Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

said. My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems.

anything grown in Montana can be grown more cheaply and with higher productivity, and transported faster and more cheaply to population centers, elsewhere in North America.

clearcutting all trees rather than by selective logging of marked individual trees. Set against those big advantages of clear-cutting were some disadvantages: water temperatures in streams no longer shaded by trees rose above values optimal for fish spawning and survival; snow on unshaded bare ground melted in a quick pulse in the spring, instead of the shaded forest’s snowpack gradually melting and releasing water for irrigating ranches throughout the summer; and, in some cases, sediment runoff increased, and water quality decreased. But the most visible evil of clear-cutting, for citizens of a state who considered their land’s most valuable resource to be its beauty, was that clear-cut hillsides looked ugly, really ugly.

Plum Creek is organized as a profit-making business, not as a charity. If Montana citizens want Plum Creek to do things that would diminish its profits, it’s their responsibility to get their politicians to pass and enforce laws demanding those things, or to buy out the lands and manage them differently.

half of the recent immigrants to the Bitterroot have been Californians. Because they are buying Bitterroot land for its beauty and not for the value of the cows or apples that it could produce, the price that they are willing to offer for Bitterroot land bears no relation to what the land would be worth if used for agriculture.

Reminds me of who moved to California in the 1940s and a book about that migration. Find the book.

“My mother’s grandfather moved here from Oklahoma

Oklahomans

In a society that espouses tolerance, it’s amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.”

Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

the collapse of Easter society followed swiftly upon the society’s reaching its peak of population, monument construction, and environmental impact.

“What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”?

Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.

Pitcairn and Henderson Islands furnish our clearest examples of collapses triggered by the breakdown of an environmentally damaged trade partner: a preview of risks already developing today in association with modern globalization.

dendrochronologists have constructed tree ring records extending back for thousands of years in some parts of the world. Each such record is valid for a geographic area whose extent depends on local weather patterns, because weather and hence tree growth patterns vary with location.

the existence of non-emergency cannibalism is controversial. In fact, it was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries.

consistent with their having been killed in a war raid rather than properly buried. Some of the bones had been cracked in the same way that bones of animals consumed for food were cracked to extract the marrow. Other bones showed smooth ends, a hallmark of animal bones boiled in pots, but not of ones not boiled in pots. Broken pots themselves from that Anasazi site had residues of the human muscle protein myoglobin on the pots’ inside, consistent with human flesh having been cooked

whoever attacked that site, killed the inhabitants, cracked open their bones, boiled their flesh in pots, scattered the bones, and relieved himself or herself by depositing feces in that hearth had actually consumed the flesh of his or her victims.

That should make us modern Americans hesitate to be too confident yet about the sustainability of our First World economy, especially when we reflect how quickly Chaco society collapsed after its peak in the decade A.D. 1110–1120, and how implausible the risk of collapse would have seemed to Chacoans of that decade.

All of us moderns—house-owners, investors, politicians, university administrators, and others—can get away with a lot of waste when the economy is good. We forget that conditions fluctuate, and we may not be able to anticipate when conditions will change. By that time, we may already have become attached to an expensive lifestyle, leaving an enforced diminished lifestyle or bankruptcy as the sole outs.

Thus, the modest productivity of Maya agriculture, and their lack of draft animals, severely limited the duration and distance possible for their military campaigns.

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.

After the animals gave birth in May or June,

Of traditional Tikopia’s seven methods of population regulation, the simplest was contraception by coitus interruptus. Another method was abortion, induced by pressing on the belly, or placing hot stones on the belly, of a pregnant woman near term. Alternatively, infanticide was carried out by burying alive, smothering, or turning a newborn infant on its face.

A momentous decision taken consciously around A.D. 1600, and recorded in oral traditions but also attested archaeologically, was the killing of every pig on the island, to be replaced as protein sources by an increase in consumption of fish, shellfish, and turtles. According to Tikopians’ accounts, their ancestors had made that decision because pigs raided and rooted up gardens, competed with humans for food, were an inefficient means to feed humans (it takes about 10 pounds of vegetables edible to humans to produce just one pound of pork), and had become a luxury food for the chiefs.

The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.

Hence peace, political stability, and well-justified confidence in their own future encouraged Tokugawa shoguns to invest in and to plan for the long-term future of their domain:

One more source for what seeing a future requires.

