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How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
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The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a romantic
fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of
them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to
experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to their often
spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The
scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their
builders—they boast "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in
Shelley's words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures
that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so
mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?—did
they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleasant way?
Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought: might such a fate
eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists someday stare mystified
at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the
jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?
It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at
least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying
the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of
unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made
in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians,
paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through
which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments
fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case:
deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and
soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing,
effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and
increased per-capita impact of people.
Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting
variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified
means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or
terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more
marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths.
Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight
types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be
abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation,
wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of
governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased
through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political,
economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers
find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies
and the trajectories of individual human lives—to talk of a society's birth,
growth, peak, senescence, and death—and to assume that the long period of
senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also
applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies
(and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak
numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and
shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, everybody in
the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajectory is not
one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different
societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while
many societies didn't collapse at all.
The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern;
indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other
Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow
nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civilization. The
environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined
past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of
toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization
of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is
claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we
solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but
also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving
human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would 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. Such
a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases
or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources. If
this reasoning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of
the world in which the current generation of children and young adults lives out
their middle and late years. But the seriousness of these current environmental
problems is vigorously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely
are they underestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population
of almost seven billion, with our potent modern technology, is causing our
environment to crumble globally at a much more rapid rate than a mere few
million people with stone and wooden tools already made it crumble locally in
the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new
problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g.,
wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new
resource (e.g., plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)?
From Collapse by Jared Diamond. Copyright Jared Diamond 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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