Collapse Quotes

“As the Bitterroot’s water commissioner, Vern Woolsey, explained it succinctly to me, “Whenever you have a source of water and more than two people using it, there will be a problem. But why fight about water? Fighting won’t make more water!”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In many prehistoric societies the mean human generation time—average number of years between births of parents and of their children—was only a few decades. Hence towards the end of a string of wet decades, most people alive could have had no firsthand memory of the previous period of dry climate. Even today, there is a human tendency to increase production and population during good decades, forgetting (or, in the past, never realizing) that such decades were unlikely to last. When the good decades then do end, the society finds itself with more population than can be supported, or with ingrained habits unsuitable to the new climate conditions.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

“In each area of Europe the Vikings settled, intermarried, and gradually became assimilated into the local population, with the result that Scandinavian languages and distinct Scandinavian settlements eventually disappeared outside of Scandinavia. Swedish Vikings merged into the Russian population, Danish Vikings into the English population, while the Vikings who settled in Normandy eventually abandoned their Norse language and began speaking French. 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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“A third objection is that Easter Islanders surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them. As Catherine Orliac expressed it, “Why destroy a forest that one needs for his [i.e., the Easter Islanders’] material and spiritual survival?” This is indeed a key question, one that has nagged not only Catherine Orliac but also my University of California students, me, and everyone else who has wondered about self-inflicted environmental damage. I have often asked myself, “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”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The first of these toxic chemicals to achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, whose effects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“For instance, many wood and paper products that are offered to consumers for sale carry labels making pro-environmental claims such as “for every tree felled, at least two are planted.” However, a survey of 80 such claims found that 77 could not be substantiated at all, 3 could be only partially substantiated, and almost all were withdrawn when challenged.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“China’s leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations. That’s a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogies, but it can be dangerous if they are only superficially similar.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Education is a process involving two sets of participants who supposedly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students, and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers’ assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn’t previously thought of.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“This will be a frequent dilemma for historians trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: apparently too many potentially independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables’ importance statistically.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“My best-case scenario for the future is that China’s government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that China’s interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on rain or drought conditions in each year. Hence the sequence of rings in a tree cross-section is like a message in the Morse code formerly used for sending telegraph messages; dot-dot-dash-dot-dash in the Morse code, wide-wide-narrow-wide-narrow in a tree ring sequence. Actually, the ring sequence is even more diagnostic and richer in information than the Morse code, because trees actually contain rings spanning many different widths, rather than the Morse code’s choice between only a dot or a dash.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The Easter Islanders’ isolation probably also explains why I have found that their collapse, more than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts my readers and students. The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. 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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In case you’re squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall, from my years of living in England in the late 1950s, recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends who kept them for experiments also used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In a society that espouses tolerance, it’s amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Throughout the U.S., small farms are being squeezed out by large farms, the only ones able to survive on shrinking profit margins by economies of scale. But in southwestern Montana it is now impossible for small farmers to become large farmers by buying more land, for reasons succinctly explained by Allen Bjergo: “Agriculture in the U.S. is shifting to areas like Iowa and Nebraska, where no one would live for the fun of it because it isn’t beautiful as in Montana! Here in Montana, people do want to live for the fun of it, and so they are willing to pay much more for land than agriculture on the land would support. The Bitterroot is becoming a horse valley. Horses are economic because, whereas prices for agricultural products depend on the value of the food itself and are not unlimited, many people are willing to spend anything for horses that yield no economic benefit.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Steve Powell explained to me, “People used to expect no more of a farm than to produce enough to feed themselves; today, they want more out of life than just getting fed; they want to earn enough to send their kids to college.” When John Cook was growing up on a farm with his parents, “At dinnertime, my mother was satisfied to go to the orchard and gather asparagus, and as a boy I was satisfied for fun to go hunting and fishing. Now, kids expect fast food and HBO; if their parents don’t provide that, they feel deprived compared to their peers. In my day a young adult expected to be poor for the next 20 years, and only thereafter, if you were lucky, might you hope to end up more comfortably. Now, young adults expect to be comfortable early; a kid’s first questions about a job are ‘What are the pay, the hours, and the vacations?’’’ Every Montana farmer whom I know, and who loves being a farmer, is either very concerned whether any of his/her children will want to carry on the family farm, or already knows that none of them will.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“That remark by Tim illustrates one reason for the rise and fall of Montana farming: the lifestyle was highly valued by older generations, but many farmers’ children today have different values. They want jobs that involve sitting indoors in front of computer screens rather than heaving hay bales, and taking off evenings and weekends rather than having to milk cows and harvest hay that don’t take evenings and weekends off. They don’t want a life forcing them to do literally back-breaking physical work into their 80s, as all three surviving Hirschy brothers and sisters are still doing.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Montana farmers today who continue to farm into their old age do it in part because they love the lifestyle and take great pride in it. As Tim Huls told me, “It’s a wonderful lifestyle to get up before dawn and see the sunrise, to watch hawks fly overhead, and to see deer jump through your hay field to avoid your haying equipment.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“When I began to plan this book, I didn’t appreciate those complications, and I naïvely thought that the book would just be about environmental damage. 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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“and their implication for southeastern Polynesian prehistory”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

“They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the bottom-up and the top-down approach.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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.)”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive