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I’m passing along another good review of Jared Diamond’s Collapse, with a pointed note at the end
to modern applications. For those who have read the book, and want to skip
down, that point is highlighted in bold brown. I’m going offline for awhile, need to be more unplugged. Thank you all
for a wonderful learning and sharing experience. To paraphrase a well-known phrase, Make good conversations, not war. Best Regards. Be well. KwC THE
VANISHING
by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker,
Issue Jan. 03, 2005, Posted online Dec. 27, 2004 In “Collapse,” Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves. A thousand
years ago, a group of Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the
vast Arctic landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland.
It was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow and ice. But along
the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords protected from the harsh
winds and saltwater spray of the North Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed
upriver they saw grassy slopes flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and
bluebells, and thick forests of willow and birch and alder. Two colonies were
formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the Eastern and Western
Settlements. The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy
slopes into pastureland. They hunted seal and caribou. They built a string of
parish churches and a magnificent cathedral, the remains of which are still
standing. They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to
the Roman Catholic Church. The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding,
economically viable, fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five
thousand people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they
vanished. The story of the
Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed” (Viking;
$29.95).
Diamond teaches
geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-seller “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. In “Guns,
Germs, and Steel,” Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to
explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In “Collapse,” he
continues that approach, only this time he looks at history’s losers—like the
Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the
modern-day Rwandans. We
live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics
and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn’t particularly interested in any
of those things—or, at least, he’s interested in them only insofar as they bear
on what to him is
the far more important question, which is a society’s relationship to its
climate and geography and resources and neighbors. “Collapse” is a book about the most prosaic
elements of the earth’s ecosystem—soil, trees, and water—because societies
fail, in Diamond’s view, when they mismanage those environmental factors. There was nothing
wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse
built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic
model of the time—devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right
before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that
Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September
14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn
Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the
wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays. The problem with the
settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really
was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern
Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay
to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests
for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm
enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of
turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland. But Greenland’s
ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool
growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that
topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic
humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of
strong winds. “The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or
burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil
than is grass,” he writes. “With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock,
especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly
in Greenland’s climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed,
soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from
occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a
distance of miles from an entire valley.” Without adequate pastureland, the summer
hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through
the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting
fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult. The Norse needed to
reduce their reliance on livestock—particularly cows, which consumed an
enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status;
to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit
practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn
from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most
reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had
contempt for the Inuit—they called them skraelings,
“wretches”—and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture.
In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on
lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on
their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for
walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those
tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells,
stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver,
churchmen’s robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with
its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end,
the Norse starved to death. Diamond’s argument stands in sharp
contrast to the conventional explanations for a society’s collapse. Usually, we
look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal civilization of the
Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of smallpox. European Jewry was
destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the disappearance of the Norse settlements is
usually blamed on the Little Ice Age, which descended on Greenland in the early
fourteen-hundreds, ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One
archeologist refers to this as the “It got too cold, and they died” argument.) What
all these explanations have in common is the idea that civilizations are
destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of God. But look, Diamond
says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced
the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens
of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to
support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it’s a barren and largely
empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe
out the island’s forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their
trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. “I have often asked myself,
‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was
doing it?’” Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about
the conclusions of “Collapse.” Those trees were felled by rational actors—who
must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the
destruction of their civilization. The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies,
as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists
and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch
themselves bleed to death. This doesn’t mean that
acts of God don’t play a role. It did get colder in Greenland in the early
fourteen-hundreds. But it didn’t get so cold that the island became
uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse
had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools,
and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t
adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for
instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological
sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm
and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five
thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones.
How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running
into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a
shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in
Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those
missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. “Could the Norse have strictly
confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites
now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all
their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse
archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse
didn’t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against
it. Given the difficulty
that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this was insane. Eating fish
would have substantially reduced the ecological demands of the Norse
settlements. The Norse would have needed fewer livestock and less pastureland.
Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting caribou,
so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other activities. It would
have diversified their diet. Why did the Norse choose
not to eat fish? Because
they weren’t thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about
their cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define
a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building lavish
churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural practices of
their land of origin.
