Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Roald B. Larsen
Er det noen her som har lest noe av Jared Diamond?
Jeg har hørt diverse om ham -- både positivt og noe
negativt, blant annet at han er litt lettvint.
Jeg synes dette var såpass interessant at jeg vil dele
det. Selv om jeg er klar over at påstanden om å ikke
spise fisk er feil, så er bosettingene på Grønland noe
jeg ikke visste altfor mye om :
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By Malcom Gladwell
The New Yorker
Wednesday 29 December 2004
A thousand years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from
Norway for the vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as
Greenland. It was largely uninhabitable-a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But
along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh
winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed
upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells,
and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were formed, three
hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western Settlements. The Norse raised
sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy slopes into pastureland. They
hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent
cathedral, the remains of which are still standing. They traded actively with
mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse
colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable, fully integrated
communities, numbering at their peak five thousand people. They lasted for four
hundred and fifty years-and then they vanished.
The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared
Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Viking; $29.95).
Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-seller "Guns,
Germs, and Steel," which won a Pulitzer Prize. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Diamond
looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came
to dominate the world. In "Collapse," he continues that approach, only this time he
looks at history's losers-like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American
Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans. We live in an era preoccupied
with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the
course of history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of those
things-or, at least, he's interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to
him is the far more important question, which is a society's relationship to its
climate and geography and resources and neighbors. "Collapse" is a book about
the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem-soil, trees, and water-because
societies fail, in Diamond's view, when they mismanage those environmental
factors.
There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland
settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant
northern-European civic model of the time-devout, structured, and reasonably
orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement
dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey
Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord
Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following
the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.
The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought
that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland
of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to
grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the
forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm
enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf,
which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.
But Greenland's ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure.
The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn
meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like
organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of
strong winds. "The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or
burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than
is grass," he writes. "With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep
and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's
climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried
away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy
rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an
entire valley." Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without
adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And,
without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly
difficult.
The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock-particularly cows, which
consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high
status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit
practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from
the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably
plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the
Inuit-they called them skraelings, "wretches"-and preferred to practice their own
brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been
sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the
pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast
to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for
those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells,
stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver,
churchmen's robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with
its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the
Norse starved to death.
Diamond's argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations
for a society's collapse. Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event.
The aboriginal civilization of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of
smallpox. European Jewry was destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the disappearance
of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little Ice Age, which descended
on Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds, ending several centuries of relative
warmth. (One archeologist refers to this as the "It got too cold, and they died"
argument.) What all these explanations have in common is the idea that civilizations
are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God.
But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving
culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It
was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem
fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it's a barren
and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant
virus wipe out the island's forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped
their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. "I have often asked myself,
'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was
doing it?'" Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the
conclusions of "Collapse." Those trees were felled by rational actors-who must
have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction
of their civilization. The lesson of "Collapse" is that societies, as often as not,
aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the
course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to
death.
This doesn't mean that acts of God don't play a role. It did get colder in
Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn't get so cold that the island
became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the
Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools,
and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn't adapt
to the country's changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance,
of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One
scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only
three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the
garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland
is a fisherman's dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland
who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. "Every
archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her
own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding," he writes.
"Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet
of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they
have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to
cows?" It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains,
Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn't eat fish. For one
reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.
Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was
insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of
the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less
pastureland. Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting
caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It
would have diversified their diet.
Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren't thinking about
their biological survival. They were thinking about their cultural survival. Food
taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define a community. Not eating fish
served the same function as building lavish churches, and doggedly replicating
the untenable agricultural practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it
meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and
forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and cement a
culture are of paramount importance. "The Norse were undone by the same social
glue that had enabled them to master Greenland's difficulties," Diamond writes.
"The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions
are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over
adversity." He goes on:
To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders
found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their
social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the question to
invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to
face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.
Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is a critical one,
because too often we blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent
on the strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two
world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if
we learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though,
that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed
to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically
suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate.
Diamond points out that the Easter Islanders did not practice, so far as we
know, a uniquely pathological version of South Pacific culture. Other societies, on
other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, chopped down trees and farmed and raised
livestock just as the Easter Islanders did. What doomed the Easter Islanders was the
interaction between what they did and where they were. Diamond and a colleague,
Barry Rollet, identified nine physical factors that contributed to the likelihood of
deforestation-including latitude, average rainfall, aerial-ash fallout, proximity to
Central Asia's dust plume, size, and so on-and Easter Island ranked at the high-risk
end of nearly every variable. "The reason for Easter's unusually severe degree of
deforestation isn't that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or
improvident," he concludes. "Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of
the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific
people." The problem wasn't the Easter Islanders. It was Easter Island.
