Canyon, Mesoamerica, Rwanda, New Guinea, Japan, China, Australia, India, North America, Europe, Norway, Cambodia, Canada, Hawaii, numerous Pacific Islands, New Zealand, New Guinea, Polynesia, Russia, Scandinavia, and Southern California; through civlizations and cultures such as Mayan, Dutch, Hatian, Feudal Japan, Modern China, Norse, Anasazi, Hutu, Tutsi, Aborigines, Kayenta, Arawak, barbarians, Maori, Ainu, Moche, Native Americans, and Zapotecs; covering issues and factors like Water quality, polution, forests, invasive species, climate change, political unrest, biodiversity, soil analysis, invasive species, irresponsible mining, deforestation, diseases, CFCs, exporting and importing imbalances, air quality, and overpopulation; Jared Diamond constructs an incredibly thorough and immensely complex web of things to consider on this topic.
Woof.
And yet, Diamond’s writing is completely accessible. He doesn’t assume any prior knowledge on his readers part, but remains interesting even when covering facts that many of us will already be familiar with. The book reads like the scientific process in many parts, as he takes us through carbon isotope tests, archeological digs of waste pits, and pollen studies to construct a narration of various civilizations’ final years.
Diamond wants his readers to know in detail how he knows the things he puts into this book. He doesn’t want to leave any doubt that he knows this subject, and doesn’t leave any doubt. Diamond is an expert on this topic, and anyone skeptical of his interpretation of the data will need to work through decades of research before they could assume to challenge him.
Beginning with his childhood home in Montana, Diamond catalogues the environmental damages the mining industry has wrought there. He takes us to Easter Island, whose inhabitants wrecked their environment by cutting down every last tree to build statues to their gods. We witness the final days of Norse Greenland, whose inhabitants must have starved to death one winter after eating the last of their livestock, while the Inuit inhabitants continued to feast on fish and seals. While Mel Gibson’s film Apocalyptico catalogues 101 ways Mayans may kill one another for entertainment purposes, Diamond explores the myriad reasons this civilization declined from their cultural accomplishments in agriculture, astronomy, and governance.
The success stories Diamond provides prove that collapse is not innevitable. The Japanese successfuly managed their forests so that they 80% of their country covered in forest. The Dominican Repbulic Dictatorship successfully implemented top-down environmental management, whose effect is starkly apparent when we look at the country’s border with Haiti, and the environmental collapse that neighbor has experienced because of its inability to manage its resources. The Dutch have implemented the most successful environmental policies, a direct result of the country’s precarious position of having so much land below sea level.
While Diamond focuses on countries and civilizations, we are now a world community and we must consider the emergent and very real possibility that we are now capable of experiencing collapse on a global scale. This is a frightening development when we look at the immensity of the catastrophes our race faces such as anthropogenic global warming, collapsing fish stocks in the Ocean, and unsustainable population growth. If the few thousand inhabitants of Easter Island couldn’t reign in their self-destructive tendencies, what hope does our global village have of managing the momentum of our 6.5 billion members?
Diamond’s tone is ultimately hopeful, mainly because we have ways of knowing the world around us that were not available to ancient peoples. We can learn from the mistakes of past civilizations. We have the benefit of being able to see the decades of changing factors that caused these societies to collapse. Factors that occurred so gradually that the people living in them could not recognize the changes themselves. We have the science to observe and document changes to our environment over time now, and we have the methods and models to project the trends we observe well into the future.
We just need to act on them.
Jared Diamond gave an excellent talk for Seminars About Long-Term Thinking.