By sharing different perspectives on what collapse means, I hope to have a better understanding of what might happen, in light of what has happened in similar circumstances in the past, to understand what might be different this time around, and to prepare, physically, economically, and spiritually for what the future holds.
This post is a book review of Jared Diamond's 2005 book 'Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed'
Jared Diamond is part archaeologist, part anthropologist. In 'Collapse', Diamond takes a scientific approach to examining how past societies either failed to meet the challenges they faced, or succeeded in overcoming these challenges. A scientific comparison between complex societies is indeed a very difficult proposition. The approach that Diamond has taken is to make comparisons between very ecologically similar societies, and describe the causal influences that have led to different results among them. For example, Diamond compares failure or success among the dozens of Polynesian islands dotting the central Pacific, the contrast between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, sharing the island of Hispaniola, and the contrast between Indonesian and Papua New Guinea, again, both sharing the same island. Diamond also devotes a lot of space in the book to societies with no scientifically contemporary neighbors, like the Maya, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, and ancient Tokugawa Japan. There are many past societies to choose from - both those that have been successful, and those that have collapsed, but Diamond seemingly chooses the societies he analyzes according to two criteria. All of the societies he analyzed faced climatic and/or natural resource challenges, and all of them had archaeological records that allowed for reasonable precision in making factual claims about the state of the society through time. Jared Diamond adds a very refreshing human perspective to the societies he analyzes. He tends to present conflict in society as generally occurring between two sets of rational people with valid needs and viewpoints. As a starting point, Diamond presents a contemporary conflict between traditional Montana residents trying to make a living off of the land conflicting with land developers trying to grow Montana's economy through tourism. The heart of the conflict is that the rising land values that the tourism brings make the traditional farming uneconomical and have been killing long-rooted local businesses and farms. Diamond presents the arguments of real people on both sides, and suggests that the societies he presents in the book are not abstractions, but dynamic states full of the same sort of people acting in their own rational (if, perhaps narrow-minded) ways.
The heart of the thesis that Diamond presents in this book is that things like climate change, resource depletion, and trade conflicts can essentially be proximal causes of collapse. By this, he means that they are the causal factors that are immediately responsible for the decline of the civilization in question. The case that he makes though, is that these factors have to be taken within the context of the civiliation in question. These proximal causes are forcings that are either withstood by a strong society or cause the collapse of a weakened society. There are often other ultimate (or underlying) causes, stemming from factors that led the society to be either inherently resiliant or fragile. I think a classic example of this distinction is this year's Haitian Earthquake. The proiximal cause of the devastation in Haiti was the 7-Magnitude earthquake. Underlying that devastion was building construction. If the buildings had been constructed to reasonable standards, they would have held up fine (as those buildings in Port-Au-Prince built to better standards did). Underlying this cause is the fact that rampant poverty prevented investment in earthquake-resistant structures. Underlying this poverty were corrupt government and perverse incentives and prices leveled on Haiti through globalization.
A common thread in the book is societies that initially established roots in a region during times of favorable climatic times, developed infrastructure utterly dependent on that favorable climate, and then were unable to cope with a harsher climate or a decline in the resources that supported the region. Thus changing ecological conditions acted as proximal causes to collapses that were undergirded by overambitious development and poor planning for the future. Two examples given in this book are the Maya, whose civilization collapsed flourishe under times of abundant rain and then collapsed during periods of relative drought, and the Greenland Norse, who were able to develop civilization in Greenland in times of relative warmth, but collapsed into war and cannibalism due to the onset of the little ice age around 1000 AD. As a point of direct comparison, the Greenland Inuit, who lived in Greenland at the same time did not experience collapse due to a more resilient and better-adapted form of subsistence.
This comparison is part of the basis for another parallel, and fascinating thesis that Diamond makes: Successful societies are often those that are able to abandon certain core values. These are values that led to success in certain circumstances, but were toxic to their success in other circumstances. This is an interesting perspective, because we often think in America, that our success as a society will depend on holding on to our core values. The true test of a society is the ability to recognize when these core values have become maladaptive and whether the society ultimately has the courage to abandon them. In the case of the Greenland Norse, it was ultimately their decision to hold on to the cultivation of livestock (a holdover from European tradition) on marginal land, and a refusal to adopt inuit techniques of whale and seal hunting that led to a collapse of food production as the climate turned south. Conversely, iceland's abandonment of certain forms of livestock were instrumental to its survival of the same kinds of conditions.
Of course, the cultivation of livestock in mainland Europe was a cornerstone of earlier civiliational success. It is easy for societies to fall into the trap of viewing such cultural values as fundamental, and not recognizing when those values become cumbersome and counterproductive under other circumstances.
