Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

Fortunately, there are signs of hope. They involve changing attitudes, rethinking by Australia’s farmers, private initiatives, and the beginnings of radical governmental initiatives.

While 60% of Australia’s land area and 80% of its human water use are dedicated to agriculture, the value of agriculture relative to other sectors of the Australian economy has been shrinking to the point where it now contributes less than 3% of the gross national product.

Is it a good use of Australian taxpayers’ money to subsidize so much unprofitable or destructive land use?

The means by which the average wool-grower survives economically are through non-farm income, earned by holding a second job as a nurse or in a store, operating a bed-and-breakfast, or other ways. In effect, those second jobs, plus the farmers’ willingness to work on their farms for little or no pay, are subsidizing their own money-losing farm operations.

My students wondered whether—if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now—those people of the next century will be as astonished about our blindness today as we are about the blindness of the Easter Islanders.

failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups.

a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed.

the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations.

“normalcy” shifts gradually and imperceptibly. lt may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago, and that what is accepted as normalcy has crept downwards.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous behavior.

abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense.

difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival.

As the German dramatist Schiller wrote, “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.”

Both crowd psychology and groupthink may operate over periods of not just a few hours but also up to a few years: what remains uncertain is their contribution to disastrous decisions about environmental problems unfolding over the course of decades or centuries.

final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem is psychological denial.

even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late.

groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures, we too, like President Kennedy in 1961 and 1962, may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success

decision making leading up to Bay of Pigs vs. during Cuban Missile Crisis

Environmentalists blame businesses for harming people by damaging the environment, and routinely putting the business’s financial interests above the public good. Yes, those accusations are often true. Conversely, businesses blame environmentalists for routinely being ignorant of and uninterested in business realities, ignoring the desires of local people and host governments for jobs and development, placing the welfare of birds above that of people, and failing to praise businesses when they do practice good environmental policies. Yes, those accusations too are often true.

Chevron and some of the other large international oil companies thereby realized that, by spending each year an extra few million dollars on a project, or even a few tens of millions of dollars, they would save money in the long run by minimizing the risk of losing billions of dollars in such an accident, or of having an entire project closed down and losing its whole investment.

cleaning up pollution is usually far more expensive than preventing pollution,

The copper mine at Panguna on Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island was formerly the country’s largest enterprise and biggest earner of foreign exchange, and one of the largest copper mines in the world. It dumped its tailings directly into a tributary of the Jaba River, thereby creating monumental environmental impacts. When the government failed to resolve that situation and associated political and social problems, Bougainville’s inhabitants revolted, triggering a civil war that cost thousands of lives and nearly tore apart the nation of Papua New Guinea.

The hardrock mining industry is the prime example of a business whose short-term favoring of its own interests over those of the public proved in the long term self-defeating and have been driving the industry into extinction.

In the short run, it’s cheaper for a mining company just to pay lobbyists to press for weak regulatory laws.

The CEO and most officers of one of the major American mining companies are members of a church that teaches that God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway.

!!!!!!!!

The environmental costs should be factored into metals prices and passed on to consumers, just as oil and coal companies already do.

Only 12% of the world’s forests lie within protected areas. In a worst-case scenario, all of the world’s readily accessible remaining forests outside those protected areas would be destroyed by unsustainable harvesting within the next several decades, although in a best-case scenario the world could meet its timber needs sustainably from a small area (20% or less) of those forests if they were well managed.

The essence of FSC certification is that consumers can believe it, because it is not an unsubstantiated boast by the company itself but the result of an examination, against internationally accepted standards of best practice, by trained and experienced auditors who don’t hesitate to say no or to impose conditions.

Forest Stewardship Council

much of the public really does weigh environmental values in its purchasing decisions, and a significant fraction of the public is willing to pay more for those values.

Besides these buyers’ groups, another potent force behind the spread of FSC-labeled products in the U.S. is the “green building standard” known as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). This code rates the environmental design and use of materials in the construction industry.

in 1997, four years after the establishment of the FSC, Unilever teamed up with World Wildlife Fund to found a similar organization termed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Its goal was to offer credible eco-labeling to consumers, and to encourage fishermen to solve their own tragedies of the commons by the positive incentive of market appeal rather than the negative incentive of threatened boycotts.

The principal criteria are that the fishery should maintain its fish stock’s health (including the stock’s sex and age distribution and genetic diversity) for the indefinite future, should yield a sustainable harvest, should maintain ecosystem integrity, should minimize impacts on marine habitats and on non-targeted species (the by-catch), should have rules and procedures for managing stocks and minimizing impacts, and should comply with prevailing laws.

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. The public can do that by suing businesses for harming them, as happened after the Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal disasters; by preferring to buy sustainably harvested products, a preference that caught the attention of Home Depot and Unilever; by making employees of companies with poor track records feel ashamed of their company and complain to their own management; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record, as the Norwegian government did to Chevron; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices, such as the U.S. government’s new regulations for the coal industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

1. At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats,

Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book.

2. Wild foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a large fraction of the protein consumed by humans.

great majority of valuable fisheries already either have collapsed or are in steep decline

3. A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diversity has already been lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what remains will be lost within the next half-century.

4. Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested land.

next three problems involve ceilings—on

5.

prevalent view is that known and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last for a few more decades.

6. Most of the world’s freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being utilized for irrigation, domestic and industrial water, and in situ uses such as boat transportation corridors, fisheries, and recreation.

today over a billion people lack access to reliable safe drinking water.

7. It might at first seem that the supply of sunlight is infinite, so one might reason that the Earth’s capacity to grow crops and wild plants is also infinite. Within the last 20 years, it has been appreciated that that is not the case,

Given the rate of increase of human population, and especially of population impact (see point 12 below), since 1986, we are projected to be utilizing most of the world’s terrestrial photosynthetic capacity by the middle of this century. That is, most energy fixed from sunlight will be used for human purposes, and little will be left over to support the growth of natural plant communities, such as natural forests.

next three problems involve harmful things that we generate or move around: toxic chemicals, alien species, and atmospheric gases.

8. The chemical industry and many other industries manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, ...

think about. 9. The term “alien species” refers to species that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to another place where they are not native.

There are by now literally hundreds of cases in which alien species have caused one-time or annually recurring damages of hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars.