Part 4

Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.

(Page 4 of 6)

Issues of human environmental impacts today tend to be controversial, and opinions about them tend to fall on a spectrum between two opposite camps. One camp, usually referred to as "environmentalist" or "pro-environment," holds that our current environmental problems are serious and in urgent need of addressing, and that current rates of economic and population growth cannot be sustained. The other camp holds that environmentalists' concerns are exaggerated and unwarranted, and that continued economic and population growth is both possible and desirable. The latter camp isn't associated with an accepted short label, and so I shall refer to it simply as "non-environmentalist." Its adherents come especially from the world of big business and economics, but the equation "non-environmentalist" = "pro-business" is imperfect; many businesspeople consider themselves environmentalists, and many people skeptical of environmentalists' claims are not in the world of big business. In writing this book, where do I stand myself with the respect to these two camps?

On the one hand, I have been a bird-watcher since I was seven years old. I trained professionally as a biologist, and I have been doing research on New Guinea rainforest birds for the past 40 years. I love birds, enjoy watching them, and enjoy being in rainforest. I also like other plants, animals, and habitats and value them for their own sakes. I've been active in many efforts to preserve species and natural environments in New Guinea and elsewhere. For the past dozen years I've been a director of the U.S. affiliate of World Wildlife Fund, one of the largest international environmentalist organizations and the one with the most cosmopolitan interests. All of those things have earned me criticism from non-environmentalists, who use phrases such as "fearmonger," "Diamond preaches gloom and doom," "exaggerates risks," and "favors endangered purple louseworts over the needs of people." But while I do love New Guinea birds, I love much more my sons, my wife, my friends, New Guineans, and other people. I'm more interested in environmental issues because of what I see as their consequences for people than because of their consequences for birds.

On the other hand, I have much experience, interest, and ongoing involvement with big businesses and other forces in our society that exploit environmental resources and are often viewed as anti-environmentalist. As a teenager, I worked on large cattle ranches in Montana, to which, as an adult and father, I now regularly take my wife and my sons for summer vacations. I had a job on a crew of Montana copper miners for one summer. I love Montana and my rancher friends, I understand and admire and sympathize with their agribusinesses and their lifestyles, and I've dedicated this book to them. In recent years I've also had much opportunity to observe and become familiar with other large extractive companies in the mining, logging, fishing, oil, and natural gas industries. For the last seven years I've been monitoring environmental impacts in Papua New Guinea's largest producing oil and natural gas field, where oil companies have engaged World Wildlife Fund to provide independent assessments of the environment. I have often been a guest of extractive businesses on their properties, I've talked a lot with their directors and employees, and I've come to understand their own perspectives and problems.

While these relationships with big businesses have given me close-up views of the devastating environmental damage that they often cause, I've also had close-up views of situations where big businesses found it in their interests to adopt environmental safeguards more draconian and effective than I've encountered even in national parks. I'm interested in what motivates these differing environmental policies of different businesses. My involvement with large oil companies in particular has brought me condemnation from some environmentalists, who use phrases such as "Diamond has sold out to big business," "He's in bed with big businesses," or "He prostitutes himself to the oil companies."

In fact, I am not hired by big businesses, and I describe frankly what I see happening on their properties even though I am visiting as their guest. On some properties I have seen oil companies and logging companies being destructive, and I have said so; on other properties I have seen them being careful, and that was what I said. My view is that, if environmentalists aren't willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won't be possible to solve the world's environmental problems. Thus, I am writing this book from a middle-of-the-road perspective, with experience of both environmental problems and of business realities.

How can one study the collapses of societies "scientifically"? Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. In some fields, such as chemistry and molecular biology, replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory are feasible and provide by far the most reliable means to acquire knowledge. My formal training was in two such fields of laboratory biology, biochemistry for my undergraduate degree and physiology for my Ph.D. From 1955 to 2002 I conducted experimental laboratory research in physiology, at Harvard University and then at the University of California in Los Angeles.

When I began studying birds in New Guinea rainforest in 1964, I was immediately confronted with the problem of acquiring reliable knowledge without being able to resort to replicated controlled experiments, whether in the laboratory or outdoors. It's usually neither feasible, legal, nor ethical to gain knowledge about birds by experimentally exterminating or manipulating their populations at one site while maintaining their populations at another site as unmanipulated controls. I had to use different methods. Similar methodological problems arise in many other areas of population biology, as well as in astronomy, epidemiology, geology, and paleontology.

A frequent solution is to apply what is termed the "comparative method" or the "natural experiment" - i.e., to compare natural situations differing with respect to the variable of interest. For instance, when I as an ornithologist am interested in effects of New Guinea's Cinnamon-browed Melidectes Honeyeater on populations of other honeyeater species, I compare bird communities on mountains that are fairly similar except that some do and others don't happen to support populations of Cinnamon-browed Melidectes Honeyeaters. Similarly, my books The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality compared different animal species, especially different species of primates, in an effort to figure out why women (unlike females of most other animal species) undergo menopause and lack obvious signs of ovulation, why men have a relatively large penis (by animal standards), and why humans usually have sex in private (rather than in the open, as almost all other animal species do). There is a large scientific literature on the obvious pitfalls of that comparative method, and on how best to overcome those pitfalls. Especially in historical sciences (like evolutionary biology and historical geology), where it's impossible to manipulate the past experimentally, one has no choice except to renounce laboratory experiments in favor of natural ones.

This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies) had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing instead on collapses rather than on buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence a society's stability. The "output" variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if a collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses.

A rigorous, comprehensive, and quantitative application of this method was possible for the problem of deforestation-induced collapses on Pacific islands. Prehistoric Pacific peoples deforested their islands to varying degrees, ranging from only slight to complete deforestation, and with societal outcomes ranging from long-term persistence to complete collapses that left everybody dead. For 81 Pacific islands my colleague Barry Rolett and I graded the extent of deforestation on a numerical scale, and we also graded values of nine input variables (such as rainfall, isolation, and restoration of soil fertility) postulated to influence deforestation. By a statistical analysis we were able to calculate the relative strengths with which each input variable predisposed the outcome to deforestation. Another comparative experiment was possible in the North Atlantic, where medieval Vikings from Norway colonized six islands or land masses differing in suitability for agriculture, ease of trade contact with Norway, and other input variables, and also differing in outcome (from quick abandonment, to everybody dead after 500 years, to still thriving after 1,200 years). Still other comparisons are possible between societies from different parts of the world.

All of these comparisons rest on detailed information about individual societies, patiently accumulated by archaeologists, historians, and other scholars. At the end of this book I provide references to the many excellent books and papers on the ancient Maya and Anasazi, the modern Rwandans and Chinese, and the other past and present societies that I compare. Those individual studies constitute the indispensable database for my book. But there are additional conclusions that can be drawn from comparisons among those many societies, and that could not have been drawn from detailed study of just a single society. For example, to understand the famous Maya collapse requires not only accurate knowledge of Maya history and the Maya environment; we can place the Maya in a broader context and gain further insights by comparing them with other societies that did or didn't collapse, and that resembled the Maya in some respects and differed from them in other respects. Those further insights require the comparative method.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond's many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.