Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.

Montanans especially bristle at the geographically and psychologically remote federal government in Washington, D.C., telling them what to do. (But they don’t bristle at the federal government’s money, of which Montana receives and accepts about a dollar-and-a-half for every dollar sent from Montana to Washington.)

A view of open space is important to me. The land across the road from my house is an old farm two miles long and half a mile wide, consisting entirely of pastureland, with a couple of barns as the only buildings. It’s owned by an out-of-state rock singer and actor called Huey Lewis, who comes here for just a month or so each year to hunt and fish, and for the rest of the year has a caretaker who runs cows, grows hay, and leases some of the land to farmers. If Huey Lewis’s land across the street got subdivided into house lots, I couldn’t stand the sight facing me every day, and I would move.

Most of the statue-bearing ahu are on the coast, oriented so that the ahu and its statues faced inland over the clan’s territory; the statues do not look out to sea.

Modern scholars have experimentally tested their various theories of statue transport on Easter by actually moving statues, beginning with Thor Heyerdahl, whose theory was probably wrong because he damaged the tested statue in the process.

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.”

I’m also reminded of a cultural tragedy and rejection of religion described to me in 1965 at a New Guinea highland village called Bomai, where the Christian missionary assigned to Bomai boasted to me with pride how one day he had called upon his new converts to collect their “pagan artifacts” (i.e., their cultural and artistic heritage) at the airstrip and burn them—and how they obeyed. Perhaps Easter Island’s matatoa issued a similar summons to their own followers.

The descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian companions living on Pitcairn today number only 52. When their number climbed from the original band of 27 settlers in 1790 to 194 descendants in the year 1856, that population overtaxed Pitcairn’s agricultural potential, and much of the population had to be evacuated by the British government to distant Norfolk Island.

the thought of a several-day canoe voyage across open ocean intolerable to me, something that only a desperate need to save my life could induce me to undertake. But to modern Pacific seafaring peoples, who sail their canoes five days just to buy cigarettes, the journeys are part of normal life.

Did everyone die simultaneously in a mass calamity, or did the populations gradually dwindle down to a single survivor, who lived on alone with his or her memories for many years? That actually happened to the Indian population of San Nicolas Island off Los Angeles, reduced finally to one woman who survived in complete isolation for 18 years.

people may just have grown old together and stopped having children, as happened to California’s last surviving Yahi Indians, the famous Ishi and his three companions. If the small population did ignore incest taboos, the resulting inbreeding may have caused congenital physical anomalies to proliferate, as exemplified by deafness on Martha’s Vineyard Island off Massachusetts or on the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha.

I have worked over the past 40 years have matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed disgust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of his recently deceased prospective son-in-law.

To understand the Maya, let’s begin by considering their environment, which we think of as “jungle” or “tropical rainforest.” That’s not true, and the reason why not proves to be important. Properly speaking, tropical rainforests grow in high-rainfall equatorial areas that remain wet or humid all year round. But the Maya homeland lies more than a thousand miles from the equator, at latitudes 17° to 22°N, in a habitat termed a “seasonal tropical forest.”

Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming off the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating (sometimes several years later) in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways (such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple).

That last part sounds horrible, yet still has an element of slapstick to it.

Only Greenland’s demise gives us what Bach himself never attempted, a full quintuple fugue. For all these reasons, Viking societies will be presented in this chapter and the next two as the most detailed example in this book: the second and larger of the two sheep inside our boa constrictor.

In that process of assimilation, Scandinavian words as well as genes were absorbed. For instance, the modern English language owes “awkward,” “die,” “egg,” “skirt,” and dozens of other everyday words to the Scandinavian invaders.

In the first years of experimentation during Iceland’s early history, its settlers managed to devise an economic and social system that worked, more or less. Granted, that system left most people poor, and from time to time many people starved to death, but at least the society persisted. Other experiments that Icelanders had tried during their history had tended to end disastrously. The evidence of those disasters lay everywhere around them, in the form of the moonscape highlands, the abandoned former farms, and the eroded areas of farms that survived. From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don’t ask us to change.

Nobel Prize–winning novelist Halldór Laxness put into the mouth of the heroine of his novel Salka Valka the immortal sentence that only an Icelander could utter: “When all is said and done, life is first and foremost salt fish.”

Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understand that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists. That is not the case in Iceland, where the effects of erosion that began 1,130 years ago are obvious, where most of the vegetation and half of the soil have already been lost, and where the past is so stark and omnipresent. Many studies of medieval Icelandic settlements and erosion patterns are now under way. When one of my archaeologist friends approached the Icelandic government and began to deliver the usual lengthy justification required in other countries, the government’s response was: “Yes, of course we realize that understanding medieval soil erosion will help us understand our present problem. We already know that, you don’t have to spend time convincing us. Here is the money, go do your study.”

Why, then, did the Norse give up on Vinland, land of plenty? The sagas offer a simple answer to that question: the large population of hostile Indians, with whom the Vikings failed to establish good relations. According to the sagas, the first Indians that the Vikings met were a group of nine, of whom they killed eight, while the ninth fled. That was not a promising start to establishing friendship. Not surprisingly, the Indians came back in a fleet of small boats, shot arrows at the Norse, and killed their leader, Erik the Red’s son Thorvald. Pulling the arrow out of his intestines, the dying Thorvald is said to have lamented, “This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my belly. We’ve found a land of fine resources, though we’ll hardly enjoy much of them.”

Other evidence of continuing Norse visits to Labrador is the mention, in Iceland’s chronicle for the year 1347, of a Greenland ship with a crew of 18 that had reached Iceland after losing its anchor and being blown off course on the return voyage from “Markland.” The chronicle mention is brief and matter-of-fact, as if there were nothing unusual requiring explanation—as if the chronicler were instead to have written equally matter-of-factly, “So, the news this year is that one of those ships that visit Markland each summer lost its anchor, and also Thorunn Ketilsdóttir spilled a big pitcher of milk at her Djupadalur farm, and one of Bjarni Bollason’s sheep died, and that’s all the news for this year, just the usual stuff.”

Among all medieval European societies, Norse Greenland is the one whose ruins are best preserved, precisely because its sites were abandoned while intact, whereas almost all major medieval sites of Britain and continental Europe continued to be occupied and became submerged by post-medieval construction.

While the Arctic has few prey species—notably reindeer, seals, whales, and fish—those few species are often abundant. But if the usual prey species dies out or moves away, there may be no alternative prey for hunters to fall back on, as they can at lower latitudes where species are so diverse. Hence the history of the Arctic, including that of Greenland, is a history of people arriving, occupying large areas for many centuries, and then declining or disappearing or having to change their lifestyle over large areas when climate changes bring changes in prey abundance.

Above all, there remains the nagging question: why didn’t the Norse learn to cope with the Little Ice Age’s cold weather by watching how the Inuit were meeting the same challenges?