Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond
Viking Press, New York, 2005
356 pp. Trade, $29.99
ISBN: 0-670-03337-5.

Reviewed by George Gessert

In Collapse, Jared Diamond tries to answer a question that shadows almost everyone today: Will we survive? Diamond, who is a professor of geography at UCLA, and well-known for his writings, including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel, proceeds by examining cultures that collapsed and others that survived. He identifies key factors in failure or longterm success, and using these as guides, sketches our probable future.

Diamond’s examples of collapse include several small, isolated societies, among them Easter Island. Small societies are relevant to us, he believes, because the processes that led to their demise "unfolded faster and reached more extreme outcomes" than generally occurs in larger societies. Especially relevant is Norse Greenland, a society of several thousand people that endured for almost 500 years, then disappeared, leaving no survivors. But the Greenlanders did leave artifacts and written records, which, because the Norse were culturally European, are relatively easy for contemporary scholars to interpret.

Diamond also examines two larger collapses, of the Anasazi, who had a culture that flourished in the US Southwest, then fell apart about 800 years ago, and the Maya, who had a large, sophisticated society with a written language, and an extraordinarily refined calendar. Different Mayan city-states collapsed at different times. Mayan culture survives today, but many achievements of the classical era lie literally in ruins. Even the indigenous tradition of writing was lost.

Rome is mentioned only in passing, perhaps because the reasons for its fall remain highly controversial. Diamond suggests, however, that widespread environmental degradation may have severely weakened the empire before barbarians delivered the coup de grace.

Diamond identifies five main factors in social collapses: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, difficulties with trading partners, and social responses to each of these problems. Not every factor comes into play in every collapse, but historically environmental problems (which includes such things as soil degradation, poor water management, human population growth, increased per capita consumption of resources, and humanly caused climate change) have been the most important contributor.

Diamond’s primary concern is not the environment itself, but its effects on humans. He does not think that overexploitation of resources occurs because human beings are by nature willfully blind, incapable of longterm planning, or dominated by greed. Rather, overexploitation begins because many resources initially seem inexhaustible, especially biological resources. When signs of impending depletion appear, they may be masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels from year to year or decade to decade. Even with knowledge, people may not exercise restraint in harvesting shared resources if individual self-interests and group self-interest widely diverge. Harmonizing the two is critical for almost every society.

In some societies, elites insulate themselves from the rest of society and ignore its problems, maintaining power through activities that exhaust essential resources. Such short-sightedness may have contributed to the collapse of classical Mayan civilization. Mayan kings derived status and power through monument-building, extravagant displays of wealth, and ceaseless war, activities that mitigate against population control and careful management of resources. At Copan, population grew rapidly and filled the valley where the ceremonial center was situated, forcing farmers to clear and cultivate surrounding hillsides. The steep slopes eroded, blanketing the valley floor with low-nutrient, acidic sediments. Demand for wood, especially to make plaster ornamentation for monuments, resulted in massive deforestation, which in turn increased erosion and may have exacerbated drought. Because the king was responsible for bringing rain, he might have become a scapegoat when it failed to arrive. The royal palace was burned around 850 AD.

What exactly happens during collapse? In the examples Diamond gives, environmental degradation leads to severe food shortages, famine, violent struggles for scarce resources, and overthrow of elites by desperate commoners. Starvation, war, and/or disease reduce the population. Sometimes everyone dies, as in Norse Greenland, but more often there are survivors. In almost every instance society loses a significant degree of complexity. The trajectory from peak population and social elaboration to collapse can be gradual, but more often is abrupt, taking place in just a few years. The suddenness of collapse is usually a consequence of exponential increase in resource extraction, leading to a peak. This situation is followed by a sharp fall, population overshoot, and social disintegration.

Diamond includes examples of collapse or partial collapse in our time. In Rwanda, where almost a million people were killed in 1994, and two million were forced into exile, the ground was laid by colonialism, a long history of ethnic strife, and ruthless struggles among political factions. An additional factor was that Rwanda was one of the most densely populated countries in the world. By 1985 all land except for parkland was developed or used for agriculture. Well before the genocide, severe land shortages, environmental degradation, and the threat of famine had so severely damaged Rwanda’s social fabric that the stage was set for disaster. Diamond makes it clear that he does not excuse those responsible for genocide. But with dismay he quotes a recent observer: "It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources."
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|Diamond thinks that Malthusian forces operate in some situations, but what happened in Rwanda is not inevitable. Many peoples have found ways to live sustainably even in environmentally fragile places, such as Iceland, or on islands seemingly too small to support permanent human populations. Tikopia is a remarkable instance. It is 1.8 square miles, and 85 miles from its nearest Polynesian neighbor, but has been home to a population of roughly a thousand people for 3,000 years. This has been accomplished by people working together to produce food, manage resources, and very carefully regulate population. Other success stories include Highland New Guinea and Japan of the Tokugawa era, both of which long before modern times faced deforestation and collapse, but developed successful forest management practices and methods of population control. One of Diamond’s most telling examples of success is the Greenland Inuit. They originally occupied colder, more inhospitable regions of Greenland than the Norse, but the Inuit survived, while the Norse did not. The reasons were largely cultural: Inuit culture was better adapted to the extremely harsh environment of Greenland than Norse culture.

Some societies do not collapse so much as sag, which is what Diamond thinks may happen to us. "Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization will be 'just' a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values." Diamond thinks that this condition is likely to happen within the lifetimes of the current generation of children and young adults.

He does not think that we need new technologies to solve our problems. Most new technologies are environmentally costly, but more important, he believes that we already have the technologies we need to produce a sustainable economy. What we lack are the cultural conditions and political will to use what we have. Diamond ends Collapse on a note of what he calls "cautious optimism." By this he means that we may be able to avoid the worst, and instead encounter "only" the spread of Haiti-like conditions.

To write of "cautious optimism" in connection with the spread of Haiti-like conditions underscores how serious Diamond considers our situation to be. And yet, his account is not depressing. This is partly because the prospect of steep economic decline, along with crises arising from depletion of essential resources, is not news. Warnings from scientists, economists, and others have been appearing regularly for more than a generation. The prototypical report was Limits to Growth, published in 1972 and updated in 1992 and 2004. Although written primarily for policy-makers, it became a best-seller and was translated into about 30 languages. For those of us who are not policy-makers, Limits to Growth, as well as most other technical reports about the unsustainability of industrial civilization tend to make depressing reading, both for the news they bring, and for how it is presented. These books consolidate essential data and make projections, often in the form of graphs, but do not help us emotionally process the rising and falling curves. Dire warnings are delivered in dry tones. Usually the authors offer a few assurances that it is not yet too late to change the course of industrial civilization, but most readers, I suspect, are left feeling helpless, angry, and guilty for being human.

Diamond avoids these pitfalls by presenting not only a wealth of data, but an informed and compassionate picture of what he believes human beings are. He presents the Easter Islanders, Greenland Norse, people of highland New Guinea, Rwandans, and first worlders today as all equally human. He neither idealizes nor despairs. He confronts the possibility of apocalypse without being overwhelmed or seduced by his subject. Most scientists ignore the aesthetic dimension of apocalypse, or combat its paralyzing spell with facts, but Diamond fights fire with fire. He relates histories that are not only well-researched accounts of actual events but artful narratives, as compelling as fairytales, ghost stories, and mythic cycles. These provide rare opportunities to let go of remnant illusions, especially lingering hopes that nature can still, somehow, maybe with the help of yet another round of technological wizardry, support limitless economic growth. Diamond carefully clears away false hopes and opens up space to choose again.