This small, privileged group first set the majority against the minority to counter a growing political opposition within Rwanda. Then, faced with RPF success on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, these few powerholders transformed the strategy of ethnic division into genocide.

The two groups were so intertwined in Rwandan society that in 1994 doctors ended up killing their patients and vice versa, teachers killed their students and vice versa, and neighbors and office colleagues killed each other.

not a single man in his early 20s lived independently of his parents by 1993.

at Kanama most people were impoverished, hungry, and desperate, but some people were more impoverished, hungry, and desperate than others, and most people were becoming more desperate while a few were becoming less desperate. Not surprisingly, this situation gave rise to frequent serious conflicts that the parties involved could not resolve by themselves, and that they either referred to traditional village conflict mediators or (less often) brought to the courts.

It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.”

This is a misunderstanding that arises regularly in discussions of the origins of evil: people recoil at any explanation, because they confuse explanations with excuses. But it is important that we understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide—not so that we can exonerate the killers, but so that we can use that knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening again in Rwanda or elsewhere.

“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”

What about the future of Haiti? Already the poorest and one of the most overcrowded countries in the New World, Haiti is nevertheless continuing to become even poorer and more crowded, with a population growth rate of nearly 3% per year. Haiti is so poor, and so deficient in natural resources and in trained or educated human resources, that it really is difficult to see what might bring about improvement.

That means much more agricultural waste, because it takes 10 or 20 pounds of plants to produce one pound of meat.

Cropland per person is now only 0.1 hectare, barely half of the world average, and nearly as low as the value for Northwest Rwanda discussed in Chapter 10.

Average blood lead levels in Chinese city-dwellers are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high and to put at risk the mental development of children.

In other words, China’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. But it is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained.

Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through hurting the public: e.g., for not requiring mining companies to clean up, or for continuing to buy wood products from non-sustainable logging operations. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make destructive environmental policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.

But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, “Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?” This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane.

As for First World society as a whole, its resource consumption accounts for most of the world’s total consumption that has given rise to the impacts described at the beginning of this chapter. Our totally unsustainable consumption means that the First World could not continue for long on its present course, even if the Third World didn’t exist and weren’t trying to catch up to us.

Could I live like someone in the developing world and still be as miserable as I am now?

Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.

A more sinister example of bad things transported from the First World to developing countries is that the highest blood levels of toxic industrial chemicals and pesticides reported for any people in the world are for Eastern Greenland’s and Siberia’s Inuit people (Eskimos), who are also among the most remote from sites of chemical manufacture or heavy use. Their blood mercury levels are nevertheless in the range associated with acute mercury poisoning, while the levels of toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in Inuit mother’s breast milk fall in a range high enough to classify the milk as “hazardous waste.” Effects on the women’s babies include hearing loss, altered brain development, and suppressed immune function, hence high rates of ear and respiratory infections.

We’ve learned through our history that we’re all living in the same polder, and that our survival depends on each other’s survival.”

Dutch society contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as public services to everyone else. Those private amenities include living inside gated walled communities (Plate 36), relying on private security guards rather than on the police, sending one’s children to well-funded private schools with small classes rather than to the underfunded crowded public schools, purchasing private health insurance or medical care, drinking bottled water instead of municipal water, and (in Southern California) paying to drive on toll roads competing with the jammed public freeways. Underlying such privatization is a misguided belief that the elite can remain unaffected by the problems of society around them: the attitude of those Greenland Norse chiefs who found that they had merely bought themselves the privilege of being the last to starve.

My Cambodian guides at Angkor in 2008 included one man who had lived through the horrors of Pol Pot and reluctantly answered our questions about what it was like then. Any people with any hint of usefulness for anything other than being a farm laborer—people wearing eyeglasses, people able to speak a second language besides Khmer, people with education—were killed. In a radical remaking of Cambodian society that dwarfed even the remakings of North Korea and Albania and sought to turn back the clock a thousand years to the days of Angkor, cities were evacuated; money, religion, markets, private property, and businesses were abolished; hospitals, schools, and stores were closed; no books or newspapers could be published; and everyone had to wear black clothes, eat in communal kitchens, and be a rice farmer.