(My own note...) Viewed through this lens, America's survival may depend on its abondonment of individualism as a curtural ideal and automobiles as a symbol of freedom. These two things were instrumental in the development of American mobility and innovation/competition in the 20th century. Innovation and competition are highly desirable in an expansionary economy with symbiotic dynamics. However, in an ecologically constrained economy, such dynamics become highly zero-sum and largely become forces for the transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the priveleged classes of society. This is exactly the dynamic underpinning the financial crisis of 2008-present. Financial 'innovation' (credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, derivatives) in the last decade has been defended by their creators as driving the expansion of the economy, but since real physical output has been stagnant, this growth has occurred entirely within the realm of the money economy, and has greatly increased levels of wealth stratification, with the poor becoming poorer and the rich becoming richer (with taxpayer funded bailouts being a ransom that the public has paid in order to not lose all that they had).
Okay, back to the book...Another interesting perspective that Diamond brings to the table is to explore how collapse may manifest itself in environmentally troubled societies. Diamond imagines that in the Greenland Norse society, the well-off farms in the more productive areas of the Greenland settlement likely tried to insulate themselves from the problems elsewhere, but eventually became targets of local anger and violence when everyone else was starving (he backs this up with archaeological evidence). Later in the book, he brings up a comparison to gated communities in modern America. The point is that the society will only validate the rich's right to a comfortable life when there are sufficient resources to go around, and people are not destitute.
An interesting modern day examination that Diamond makes regarding the social manifestation of modern day troubles is Rwanda. The background to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, as portrayed in the media is mostly correct - and goes something like this: Rwanda is a country that over time became populated by two ethnic groups; the Hutu of West African descent, who were principally farmers, and the Tutsi, from East African descent, who were principally pastoralists. The Tutsi early on established themselves as overlords of the Hutu. Diamond writes: "When German and Belgian colonial governments took over, they found it expedient to govern through Tutsi intermediaries whom they considerd racially superior to Hutu because of Tutsi's paler skins and supposedly more European appearance." Independence came to Rwanda in 1962, and in the power vacuum left by the departing Europeans, the Hutu took the oppurtunity to overthrow Tutsi domination and replace it with Hutu domination. Over the next decade, a million Tutsi Rwandans fled to neighboring countries. For years, they would periodically invade in attempts to restore their power. In 1973, General Habyarimana (Hutu) staged a coup against the existing Hutu government and decided to leave the Tutsi in peace. For 15 years, Rwanda prospered under these peaceful conditions. Diamond writes, "Unfortunately, Rwanda's economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforestation, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a steep decline in world prices for Rwanda's principal exports of coffee and tea, austerity measures imposed by the World Bank, and a drought in the south." These pressures came to a head in 1990 when another Tutsi invasion was used as a pretext for Hutu-led civil war. Habyarimana's government was brutal enough in its attack on Tutsi, but not enough for Hutu extremists, who murdered Habyarimana, and rounded up the nation's Hutu in a campaign of mass Tutsi genocide. By the end of the campaign, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing 75% of the remaining Tutsi population had been exterminated.
While ethnic tensions were the spark that lit the fire, Diamond makes a strong case for environmental and population pressures underlying factors in the genocide - the fuel for the fire. Diamond notes that the genocide is not as black and white as is portrayed. For example, Diamond writes "Rwanda contained a thied ethnic group, known as the Twa, who numbered only 1% of the population, were at the bottom of the social scale and power structure, and did not constitute a threat to anybody - yet most of them, too were massacred in the 1994 killings." and "The distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi is not nearly as sharp as often portrayed. The two groups speak the same language, attended the same churches and schools and bars, lived together in the same village under the same chiefs, and worked together in the same offices. Hutu and Tutsi intermarried and sometimes switched their ethnic identities...the groups were so intertwined in Rwandan society that in 1994, doctors ended up killing their patients and vice versa, teachers killed their students and vice versa, and office colleagues killed each other" and "Especially puzzling...are events in Northwest Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everyone was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killings still took place, of Hutu by Hutu." Clearly there was something else going on here. Writes Diamond, "How, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by etremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost savagery?"
A complete explanation, according to Diamond lies in the population and environmental pressures in Rwanda. Rwanda and neighboring Burundi are the two most densely populated countries in Africa, and among the most densely populated in the world. Exploring the case of the Northwestern Hutu region (Kamana) that also participated in the massacre amongst its own, Diamond writes, "Kamana's population density is high even by the standards of the densely populated Rwanda: 1740 people per square mile in 1988, rising to 2040 in 1993...Those high population densities translated into very small farms: a median farm size of only 0.89 acre in 1988, declining to 0.72 acre in 1993. Each farm was divided into (on average) 10 parcels, so that farmers were tilling absurdly small parcels averageing only 0.09 acre in 1988 and 0.07 acre in 1993. "As both population and agricultural production increased, per-capita food production rose from 1966 to 1981, but then ddropped back to the level where it had stood in the early 1960s...Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. even the most elementary measures that could have minimized soil erosion, such as terracing, plowing along contours rather than straight upa nd down hils, and providing some fallow cover of vegetation rather than leaving fields bare between crops, were never practiced. As a result, there was much soil erosiion, and the rivers carried heavy loads of mud... Because all of the land was already occupied, young people found it difficult to marry, leave home, aquire a farm, and set up their own household. Increasingly young people postponed marriage and continued to live at home with their parents." By 1993, all males age 20-24 were living at home. Thus, family size was increasing, such that each family was living off of only 1/5 of an acre in 1988 and 1/7 of an acre in 1993. Again, Diamond writes "Even when measured agains the low calorie intake considered adequate in Rwanda, the average houshold got only 77% of its calorie needs from its farm. The rest of its food had to be bought with income earnd off the farm, at jobs such as carpentry, brick-making, sawing wood, and trade. Two-thirds of households held such jobs, while one-third didn't. The percentage of the population consuming less than 1600 calories per day (i.e. what is considered below the famine level) was 9% in 1982, rising to 40% in 1990 and some unknown higher percentage thereafter." There was also a fundamental redistribution of land going on, with the relatively wealthy, larger farms buying farmland from the increasingly desperate smaller farms, who needed emergency income from their farm sales to stay alive. "Those land disputes undermined the cohesion of Rwandan society's traditional fabric. Traditionally, richer landowners were expected to help their poorer relatives. This system was breaking down, because even the landowners who were richer than other landowners were still too poor to be able to spare anything for poorer relatives."