In the second half of "Collapse," Diamond turns his attention to modern
examples, and one of his case studies is the recent genocide in Rwanda. What
happened in Rwanda is commonly described as an ethnic struggle between the majority
Hutu and the historically dominant, wealthier Tutsi, and it is understood in those
terms because that is how we have come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb
and Croat, Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural
antagonism. It's an explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond. The Hutu didn't
just kill the Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at
the land: steep hills farmed right up to the crests, without any protective
terracing; rivers thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading
to irregular rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population densities; the
exhaustion of the topsoil; falling per-capita food production. This was a society
on the brink of ecological disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the
study of such societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal chaos. In
"Collapse," Diamond quite convincingly defends himself against the charge of
environmental determinism. His discussions are always nuanced, and he gives
political and ideological factors their due. The real issue is how, in coming to
terms with the uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest of us have
turned ourselves into cultural determinists.
For the past thirty years, Oregon has had one of the strictest sets of land-use
regulations in the nation, requiring new development to be clustered in and around
existing urban development. The laws meant that Oregon has done perhaps the best
job in the nation in limiting suburban sprawl, and protecting coastal lands and
estuaries. But this November Oregon's voters passed a ballot referendum, known
as Measure 37, that rolled back many of those protections. Specifically, Measure
37 said that anyone who could show that the value of his land was affected by
regulations implemented since its purchase was entitled to compensation from the
state. If the state declined to pay, the property owner would be exempted from the
regulations.
To call Measure 37-and similar referendums that have been passed recently in
other states-intellectually incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the
reason your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions to a
developer is that it's on a pristine hillside: if everyone on that hillside could
subdivide, and sell out to Target and Wal-Mart, then nobody's plot would be
worth millions anymore. Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38,
allowing them to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values
caused by Measure 37?
It is hard to read "Collapse," though, and not have an additional reaction to
Measure 37. Supporters of the law spoke entirely in the language of political
ideology. To them, the measure was a defense of property rights, preventing the
state from unconstitutional "takings." If you replaced the term "property rights"
with "First Amendment rights," this would have been indistinguishable from an
argument over, say, whether charitable groups ought to be able to canvass in
malls, or whether cities can control the advertising they sell on the sides of
public
buses. As a society, we do a very good job with these kinds of debates: we give
everyone a hearing, and pass laws, and make compromises, and square our
conclusions with our constitutional heritage-and in the Oregon debate the
quality of the theoretical argument was impressively high.
The thing that got lost in the debate, however, was the land. In a rapidly
growing state like Oregon, what, precisely, are the state's ecological strengths and
vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use priorities have on water and soil
and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond writing about the Measure 37
debate, and he wouldn't be very impressed by how seriously Oregonians wrestled
with the problem of squaring their land-use rules with their values, because to him
a
society's environmental birthright is not best discussed in those terms. Rivers and
streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite
thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine
points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs-with making sure that
Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of
witnesses following the announcement of wedding banns on the right number of
Sundays-that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is
gone.
When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they
found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland-
crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers-which meant that the end came
too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked
at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves,
meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found
toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the
Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered
with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish
bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight
of what they stood for.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Twilight at Easter," an essay/review by Jared Diamond on Easter Island appears
in the NY Review of Books at www.nybooks.com/articles/16992. -BA
www.truthout.org/docs_04/printer_123004G.shtml
--
rL
roal...@gmail.com
Jo Stein
<roald.h...@c2i.net> wrote in
news:<PYPsf.9572$qE.21...@juliett.dax.net>:
>Selv om jeg er klar over at påstanden om å ikke
>spise fisk er feil, så er bosettingene på Grønland noe
>jeg ikke visste altfor mye om :
Hva er det som er feil her?
De arkeologiske funn er solide og da må man ha solide data for å
motbevise påstanden.
