Collapse by Jared Diamond

What does one do after winning the Pulitzer Prize? Perhaps take a long deserved round-the-word vacation? Write a memoir? In a way Jared Diamond accomplishes both tasks in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. If Guns, Germs, and Steel was about showing difference – why the Eurasian continent was geographically and ecologically better suited than the rest of the world to develop extensive cities and agriculture – Collapse is ultimately about similarities. The book compares an array of historical societies that either vanished or steeply declined in numbers and power, showing that in each and every case ecological mismanagement played the pivotal role. As one might expect, Diamond explicitly compares the crises of the past with those of our 21st-century global village, making the book far more incendiary than a detached exercise in comparative history. However, he steers clear of pessimistic environmental determinism by sprinkling-in counter-examples of societies, which, when faced with similar problems, actually found sustainable solutions.

At moments the book bears the marks of a travel memoir with its bountiful anecdotes about the places visited and the lives of its inhabitants – past and present. These stories put a warm face on what is ultimately a cold, social-scientific reduction of human history to laws of behavior, and ultimately make the book overly long. Nearly all of the book’s arguments are at some point condensed into bullet point-like lists. For your convenience and quick reference I will append several of Diamond’s much beloved lists at the end of this essay. Fare warning, though, by limiting yourself to the lists you will miss out on some rather sappy letters from Montana locals, though also on some honestly intriguing details about Viking yogurt production and New Guinean horticulture. Yet these warm and fuzzy stories are more than ornamental. They betray one of the deeper analytical problems with the book, that is, Diamond’s nostalgic anti-urbanism. His otherwise sharp analytical lens fogs up when turned away from older societies and toward the modern, urban, industrial, global, market-oriented world. In essence his comparison between past collapsed societies and our own, while extremely illuminating, remains deceivingly problematic.

Since environmentalist prophecies of apocalypse are not likely to generate much surprise, let me tell you where Diamond bucks the trend and surprises readers of all political stripes. For starters, Diamond has almost nothing to say about global warming, CO2 emissions, energy scarcity, the ozone, pesticides, genetically modified crops, or diffusion of chemicals (the issues of Al Gore, Rachel Carson, Michael Pollen). Collapse focuses primarily on the twin ecological problems of deforestation and erosion, while consistently proposing population control and strict state regulation as solutions. However, the most unique issues raised by the book are the continued devastation caused by mining and the need to sympathize with big business.

Perhaps the central historical lesson of Collapse is that deforestation and erosion were the primary reasons for the collapse of the Vikings in Greenland, Mayan civilization, the Anasazi cities in what is now the U.S. Southwest, and the societies on several South Pacific islands, notably Easter, Pitcairn, and Henderson. Additionally, Diamond cites deforestation and erosion as the roots of disarray in modern day Haiti and Rwanda, though giving little evidence for the latter. Deforestation – to the last tree in the case of Easter Island – not only eliminates what could be a renewal resource for fuel and shelter, but also accelerates erosion, making the land more vulnerable to wind and especially flood damage, as in the case of Anasazi, whose fields and structures were washed away. Similarly erosion reduces crop productivity and the stability of built environment. It should be noted that Diamond makes a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes for societal collapse. The ultimate cause, he asserts, is always ecological, but the proximate – that which immediately precipitated the death or emigration of most of the society – might be war, famine, natural disaster, decline of a trading partner, etc. So while the immediate reason for the death of the Vikings in Greenland may have been civil war or invasions (it is unknown), deforestation and erosion had weakened the society and inspired acts of desperation.

Although the identity of Diamond’s sparring partner isn’t revealed until near the end, much of the book is aimed at debunking Joseph Tainter’s claim in The Collapse of Complex Societies that depletion of environmental resources is not a factor for “complex societies: “That is, Tainter’s reasoning suggested to him that complex societies are not likely to allow themselves to collapse through failure to manage their environmental resources. Yet it is painfully clear from all the cases discussed in this book that precisely such a failure has happened repeatedly” (420). Diamond shows that Tainter’s “reasoning” is laced with a primitivist prejudice that doesn’t think societies with economic diversification and bureaucracy would allow the last tree to be felled – only an idiot savage would do this. Diamond rightly deploys the anthropologist’s sense for the structural similarities of all human societies – we are not that different than the Mayans and Easter Islanders!

At this point I should make clear the extreme care Diamond takes to deflect the mounting pessimism. His first line of defense comes in a form of a profound adulation for the innate goodness of humanity. While societies may fail to respond to ecological crisis for a variety of reasons (see appendix list #5), Diamond never blames crisis on raging selfishness or stupidity. His second strategy is to create a counter list of societies that, when faced with the major ecological problems (again primarily deforestation and erosion) actually changed their behaviors and continued to exist (i.e., there is hope for us!). The success stories include the Inca, Iceland, New Guinea, Tokawado Japan, the Dominican Republic, and the island of Tikopia.