So to sum it up, writes, Diamond, "Escalating conflict forms the background against which the killings of 1994 took place. Even before 1994, Rwanda was experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated especially by hungry landless young people without off-farm income...The 1994 events provided a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among Hutu villagers...It is nor rare even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess population and to bring numbers in line with available land resources.
This is one example of how collapse dynamics can play out in a society that has outgrown its available resources (in this case, arable land). If a society is unwilling or unable to sufficiently plan for the future and faces starvation as a result, these kinds of pressures will be solved in one way or another. If not through family planning and resource management, then through war, genocide, starvation, etc. Again, this is just one contemporary example, but such scenarios can be envisaged for many of the ancient societies that experienced collapse.
In our modern world, we have essentially managed resource and environmental problems in the past century or two by outsourcing our needs to an increasinly globalized marketplace. When we have faced environmental pressures at home, we have sought additional resources abroad, or have outsourced our production, in effect moving the dangerous effects of the pollution and land degradation elsewhere. This has been a very successful strategy because a more diverse set of countries and regional entities trading in a global marketplace has been more effective at redistributing surplusses, and mitigating problems in individual regions. The crisis we face in the 21st century, however, is one where global capacity for resource extraction and sinks for pollution become limited. Rather than the isolated Easter Island described in the book, where islanders cut down all of their trees to make canoes and build monumental stone heads, we risk globally using up all of our readily available oil on the erection and sustainment of cities that are utterly dependent on that cheap oil (and bumping up against a host of other limits as well).
One of my favorite chapters in the book is a concluding chapter called 'One-Liner Objections', where Diamond lists 12 commonly espoused objections that people blithely make, largely as articles of faith, against the warnings presented in this book, and then presents a rebuttal against those objections. I'll wrap up this post by listing those objections below (in bold), and then including parts of Diamond's rebuttal to each.
The environment has to be balanced against the economy
"This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed..."
Technology will solve our problems
"This is an expression of faith about the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that the new technologies now under discussion will succeed and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon..."
If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need
The major arguments that Diamond makes here are that unforseen problems often derail promising new solutions, and that those that do have promise, often require several decades to transition due to the requirements to change secondary technologies, infrastructure, and institutions associated with the former resource or technology. The point is that such switches are enormously costly and inherently uncertain. In the case of switching from fossil fuels to wind/solar, there is an additional issue related to switching from a high-energy density, easily transportable and dispatchable fuel, to one that is only available at certain times and in smaller quantities.
Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets, clean water still flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse.
"One of the main lessons to be learned from the collase of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and other past societies(as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power"
Look at how many times in the past the doom-and-gloom predictions of fearmongering environmentalists have proved wrong. Why should we believe them this time?
"...it is misleading to look selectively for environmental problems that have proved wrong and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that have proved right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that have proved wrong. There is an abundance of errors of the latter sort...we must expect some environmentalist warnings to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environmental warning systems were much too conservative. The multibillion dollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms. In addition, the reason that alarms proved false is often that they convinced us to adopt successful countermeasures."
The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The more people the better, because more people means more inventions and ultimately more wealth.
"Data on national wealth demonstrate that the claim that more people mean more wealth is the opposite of correct." (paraphrasing...The only country on the top 10 list of countries for both population and affluence is the U.S.) "Actually the countries with large populations are disproportionately poor. Eight of the ten have per-capita GDP under $8000 and 5 under $3000...Instead, what does distinguish the two lists is population growth rates: all 10 of the affluent countries have very low relative population growth rates (1% per year or less), while eight of the 10 most populous countries have higher relative population growth rates than any of the most affluent countries, except for two large countries that achieved low population growth in unpleasant ways:China, by government order and enforced abortion, and Russia, whose population is actually decreasing because of catastrophic health problems."
If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die, and I can't take them seriously
"In fact, at current rates, most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems will become acute within the lifetime of young adults now alive. Most of us who have children consider the securing of our children's future as the highest priority to which we deote our time and money. We pay fro their education and food and clothes, amke wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of helping them to enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for us to do those things for our individual children, while simultaneously doing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50 years from now."
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