NPG Booknote

COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeedby Jared Diamond

New York: Viking, 2004. 575 pp. $29.95

he monumental ruins left behind by thosepast societies hold a romantic fascination

for all of us. We marvel at them when as chil-dren we first learn of them through pictures.When we grow up, many of us plan vacationsin order to experience them at firsthand astourists. We feel drawn to their often spectac-ular and haunting beauty, and also to themysteries that they pose. The scales of theruins testify to the former wealth and power oftheir builders -- they boast "Look on myworks, ye mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's

words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoningthe great structures that they had created atsuch effort. How could a society that wasonce so mighty end up collapsing? Whatwere the fates of its individual citizens? -- didthey move away, and (if so) why, or did theydie there in some unpleasant way? Lurkingbehind this romantic mystery is the naggingthought: might such a fate eventually befallour own wealthy society? Will tourists some-day stare mystified at the rusting hulks ofNew York's skyscrapers, much as we stare

r. Diamond's new study of "how societies choose to fail or succeed" has received consider-able attention, and deservedly so. He describes eight threats to traditional societies and

twelve among modern societies. He details the process by which various well-known collapsesoccurred in Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, Mayan civilization, NorseGreenland; and he touches upon others: Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete, the Harappan cul-ture in south Asia, Angkor Wat. He describes only three success stories in the face of similar threats: upland New Guinea, Tokugawa Japan and Tikopia in the Pacific.

I would note (and Dr. Diamond observes in several instances) that the primary driver of the threats was the seventh one he lists: population growth, or the settlement of places too fragile to handle the numbers. And the success stories depended upon drastic population limitation. Diamond makes the point that such threats are not simply history. Collapses areoccurring today, and the huge growth of populations and globalization means that a threat in one place can threaten all of us.

This book is important as an antidote to the unthinking confidence - at least until the present oil price scare - that our society is immune. He believes our current problems "are liketime bombs with fuses of less than 50 years", and the only way to address them is with "long termplanning and the willingness to reconsider core values" - in the U.S. case, the addiction to growthand conspicuous consumption. Dr. Diamond's style is readable and anecdotal; the book shouldbe a boon for NPG members, and for their acquaintances who are open minded enough to recon-sider their values.

But let Dr. Diamond speak for himself. The following pages were taken intact from thePrologue to his book.

- Lindsey Grant

T

D

today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Mayacities?

It has long been suspected that manyof those mysterious abandonments were atleast partly triggered by ecological problems:people inadvertently destroying the environ-mental resources on which their societiesdepended. This suspicion of unintended eco-logical suicide -- ecocide -- has been con-firmed by discoveries made in recentdecades by archaeologists, climatologists,historians, paleontologists, and palynologists(pollen scientists). The processes throughwhich past societies have undermined them-selves by damaging their environments fallinto eight categories, whose relative impor-tance differs from case to case: deforestationand habitat destruction, soil problems (ero-sion, salinization, and soil fertility losses),water management problems, overhunting,overfishing, effects of introduced species onnative species, human population growth,and increased per capita impact of people.

Those past collapses tended to followsomewhat similar courses constituting varia-tions on a theme. Population growth forcedpeople to adopt intensified means of agricul-tural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farm-ing from the prime lands first chosen ontomore marginal land, in order to feed thegrowing number of hungry mouths.Unsustainable practices led to environmentaldamage of one or more of the eight types justlisted, resulting in agriculturally marginallands having to be abandoned again.Consequences for society included foodshortages, starvation, wars among too manypeople fighting for too few resources, andoverthrows of governing elites by disillu-sioned masses. Eventually, populationdecreased through starvation, war, or dis-

ease, and society lost some of the political,economic, and cultural complexity that it haddeveloped at its peak. Writers find it temptingto draw analogies between those trajectoriesof human societies and the trajectories ofindividual human lives -- to talk of a society'sbirth, growth, peak, senescence, and death -- and to assume that the long period ofsenescence that most of us traverse betweenour peak years and our deaths also applies tosocieties. But that metaphor proves erro-neous for many past societies (and for themodern Soviet Union): they declined rapidlyafter reaching peak numbers and power, andthose rapid declines must have come as asurprise and shock to their citizens. In theworst cases of complete collapse, everybodyin the society emigrated or died. Obviously,though, this grim trajectory is not one that allpast societies followed unvaryingly to com-pletion: different societies collapsed to differ-ent degrees and in somewhat different ways,while many societies didn't collapse at all.