It was part of what it meant to be Norse, and if you are going to establish a
community in a harsh and forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies
which define and cement a culture are of paramount importance. “The Norse were
undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s
difficulties,” Diamond writes. “The values to which people cling most
stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously
the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.” He goes on: To
us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders
found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their
social survival as much as their biological survival, it was out of the
question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit,
and thereby
to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. Diamond’s distinction
between social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we
blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the strength
of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from the two world wars
and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive as a species only if we
learned to get along and resolve our disputes peacefully. The fact is, though,
that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and
committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave in ways that
are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate. Diamond points out
that the Easter Islanders did not practice, so far as we know, a uniquely
pathological version of South Pacific culture. Other societies, on other
islands in the Hawaiian archipelago, chopped down trees and farmed and raised
livestock just as the Easter Islanders did. What doomed the Easter Islanders
was the interaction between what they did and where they were. Diamond and a
colleague, Barry Rollet, identified nine physical factors that contributed to
the likelihood of deforestation—including latitude, average rainfall,
aerial-ash fallout, proximity to Central Asia’s dust plume, size, and so on—and
Easter Island ranked at the high-risk end of nearly every variable. “The reason
for Easter’s unusually severe degree of deforestation isn’t that those
seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident,” he concludes.
“Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile
environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people.”
The problem wasn’t the Easter Islanders. It was Easter Island. In
the second half of “Collapse,” Diamond turns his attention to modern examples, and one of his case studies is the
recent genocide in Rwanda. What happened in Rwanda is commonly described as an
ethnic struggle between the majority Hutu and the historically dominant,
wealthier Tutsi, and it is understood in those terms because that is how we
have come to explain much of modern conflict: Serb and Croat, Jew and Arab,
Muslim and Christian. The world is a cauldron of cultural antagonism. It’s an
explanation that clearly exasperates Diamond. The Hutu didn’t just kill the
Tutsi, he points out. The Hutu also killed other Hutu. Why? Look at the land:
steep hills farmed right up to the crests, without any protective terracing;
rivers thick with mud from erosion; extreme deforestation leading to irregular
rainfall and famine; staggeringly high population densities; the exhaustion of
the topsoil; falling per-capita food production. This was a society on the brink of ecological
disaster, and if there is anything that is clear from the study of such
societies it is that they inevitably descend into genocidal chaos. In
“Collapse,” Diamond quite convincingly defends himself against the charge of
environmental determinism. His discussions are always nuanced, and he gives
political and ideological factors their due. The real issue is how, in coming to
terms with the uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest of us have
turned ourselves into cultural determinists. For the past thirty years, Oregon has had
one of the strictest sets of land-use regulations in the nation, requiring new
development to be clustered in and around existing urban development. The laws meant that Oregon has done
perhaps the best job in the nation in limiting suburban sprawl, and protecting
coastal lands and estuaries.
But this November Oregon’s voters passed a ballot referendum, known as Measure
37, that rolled back many of those protections. Specifically, Measure 37 said
that anyone who could show that the value of his land was affected by
regulations implemented since its purchase was entitled to compensation from
the state. If the state declined to pay, the property owner would be exempted
from the regulations. To call Measure 37—and
similar referendums that have been passed recently in other
states—intellectually incoherent is to put it mildly. It might be that the reason
your hundred-acre farm on a pristine hillside is worth millions to a developer
is that it’s on a pristine hillside: if everyone on that hillside could
subdivide, and sell out to Target and Wal-Mart, then nobody’s plot would be
worth millions anymore. Will the voters of Oregon then pass Measure 38,
allowing them to sue the state for compensation over damage to property values
caused by Measure 37? It is hard to read “Collapse,” though, and
not have an additional reaction to Measure 37. Supporters of the law spoke
entirely in the language of political ideology. To them, the measure was a
defense of property rights, preventing the state from unconstitutional
“takings.”
If you replaced the term “property rights” with “First Amendment rights,” this
would have been indistinguishable from an argument over, say, whether
charitable groups ought to be able to canvass in malls, or whether cities can
control the advertising they sell on the sides of public buses. As a society,
we do a very good job with these kinds of debates: we give everyone a hearing,
and pass laws, and make compromises, and square our conclusions with our
constitutional heritage—and in the Oregon debate the quality of the theoretical
argument was impressively high. The thing that got lost in the debate,
however, was the land.
In a rapidly growing state like Oregon, what, precisely, are the state’s
ecological strengths and vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use
priorities have on water and soil and cropland and forest? One can imagine Diamond
writing about the Measure 37 debate, and he wouldn’t be very impressed by how
seriously Oregonians
wrestled with the problem of squaring their land-use rules with their values, because to him a society’s environmental
birthright is not best discussed in those terms. Rivers and streams and forests
and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse
when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and
culture and deeply held beliefs—with making sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid
Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of witnesses following the
announcement of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays—that they forget
that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone. When archeologists
looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the
big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland—crucifixes, bowls,
furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that the end came too quickly for
anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal
bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that
the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe
bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that
the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs
covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets.
But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost
sight of what they stood for.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?050103crbo_books |
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