Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans—whether of Australia, North America, South America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean islands, or Hawaii and New Zealand and dozens of other Pacific islands—has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human-associated habitat changes, introduced pest species, and diseases. Any people can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the resources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it’s difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation virtually impossible to predict even for a professional ecologist.

Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors— environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors—the society’s responses to its environmental problems—always proves significant.

please reflect that half of the income of Montana residents doesn’t come from their work within Montana, but instead consists of money flowing into Montana from other U.S. states: federal government transfer payments (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and poverty programs) and private out-of-state funds (out-of-state pensions, earnings on real estate equity, and business income). That is, Montana’s own economy already falls far short of supporting the Montana lifestyle, which is instead supported by and dependent on the rest of the U.S.

The settlers eventually discovered that they were not living off of Iceland’s ecological annual interest, but that they were drawing down its accumulated capital of soil and vegetation that had taken ten thousand years to build up, and much of which the settlers exhausted in a few decades or even within a year. Inadvertently, the settlers were not using the soil and vegetation sustainably, as resources that can persist indefinitely (like a well-managed fishery or forest) if harvested no faster than the resources can renew themselves. They were instead exploiting the soil and vegetation in the way that miners exploit oil and mineral deposits, which renew themselves only infinitely slowly and are mined until they are all gone.

Iceland’s combination of fragile soils and slow plant growth creates a positive feedback cycle to erosion: after the protective cover of vegetation is stripped off by sheep or farmers, and soil erosion has then begun, it is difficult for plants to reestablish themselves and to protect the soil again, so the erosion tends to spread.

the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.

Thus, 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.

“The apocalypse here will not take the form of an earthquake or hurricane, but of a world buried in garbage.”

That disaster stimulated the government to send the surveyor-general G. W. Goyder to identify how far inland from the coast the area with rainfall sufficiently reliable to justify farming extended. He defined a line that became known as the Goyder Line, north of which the likelihood of drought made attempts at farming imprudent.

It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live?

“Sure, I’m willing to pay another dollar per ounce for copper and palladium, just as long as I can still buy a car this year.” Instead, you shop around for a better deal on a car. The copper and palladium middlemen and car manufacturers know how you feel, and they pressure the mining companies into keeping their prices down. That makes it hard for a mining company to pass on its cleanup costs.

The reason why we want mining companies to clean up is that we, the public, are the ones who suffer from mining-related messes: unusable mined land surfaces, unsafe drinking water, and polluted air. Even the cleanest methods for mining coal and copper create messes. If we want coal and copper, we have to recognize the environmental costs of extracting them as a legitimate necessary cost of hardrock mining, as legitimate as the costs of the bulldozer that digs the pit or the smelter that smelts the ore. The environmental costs should be factored into metals prices and passed on to consumers, just as oil and coal companies already do. Only the long and opaque supply chain from mineral mines to the public, and the historically bad behavior of most mining companies, has obscured this simple conclusion to date.

Do enough members of the public really care about environmental issues for FSC certification to help sell wood products? When asked in surveys, 80% of consumers claim that they would prefer to buy products of environmentally clean provenance if given the choice. But are those just empty words, or do people really pay attention to FSC labels when they are in a store? And would they be willing to pay a little more for an FSC-labeled product?

In connection with the mining industry, I mentioned that the most effective pressure on mining companies to change their practices has come not from individual consumers picketing mine sites, but from big companies that buy metals (like DuPont and Tiffany) and that sell to individual consumers. A similar phenomenon has unfolded in the timber industry. While the largest consumption of wood is for home construction, most homeowners don’t know, select, or control the choice of forestry companies producing the wood used in their house. Instead, the customers of forestry companies are big forest products companies, like Home Depot and IKEA, and big institutional buyers, like the City of New York and the University of Wisconsin.

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.

instead prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, in all politically complex human societies in which people encounter other individuals with whom they have no ties of family or clan relationship, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles.

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing.

the problem known as the tragedy of the commons

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.

But it is misleading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that proved wrong, and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that proved right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort: e.g., overly optimistic predictions that the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger problems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years;