The risk of such collapses today is nowa matter of increasing concern; indeed, col-lapses have already materialized forSomalia, Rwanda, and some other ThirdWorld countries. Many people fear that eco-cide has now come to overshadow nuclearwar and emerging diseases as a threat toglobal civilization. The environmental prob-lems facing us today include the same eightthat undermined past societies, plus four newones: human-caused climate change,buildup of toxic chemicals in the environ-ment, energy shortages, and full human uti-lization of the Earth's photosynthetic capaci-ty. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, willbecome globally critical within the next fewdecades: either we solve the problems bythen, or the problems will undermine not justSomalia but also First World societies. Muchmore likely than a doomsday scenario involv-

COLLAPSE: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed

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ing human extinction or anapocalyptic collapse of industrialcivilization would be "just" afuture of significantly lower livingstandards, chronically higherrisks, and the undermining ofwhat we now consider some ofour key values. Such a collapsecould assume various forms,such as the worldwide spread ofdiseases or else of wars, trig-gered ultimately by scarcity ofenvironmental resources. If thisreasoning is correct, then ourefforts today will determine thestate of the world in which thecurrent generation of childrenand young adults lives out theirmiddle and late years.

But the seriousness ofthese current environmentalproblems is vigorously debated.Are the risks greatly exaggerat-ed, or conversely are theyunderestimated? Does it standto reason that today's humanpopulation of almost seven bil-lion, with our potent moderntechnology, is causing our envi-ronment to crumble globally at amuch more rapid rate than amere few million people withstone and wooden tools already made itcrumble locally in the past? Will modern tech-nology solve our problems, or is it creatingnew problems faster than it solves old ones?When we deplete one resource (e.g., wood,oil, or ocean fish), can we count on beingable to substitute some new resource (e.g.,plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmedfish)? Isn't the rate of human populationgrowth declining, such that we're already oncourse for the world's population to level off

at some manageable number of people?All of these questions illustrate why

those famous collapses of past civilizationshave taken on more meaning than just that ofa romantic mystery. Perhaps there are somepractical lessons that we could learn from allthose past collapses. We know that somepast societies collapsed while others didn't:what made certain societies especially vul-nerable? What, exactly, were the processesby which past societies committed ecocide?

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Why did some past societies fail to see themesses that they were getting into, and that(one would think in retrospect) must havebeen obvious? Which were the solutions thatsucceeded in the past? If we could answerthese questions, we might be able to identifywhich societies are now most at risk, andwhat measures could best help them, withoutwaiting for more Somalia-like collapses.

But there are also differences betweenthe modern world and its problems, and thosepast societies and their problems. We shouldnot be so naïve as to think that study of thepast will yield simple solutions, directly trans-ferable to our societies today. We differ frompast societies in some respects that put us at

lower risk than them; some of those respectsoften mentioned include our powerful tech-nology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globaliza-tion, modern medicine, and greater knowl-edge of past societies and of distant modernsocieties. We also differ from past societies insome respects that put us at greater risk thanthem: mentioned in that connection are,again, our potent technology (i.e., its unin-tended destructive effects), globalization(such that now a collapse even in remoteSomalia affects the U.S. and Europe), thedependence of millions (and, soon, billions)of us on modern medicine for our survival,and our much larger human population.Perhaps we can still learn from the past, butonly if we think carefully about its lessons.

COLLAPSE: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed

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Dr. Jared Diamond was born in New York, received his doctorate from Oxford, and isProfessor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His book, Guns,Germs and Steel, received the Pulitzer prize.

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About the editor: Lindsey Grant is a writer and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Population and Environment.

Negative Population Growth, Inc.2861 Duke Street

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