--
jo
Vegard Krog Petersen
Interessante artikler her:
http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107163524.0
http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107184331.61
http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107186992.14
mvh
--
Vegard Krog Petersen - Norway
http://vegard2.no -
Solitaire MahJongg guide, Sarah Michelle Gellar Solitaire,
Freeware Logo & symbol, Halma & Chinese Checkers,
Pachisi & Ludo, Freeware Solitaire, My fishy site (fishing
games), a.c.f.g information, Fredrikshald Havfiskeklubb
18+ sites: Firefoxy, Adult Solitaire, Fishy Pictures,
Sexy Chess, Sexy Librarians, Sexy Football
---------------------------------------------------------
Jo Stein
<vegard_kro...@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:<43b4660a$1...@usenet.zapto.org>:
>>>Selv om jeg er klar over at påstanden om å ikke
>>>spise fisk er feil, så er bosettingene på Grønland noe
>>>jeg ikke visste altfor mye om :
>>
>> Hva er det som er feil her?
>> De arkeologiske funn er solide og da må man ha solide data for å
>> motbevise påstanden.
>
>Interessante artikler her:
>
>http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107163524.0
>http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107184331.61
>http://www.forskning.no/Artikler/2005/februar/1107186992.14
Ja, dette var svært interessant.
Christian Keller, professor i arkeologi ved Middelaldersenteret ved
Universitetet i Oslo er så raus at han sier dette:
"- Han har nok ikke rett i alle detaljer, men det globale
perspektivet er spennende.
- Dette er forhold vi nordiske arkeologer begynner å øyne først nå.
Diamond kom utenfra og tok poenget umiddelbart,
hvilket kan tyde på at han har utviklet en god metode.
Det som skiller Jared Diamond fra andre historikere, er at han
opprinnelig var biolog. Han har følgelig tatt med seg grep fra
naturvitenskapene inn i historiefaget."
Nyere forskning korrigerer arkeologiske funn:
"Keller griper også fast i påstanden om at grønlenderne ikke spiste
fisk, et paradoks for eksempel Jared Diamond henger seg opp i (se
forrige artikkel i spalten til høyre).
Her kommer helt ny forskning oss til unnsetning: Isotop-analyser viser
at den norrøne befolkningen på Grønland spiste mer og mer fisk ut
gjennom middelalderen. En erkebiskop (som jo var norsk) hadde spist 30
prosent marin føde. Norrøne grønlendere generelt ca 50-60 prosent. De
senere norrøne grønlendere hadde spist 80 prosent marint.
Nitrogen-analyser har så fastslått at av de 80 prosent var ca 40 fisk
og 40 sjøpattedyr.
Hvor er fiskebeina?
- Dermed er ikke problemet lenger hvorfor de ikke har spist fisk, men
hvor de har gjort av fiskebeina etter at de har spist dem! For det er
ganske riktig: Vi finner ikke fiskebein under utgravninger på
Grønland."
Hvor har de gjort av fiskebeina?
--
jo
JAG
Forsøker biologene å omskrive at Grønnland forvant med den lille Istiden
også???
Forsøker de virkelig å gjøre en regional nedkjøling som fører til
sammenbrudd i en bosetting til noe helt annet?
JAG
"Roald B. Larsen" <roald.h...@c2i.net> skrev i melding
news:PYPsf.9572$qE.21...@juliett.dax.net...
Trond Engen
> Forsøker biologene å omskrive at Grønnland forvant med den lille Istiden
> også???
Nei.
> Forsøker de virkelig å gjøre en regional nedkjøling som fører til
> sammenbrudd i en bosetting til noe helt annet?
Nei. Det er ikke alle som har en skjult agenda. Og det er ikke alle med
en skjult agenda som viser den fram bestandig...
Den lille istida ligger som en av forutsetningene, men den er ikke nok
aleine. Hvorfor skulle et fangstsamfunn bryte sammen av at
fangstplassene ved iskanten kommer nærmere? Nå begynner det å komme data
som gjør at en kan skissere svar på /hvorfor/, /hvordan/ og /når/ det
kaldere klimaet fikk samfunnet til å forsvinne.
Om du nå har lest artiklene det blei linka til seinere i tråden har du
sett at datagrunnlaget alt har blitt bedre, at svara må endres
tilsvarende, og at nye spørsmål må stilles. Men som du skjønner er
grunnlaget fortsatt tynt. Svar og spørsmål vil sikkert endres mange
ganger i åra framover. Trist og utrygt for dem som gjerne vil ha en
endelig forklart verden, betryggende for alle som får bekrefta at
verdens samla viten vokser.
Jeg har kutta i den overdrevne krysspostinga.
--
Trond Engen
Sløv men interessert