Collapse - Prologue, part II: A Roadmap

Jared Diamond is a BIG picture thinker. Experience in biology and anthropology allows him to see issues in a very global way. In looking at human societies that have succeeded or failed on 6 continents over thousands of years, Diamond distilled 5 contributing factors in understanding collapses - and they aren't just environmental.

1) Environmental Damage. Ok, the first one is environmental. You know, and I know...and even the most fervent anti-environment politicians know that humans impact our environment. We've all see oil soaked birds and post-nuclear wastelands. The only difference of opinion is how much humans impact the environment and what effect that impact really has. In collapsed societies, it turns out those questions (how much? what effect?) are key. Some areas of earth are naturally more resilient or more fragile depending on a whole host of factors like rainfall, climate, soil... This means human action in different environments has different consequences. Cutting down a single, slow-growing 1,000 year old redwood tree at a high elevation has a different impact than cutting down a stand of rapidly growing locust trees in Indiana.

2) Climate Change. "...a term that today we tend to associate with global warming caused by humans. In fact, climate may be hotter or colder, wetter or drier, or more or less variable between months or between years, because of changes in natural forces that drive climate and have nothing to do with humans." Before the phrase "global warming" crossed the lips of an unwashed hippy, changes in the sun's heat, volcanic eruptions and movement of continents created changes in climate that affected all life on earth.

3) Hostile Neighbors. Most human societies are and were within warring range of other societies. Military conquest doomed many societies (including Rome) and the ability to fend off attacks was an important consideration to survival.

4) Decreased Support from Friendly Neighbors. Most societies also have friendly trade partners that provide essential goods. If your trade partner is weakened or disappears, this affects your society too. Those who remember the 1973 oil embargo particularly understand this.

5) How Societies Respond to Problems. This is Diamond's most important factor. "Different societies respond differently to similar problems. For instance, problems of deforestation arose for many past societies, among which Highland New Guinea, Japan, Tikopia and Tonga developed successful forest management and continued to prosper, while Easter Island, Mangareva, and Norse Greenland failed to develop successful forest management and collapsed as a result."

In most cases of collapse these factors are intertwined. Rome, for example, fended off enemies and thrived for over 1,000 years. Why did invaders eventually succeed? Was Rome weakened by some internal economic, political, or environmental problem before it fell?

With this framework in mind, the rest of the book reviews modern and ancient collapses of diverse societies, including Easter Island, the Maya, Norse Greenland and the Anasazi of the American Southwest. Norse Greenland seems particularly fascinating as two societies inhabited one island for many years, facing all 5 pressures mentioned above with one society succeeding and the other failing.

Collapse - Prologue, part I: Relating

I started re-reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed after hearing a presidential candidate imply that we have to choose between helping the environment or helping people. I remember this sort of false choice from the 1980s when it was loggers vs. spotted owls, but I thought 30 years of costly experience (and Exxon Valdez, BP, mad cow disease, Katrina, Fukushima and Chernobyl, Bhopal...) convinced most people that good environmental policy was good economic policy.

With this thought banging around my head, I settled in to a chair on the porch of my 150 year old farm house as the remnants of Hurricane Issac brought some relief to one of the Midwest's worst (and most costly) droughts since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. I was sitting on the porch because rain has been so infrequent in Indiana this summer that the sound of the droplets falling on my struggling garden was the most beautiful music I'd heard in ages.

While I sat there, a pair of adventurous / troublesome Dorking hens ventured in out out from under cover every so often to peck at the newly soggy ground and see if it was still raining. It was. It so gloriously was. Over two full inches when it was all done, two days later. The Dorking hens were born in March and were only just figuring out rain. After spending the first few weeks of their lives in a brooder box, they experienced less than 9 inches of rain from April through July - the driest those months have been since 1936.

I thought of the relevancy of my old farm house and my ancient breed of chicken as I read the Prologue of Collapse. (Julius Caesar ate Dorking chickens...most Americans eat Cornish Cross, a breed developed in the 1950s to grow quickly and profitably in intensively managed, large-input, oil-dependent factory farming environments.)

If you don't believe we are intimately connected to our ancestors, the entirety of this book will seem to be an irrelevant fairytale. A mystery for entertaining children. But, if you believe, like I do, that despite our computers and combines and fossil fuel economy, we are subject to the same forces of nature and laws of ecology that our ancestors were (the people who built my house and developed my breed of chickens), then Collapse is the most important lesson and the most valued guidebook we can possess.

Diamond drives home this belief in his very first story.

A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities.

He describes their similarities in size, product, economics, animal feed, management, and their prominence in their communities. He lays out their shared vulnerabilities including their distance from population centers increasing their transportation costs, the changing tastes of customers and that both farms "lay in districts economically marginal for dairying because their high northern latitudes mean a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay."

The biggest different between the farms is that Huls Farm is currently operating in Montana and Gardar Farm was abandoned in Greenland 500 years ago when Norse Greenland society collapsed.

Here is the key bit - the really scary bit - you really need to believe to derive any usable value from Diamond's work.

Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of Huls Farm and the US today.

You have to believe that we are similiar enough to the people who lived before us that we can learn for their lives, their work, and their deaths.

In most subjects we believe this readily. NASA scientists that land robots on Mars are building off the work of Einstein, Galileo and Newton. Poets and artists are inspired by Shakespeare and Picasso. We know we can learn from their successes, but somehow we believe we are immune to their failures. As if having the ability to make computers and cell phones will keep us safe from all the vulnerabilities of past societies.

Diamond aptly and brilliantly seeks to challenge that comforting thought and the thing that makes his argument so believable is his moderation. He knows that collapsed societies are extremes and not inevitable. He points out successful societies to contrast with those that rapidly declined. He also alludes to modern day collapses that we hear about on the news: Somalia, Rwanda and the USSR.

Of course it's not true that all societies are doomed to collapse because of environmental damage: in the past some societies did while others didn't; the real question is why only some societies proved fragile, and what distinguished those that collapsed form those that didn't.

Our challenge is to look at those the examples Diamond has compiled for us and think critically and openly - with all the self-awareness we can muster - about which path we are on.