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December 14 - December 29, 2019
Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.
Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America.
On Tikopia, however, people are explicit in saying that their motive for contraception and other regulatory behaviors is to prevent the island from becoming overpopulated, and to prevent the family from having more children than the family’s land could support.
Tikopia chiefs each year carry out a ritual in which they preach an ideal of Zero Population Growth for the island,
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.
The years from 1603 to 1867 in Japan are called the Tokugawa era, during which a series of Tokugawa shoguns kept Japan free of war and foreign influence.
In 1614 Ieyasu prohibited Christianity and began to torture and execute missionaries and those of their converts who refused to disavow their religion. In 1635 a later shogun went even further by forbidding Japanese to travel overseas and forbidding Japanese ships to leave Japan’s coastal waters. Four years later, he expelled all the remaining Portuguese from Japan. Japan thereupon entered a period, lasting over two centuries, in which it cordoned itself off from the rest of the world, for reasons reflecting even more its agendas related to China and Korea than to Europe.
The 1657 Meireki fire, and the resulting demand for timber to rebuild Japan’s capital, served as a wake-up call exposing the country’s growing scarcity of timber and other resources at a time when its population, especially its urban population, had been growing rapidly.
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.
Another part of the shift consisted of the near-achievement of Zero Population Growth. Between 1721 and 1828, Japan’s population barely increased at all,
Still other aspects of the shift served to reduce wood consumption.
One of the first signs of awareness at the top was a proclamation by the shogun in 1666, just nine years after the Meireki fire, warning of the dangers of erosion, stream siltation, and flooding caused by deforestation, and urging people to plant seedlings.
by 1700 an elaborate system of woodland management was in place.
Leaders who don’t just react passively, who have the courage to anticipate crises or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. So can similarly courageous, active citizens practicing bottom-up management.
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.”
Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.
Haiti is among the most overpopulated countries of the New World, much more so than the Dominican Republic, with barely one-third of Hispaniola’s land area but nearly two-thirds of its population (about 10 million), and an average population density approaching 1,000 per square mile.
The question that all visitors to Haiti ask themselves is whether there is any hope for the country, and the usual answer is “no.”
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as “environmental determinism,” the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote.
environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies’ responses also make a difference. So, too, for better or for worse, do the actions and inactions of their leaders.
Dominican president towards the end of the 19th century borrowed and failed to repay so much money from European lenders that France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany all sent warships and threatened to occupy the country
To forestall that risk of European occupation, the United States took over the Dominican customs service, the sole source of government revenues, and allocated half of the receipts to pay those foreign debts. During World War I, concerned about risks to the Panama Canal posed by political unrest in the Caribbean, the United States imposed a military occupation on both parts of the island, which lasted from 1915 to 1934 in Haiti and from 1916 to 1924 in the Dominican Republic. Thereafter, both parts quickly reverted to their previous political instability and strife between competing would-be
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Instability in both parts was ended, in the Dominican Republic long before Haiti, by the two most evil dictators in Latin America’s long history of evil dictators. Rafael Trujillo was the Dominican chief of the national police and then the head of t...
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On May 30, 1961, while traveling in a chauffeur-driven unaccompanied car late at night to visit his mistress, Trujillo was ambushed and assassinated in a dramatic car chase and gun battle by Dominicans, apparently with CIA support.
Haiti continued to have an unstable succession of presidents until it too in 1957 passed under the control of its own evil dictator, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
died a natural death in 1971, to be succeeded by his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who ruled until forced into exile in 1986. Since the end of the Duvalier dictatorships, Haiti has resumed its former political instability,
Dominican Republic also remained politically unstable until 1966, including a civil war in 1965 that triggered the arrival again of U.S. marines and the beginning of large-scale Dominican emigration to the U.S. That period of instability ended with the election of Joaquín Balaguer,
continued to dominate Dominican politics for the next 34 years, ruling as president from 1966 to 1978 and again from 1986 until 1996, and exercising much influence even while out of office from 1978 to 1986.
why did the political, economic, and ecological histories of these two countries sharing the same island unfold so differently? Part of the answer involves environmental differences.
paradox: the Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. This lesson—in effect, that an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cash flow—is
a larger part of the explanation involved social and political differences,
a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.
Balaguer reacted with the even more drastic step of taking responsibility for enforcing forest protection away from the Department of Agriculture, turning it over to the armed forces, and declaring illegal logging to be a crime against state security. To stop logging, the armed forces initiated a program of survey flights and military operations, which climaxed in 1967 in one of the landmark events of Dominican environmental history, a night raid by the military on a clandestine large logging camp. In the ensuing gunfight a dozen loggers were killed.
It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.
per-capita human impact. (By that term, which will recur in the remainder of this book, I mean the average resource consumption and waste production of one person:
A society’s total impact equals its per-capita impact multiplied by its number of people.)
As one Dominican said to me, “The apocalypse here will not take the form of an earthquake or hurricane, but of a world buried in garbage.”
If the lot of Haiti is to improve at all, I don’t see how that could happen without more involvement on the part of the Dominican Republic, even though that is undesired and almost unthinkable to most Dominicans today.
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. Something has to give way. That is the strongest reason why China’s problems automatically become the world’s problems.
the world cannot sustain China and other Third World countries and current First World countries all operating at First World levels.
the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time, and hence to deplete those resources.
Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, like the gold in a gold mine.
while Australia shows no prospects of collapsing like Rwanda and Haiti, it instead gives us a foretaste of problems that actually will arise elsewhere in the First World if present trends continue. Yet
Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity.
those small fractions of the Australian landscape that have recently had their soils renewed by volcanism, glaciation, or uplift are exceptions to Australia’s otherwise prevalent pattern of unproductive soils, and contribute disproportionately today to modern Australia’s agricultural productivity.
the Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which (just as in a real flowerpot) the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate, and where the nutrients have to be supplied.
Increasingly, most Australians don’t depend on or really live in the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.
Australia’s existing sheep industry is a money-losing proposition (to be discussed below); and its legacy is ruinous land degradation through overgrazing
Underground rivers flow very slowly, such that once one has mobilized salt through bad land management, it may take 500 years to flush that mobilized salt out of the ground even if one switches overnight to drip irrigation and stops mobilizing further salt.
To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober thinking, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment. That is an entirely realistic scenario for Australia’s future—much more likely than either a plunge into an Easter Island–like population crash and political collapse as prophesized by doomsday advocates, or a continuation of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely assumed by many of Australia’s current politicians and business leaders.
