How societies choose to fail or survive
Rebecca Lann
http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/01/16/bodia216.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/01/16/bomain.html
[Review: "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" by Jared
Diamond]
by Noel Malcolm -- One day in the middle of the 17th century, the very
last tree on Easter Island was cut down. An island which had once been
blessed with forests containing many types of tree, including the
largest species of palm known to man, was now reduced to bare
grassland and volcanic desert. Despite increasing problems with soil
erosion, the islanders could still grow some crops, such as yams and
sugarcane; but fishing at sea became almost impossible, because there
was no new timber for boat-building.
Without timber it was also impossible to move and erect the giant
statues which, evidently, had been of such significance to Easter
Island life. Communal values rapidly collapsed, and the island sank
into civil war: statues were toppled by rival clans, and defeated
enemies were eaten. By the time European explorers encountered them in
the 18th century, the islanders had declined in numbers by roughly 70
per cent, and the surviving ones were (in the words of Captain Cook),
"small, lean, timid and miserable".
One cannot read about this – one of many case-histories of social and
environmental collapse discussed in Jared Diamond's new book – without
asking the question: what went through the mind of the person who cut
down that last tree? It is almost impossible to think of an answer –
unless he was imagining that one final sacrifice to the gods would be
rewarded with a miraculous new forest. But perhaps the tree was old
and diseased; perhaps its last seedlings had failed. The more
troubling question, surely, concerns the period just before: why, when
there was still a small but viable stock of trees, did the islanders
continue to destroy them? Jared Diamond has some possible answers to
that puzzle, drawn from a range of studies by sociologists and
economists of group behaviour with perversely negative outcomes. But
his most striking way of responding to the question is to ask,
rhetorically, some similar questions, closer to home. What went
through the minds of the fishermen who, less than a generation ago,
destroyed the Grand Banks cod stocks? What goes through the minds of
the managers of mining companies today, whose methods can leave
environmental clean-up costs greater than the total value of the
metals they have extracted? Gradually it becomes clear that every one
of the case-studies presented in this book is meant to be taken as
some sort of model for the world we now live in. Diamond's argument is
that societies collapse because the environment in which they exist is
fragile, and when those societies adopt policies that either harm the
environment or ignore the demands it makes, they can tip the balance
from viability to unviability in a surprisingly short time.
Some of the case-histories make this point convincingly. The early
Norse settlers in Iceland, for example, came close to rendering the
island uninhabitable, but veered from the brink just in time. (It took
them a while to discover that although the green and wooded landscape
resembled that of Scandinavia, the soil on which it was based was
something quite unlike their native earth: a layer of fine volcanic
ash, held in place only by a thin web of vegetation, and easily blown
away once that vegetation was cleared.)
Their counterparts in Greenland, on the other hand, never learned from
their mistakes: they cut down whatever they could burn, dug up huge
areas of turf to make insulating walls, over-grazed the scanty
grassland, and fought against the local Eskimos (whose ingenious
methods for surviving in this environment they never bothered to
copy). After several hundred years of frost-bitten subsistence, the
two Norse colonies on Greenland succumbed to fighting and starvation.
How seriously should we take the idea that the failures of Norse
Greenland, Easter Island and other such societies constitute warnings
for our societies today? Most of those earlier populations were, from
the start, operating at the fringes of economic viability,
experiencing problems unknown to the rest of humanity at the time.
Their scientific knowledge was extremely limited; in many cases they
were illiterate, with no systematic records of their own past
conditions; and they had only limited contacts with other societies
and economies.
The differences between them and us greatly outnumber the
similarities; yet there is just enough of an underlying resemblance
(think of those Easter Island tree-fellers and their modern
trawler-fishing counterparts) to make the comparison work, not as a
model, but as a parable. But what exactly is the message of the
parable, the moral of all these stories?
Jared Diamond is keen to deny the charge that he is an "environmental
determinist" – an accusation made by many critics of his previous
book, Guns, Germs and Steel. It is unfortunate that he has given such
critics further ammunition here, with an unconvincing chapter arguing
that the recent genocide in Rwanda was a response to agricultural
pressure on land, and a bizarre attempt to show that all the
"political trouble spots" in the world today are identical with
"environmental trouble spots". (He presents a list of political
trouble spots which includes Mongolia and the Solomon Islands, but
omits Sri Lanka, Israel and Sierra Leone, to name just a few).
Nevertheless, the basic argument of this book is that the environment
is only part of the story: what matters is the decisions made, in
relation to it, by human beings. One fascinating chapter discusses the
divergent histories of two countries on one island, Haiti and the
Dominican Republic: the former is an environmental and socio-political
basket case, while the latter, thanks partly to the policies of a
ruthless and environmentally obsessed political leader, has thriving
forests, productive agriculture and relative social stability.
Like all environmentalists, Jared Diamond has what can be called a
political agenda. Unlike some, he admits that it can be applied by
autocratic rulers just as well as by democracies (or sometimes
better). Unlike many, he has no illusions about primitive societies
being naturally in tune with their environment: he points out that
while some have achieved sustainability, others have ruined the land.
And unlike almost all environmentalists, he does not believe that big
companies, and the profits they make, are inherently evil.
This is an impressively wide-ranging and informative book, which begs
some questions, but raises many more that deserve to be asked. It will
not change readers' lives, but it may make them think a little more
carefully about how the lives we all lead are changing the world we
live in.
(c) Telegraph Group Limited 2005
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