While the specific strategies for survival among these societies are perhaps more diverse than the cases of decline, all employed strict measures to curb population growth and tight regulation of resource extraction. Despite Diamond’s usual fearlessness in deploying flowery language, it is noteworthy that he doesn’t fully advertise these controversial points with flashing lights. Nevertheless, he returns to them with diligent repetition. He is explicit about the limits of grassroots sustainability and the need for statism in complex societies. And while such argumentation is really not much of a surprise, it definitely lands him in a left-of-center sympathy for government regulation, an alienating point for the libertarian element in American politics. Where Diamond really transgresses the boundaries of political correctness is in his Malthusian insistence that zero population growth is a prerequisite for sustainability. He seems hesitant to advocate specific policies – again, lack of flashing lights – but he notes with scientific coolness the laudatory effects of abortion and infanticide, and limitations on child-bearing and marriage. This is Diamond at his boldest and most convincing, and for that I applaud him. After all, haven’t most unsustainable directions in human history been the result of population pressures?

The final two topics about which Diamond makes an original and sustained argument are mining and what he calls “big business”. Among the extraction industries, oil and coal tend to get more flack and bad press than hardrock mining, but it is the latter that causes perhaps the most ecological damage (of course Diamond is only considering the process of extraction, not its later use. More on this later). According to Diamond, “The [hardrock mining] industry is currently the leading toxic polluter in the U.S., responsible for nearly half of reported industrial pollution” (452). In addition to the totalizing erosion of open pit mining – which is similar to coal – hardrock mining pollutes water with the metal itself, the chemicals used for processing, tailing sediment, and acidic drainage. In many cases shaft mining is no better, as it results, if not properly capped, in a permanent leakage of toxic acids. Currently there are 20,000 such leaking mines in Montana alone. What complicates all of this is that – unlike in coal and oil extraction – there is little incentive for mining companies to clean up or reclaim damaged ecosystems. Hardrock mining is becoming an unprofitable enterprise, with many companies claiming bankruptcy and passing the clean up costs onto the tax payer. While the hobby horse issue of hardrock mining does little to advance Diamond’s overall argument, it dovetails nicely with his insistence that ecological sustainability is good for business.

Perhaps one of the most sparkling idiosyncrasies of Collapse is the author’s appeal, not just to economic necessity, but to “big business.” Rather than perpetuating the stereotypical tension between environmentalists and industry – picture for a moment an activist chained to a tree, attempting to save it from logging – Diamond recognizes that big companies are major power brokers in the modern world and that large-scale change will not occur if they are not on board. Whereas his muted calls for state regulation may alienate the business community, ultimately Diamond is quite vocal in his appeal to big business on its terms, even suggesting that, in numerous ways, it can be profitable to be green. He raises this intriguing line of argument early in the book, but only fleshes it out, like many of the arguments, in the final chapters. Unfortunately the examples of and arguments for the profitability of sustainability proved highly unsatisfactory to this curious reader, and were at best contradictory, at worst downright deceptive.

Diamond’s central example of green big business is a comparison between Chevron and another unnamed oil company. The author visited both of sites of extraction to observe birds in the lands owned by the oil companies (Diamond is by trade an ornithologist) in New Guinea. As of 1986 the property of the unnamed company contained unnecessarily wide roads, oil spills, and almost no wildlife. By contrast the land of Chevron circa 2000 reversed these demerits, a welcomed change, but what does that prove about the ecological logic of oil extraction? Why is there a large band of “wilderness” surrounding the extraction site? The ability to preserve wilderness is important, but ultimately not an example of sustainability, not an example of how to intelligently use resources. Diamond’s analysis of Chevron here is a less than elaborate slight of hand. He side steps the whole issue of green house gas emissions and the devastating ecological (not to mention social) impact of the car-per-person mentality. Admittedly, oil extraction can be much cleaner than coal or hardrock mining, with the only greatest dangers lying in transportation, but as the recent tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates, one mistake can be one too many. Playing with oil is playing with fire. Diamond’s praise for oil companies’ environmental savvy sounds even more ridiculous now.

