Jared Diamond Asks Why Societies Fail in New Book Collapse

Jared Diamond's earlier book Guns, Germs and Steel asks what causes lay behind the "Rise of the West" from a life sciences perspective. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he asks the complementary question from the same perspective, what causes societies to decline? The environment, according to professor Diamond, constrains the limits of human actions, but in most cases, there is no pre-determined fate for a society. Hence the phrase "how societies choose to fail or succeed." Human actions matter, and the more fragile the ecosystem, the more they matter.

The methodology is a familiar one to readers of his earlier work. By examining diverse human populations and their histories, he isolates a handful of factors that played a role in the outcome. Traditional social scientists get nervous about this sort of "reductionism," as it suggests humanity's elegant and intricate learned behaviors are really just so much window dressing. From an ecological standpoint, they are just that, and as any natural scientist will attest, reductionism is the whole point (E=MC² is the most obvious case). The human animal is unique in its mental capacities, but it has no dispensation from above regarding its biological needs.

Professor Diamond starts with a discussion of the ecosystem and culture of those in the Montana Bitterroot Valley, a place where environmental pressures are obvious, but where the final determination of success or failure has yet to be played out. He then moves to the inhabitants of Easter, Pitcairn and other Polynesian islands, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Norse of Greenland, the Maya of Central America, modern Hispaniola, China and Australia. In each instance, some successful, others not so, the environment and human impact on it (not because humans are distinct from the environment but because are so integral to it wherever they are) create challenges that the society either overcomes or is overcome by. Darwinian change, not Hegelian change, is the thrust of Professor Diamond's argument.

The most interesting case is that of the Norse of Greenland. For 450 years, there was a Viking society that survived in Greenland, which eventually failed. There are no survivors. Yet, contemporaneous with the Vikings were Inuit inhabitants of the region (the fifth wave of North American settlers by Professor Diamond's count), whose descendants are still there. Why did one population survive while another did not? In the end, the Inuit found survival strategies that the Norse did not, or which the Norse rejected (like eating fish, despite the role of fish in the diet of other Norse settlements like Iceland). At the same time, it must be remembered that the Norse lasted longer in Greenland than the British settlement of North America has thus far.

In the end, Professor Diamond argues that modern societies are not immune from environmental pressures, that the choices consumers and voters make will affect the outcome, and that a society's success is often a matter of time frame. The Norse of Greenland are gone, but was 450 years of continuous settlement a failure? Easter Island is still inhabited by descendants of the statue builders. Are they successful? Barring extinction, collapse doesn't mean an end to a society, merely a radical transformation. If one accepts that change is good because the world changes, then there is hope regardless. Only those truly attached to their SUVs, cyanide-processed gold and living off the environmental capital (rather than the interest only) of Earth have anything to fear.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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