But the real problem with Diamond’s examples is that they contradict the argument that it can be profitable for big business to be green. While it will, of course, profit to have resources to extract far into the future, I feel pretty confident saying that it is never inherently profitable to be sustainable. From Diamond’s examples, Chevron was able to get contracts in Europe because of its good environmental record, as it became less profitable to be a sloppy oil extractor after the very visible 1989 Exon Valdez catastrophe. As the oil industry illustrates, the profitability of sustainability only comes into play with marketing and state intervention, both of which are highly problematic. A company must only appear to its target public to be green – it is their marketing, not the truth of their practices that determine profit. That it has become marketable to be green might actually be a huge barrier to achieving real sustainability, because companies can “green wash” themselves such that the claim has no substance and the consumer is trapped in a sick, confusing game. While now it can be profitable to appear green, for oil companies they only have to not appear to be environmentally destructive. Diamond’s slight of hand is in this negative declination. Oil extraction can never be a positive contribution to a sustainable ecosystem or economy, but can simply wreak less damage. Ultimately, though, causing less damage is not in itself financially worth it, but only projecting an image of causing less damage.

More importantly than public opinion, the real unprofitability of unsustainability only comes about with strict state regulation, even more strictly enforced. For example, clear cutting will always generate more profit than forest thinning, unless sustainable harvesting is the only legal method of forestry. But what government is going to risk the political fallout of making its big businesses less profitable? And since there are graduations of sustainability, won’t businesses always gravitate toward what is legally the least sustainable. And then there is the glaring fact – mentioned by Diamond – that “big businesses” are legally bound to make as much profit for their investors as possible, no matter the ecological damage. All the examples Diamond gives to support the profitability of sustainability are negative examples – it only hurts profit to get caught or held accountable, and most things are not regulated. Even the green marketing is mostly a defensive measure because of pressures external to the process of production.

Of course sustainability is profitable in the long term – if there no trees left to harvest and no one to sell them to that would be problematic – but business, especially joint-stock companies, only operate in the short term. Sustainability always requires short term losses in profitability. Projected onto a larger scale, the first world is going to have to take a cut in so called “living standards” in order to live sustainably. In a way Diamond even notes this when he points to the fact that it is physically impossible in terms of planetary resources for everyone on the planet to currently live at first world standards – which is the state goal of the developing world. Unless we start pillaging other planets, there are not enough material resources for the entire earth’s population to live like Jared Diamond in a Los Angeles suburb. This factoid stands head to head with Diamond’s deliciously ambiguous comment that the contemporary world might not face total collapse, but only lower living standards – which he maintains (in contradiction to his point above) to be a serious threat to avoid. Somehow Diamond thinks that we can keep our standard of living and dramatically reduce our resource usage. I actually don’t think that there is a one-to-one indirect relationship, given the accumulation of surpluses in elite hands. We don’t have to all live in shanty towns, but somehow we have to rethink the way we live – which Diamond does not.

I am not prepared to offer a total solution, but a partial one can be found by exploding one Diamond’s false dichotomies. At several points he makes the glib observation that businesses are not charities but profit making entities. Now profit can mean one of two things. It can either refer to net (what one makes after operating costs) or to capital (the surplus beyond salaries, which is reinvested in the company and distributed to stock holders as dividends). Diamond makes it clear that he is talking about this second kind of profit. But what about the first kind of profit? It is neither charity nor the unending multiplication of surplus, but rather generating enough income for everyone involved to “make a living.” It is still subject to the adverse effects of profit-driven system on sustainable practices, but it is not stuck in a cycle which requires one to continually grow or wither on the vine. The pursuit of net is not bound to “sustainable growth” – perhaps a contradiction in terms. If big businesses that have gone public fail to expand, their stock goes down and they not only lose the ability to expand, but they loose money.

To bring things back to Diamond, he is an ornithologist, a biologist, and an environmental historian – at his best in those realms, but he is generally a bit sloppy when it comes to contemporary issues. He cites hotel encouragement of towel reuse as a sign of growing environmental awareness. Of course he is right; it is a sign of public awareness, but more importantly, a sign of the marketability of sustainable practices and a manipulation of them. Hotels are able to profit from not washing your towels, but do you see hotels making any other strides in sustainability? In fact, the multiplication of “disposabilia” means that hotels are probably less sustainable now than they were forty years ago, before the birth of the modern environmental movement, but that is just a hunch. As far as an example of the potentially beneficial power of big business, Diamond also cites McDonalds, which in the face of slumping burger profits, forced meat packagers to adopt measures that reduced the spread of mad cow. True, this is a small victory for human health, but then again, McDonalds should not be confused with human health and ecological thinking. This is akin to Walmart’s recent self-marketing as a green company to assuage the consciences of its increasingly concerned customers. What an example of doublespeak and proof that consumer pressures for sustainable products can easily be diffused. Sustainability is not a black or white issue – on or off – but a process of ever-deepening greenness, a process that should not be confused with a pretty label or the word “natural.”

Other strikes against Diamond’s analysis of the present include remarks about LA traffic, immigration, Rwandan genocide, and the success story of the Dominican Republic. In a few short sentences – which include a story of how the auto industry bought up and destroyed trolley lines in LA – Diamond dismisses the feasibility of a decent public transportation system in his home city, citing the necessity of long commutes. With a total lack of imagination he justifies a serious ecological problem and shows no interest in analyzing the urban world. As mentioned before, his analysis of Rwanda, while showing how economic tensions can spark violence, makes scant reference to ecology, in an over-reaching effort to get genocide into his book. Worse yet, he borders on irresponsibly racist analyses of illegal immigration into the first world and white flight from the Dominican Republic. Regarding the Dominican Republic he is, of course, quick to applaud its state regulation of resources, but also the influx of foreign capital and transformation of the country an extract and export economy. Haiti’s autarky, while potentially receiving high marks for sustainability, is flagged as backward.

So far I have been taking pot shots at rather tertiary points of Collapse, primarily the naïve pandering to big business and flat analysis of the modern world. However, the sum of these criticisms is a rather damning judgment of the whole comparative project. While there are convincing parallels between past collapsed societies and our own, much of the relevance of the lessons of past collapse breaks down as one crosses the threshold of modernity. Because Diamond approaches human societies from the perspective of the anthropologist looking for structural similarities across space and time, he is wedded to a transhistorical point of view that resists the possibility that, while humans are humans, the world of industrial-global-capitalism is qualitatively different from localized agrarian societies. Only 2% percent of Americans make their living from agriculture, so even if their businesses are severely weakened by soil erosion (a very real threat in the Midwest), they can theoretically receive subsidies or job retraining and we can import (if not chemically create) our food. The time-honored threats of deforestation and erosion do not pose a direct threat to most Americans’ way of life. The scenic value of forests has actually allowed us to store up wood that probably should be thinned out so as to prevent fires. Most of the historical examples that Diamond can cull are only applicable to threats to agricultural land, not urban and suburban development, which pose soil, air, and aquifer threats of their own. Erosion and deforestation actually pose new distinctly urban threats (such as poor air quality), and it would be interesting to see an analysis of how these might indirectly contribute to collapse, economic or otherwise.

Diamonds initial strategy is to provocatively juxtapose abandoned Greenland with modern Montana, which share considerable qualities. Additionally, it is part of his argumentative strategy to assert that if the economy in Montana – what we might consider an ecologically stable and thriving location – is vulnerable to collapse, just imagine how much greater the dangers are in the more vulnerable ecologies of the urban world. He leaves up to the imagination the ecological threats and solutions to the world where most Americans actually live. This unarticulated gulf between Montana and, let’s just select Diamond’s home, Los Angeles, represents two things: 1) the gulf between the premodern and the modern that Diamond can only bridge using an imaginary leap, and 2) Diamond’s self-proclaimed distain for the urban.

Without getting too hung up on the differences between the Neolithic and Industrial worlds, let me just point out that it is possible for the Neolithic world to attain some semblance of sustainability. Diamond cites the inspiring example of New Guinea – a place Diamond has spent considerable time – where an agricultural civilization managed to sustainably farm the same land for thousands of years. By contrast the “fertile crescent” is now a desert with America’s breadbasket not far behind. On the other hand the modern imperatives for economic growth, opening up new markets, and extracting new resources make it impossible for our current system to attain a similar stability. And with a system that structurally requires ad nauseum capital accumulation how can we expect the public to put pressure on governments and big businesses to enforce their sustainability, that is, to decrease their short term profitability? The thrust of my notion that the modern world is qualitatively different from those of past societies is not to suggest that collapse is not a possibility, but rather to suggest that the threat is far greater than Diamond’s optimism lets on. Additionally, if something is to be done, it is going to require radical change – not just of Montana’s distant farming and ranching life – but of urban and suburban ways of life. The bumper sticker is relevant here: regime change begins at home.

In some of his memoir moments in Collapse, Diamond displays his anti-urbanism, both directly in his aversion to living in Los Angeles, and indirectly in obtuse comments about the authenticity and vigor of life in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. We can’t all simply escape to Montana or, like Diamond, have a second home there. I’m sure he could have said more about the urban environmental problems that he has encountered, but that would have been a different book – one he doesn’t want to write. More evidence for his lack of desire to rethink the urban comes from missed analytical opportunities in the book. Some interesting points are not missed, but rather just unsatisfactorily expanded on. First off, several of the failed societies – Eastern Islanders, Greenland Norse, Mayan – got caught up in the production of luxury goods and monuments of power rather than more life-sustaining activities. Secondly, several societies suffered from trying to bring old traditions (including plants and animals) to new environments rather than adapting to their new ecological arrangements. This seems especially salient to the modern U.S. where carbon copies of housing projects developed in Long Island are transplanted to the deserts of the arid Southwest, evidence that we are not learning from the dichotomy between the collapsed Anazi and successful Pueblo societies about how to build for the local environment. There are similar interesting dichotomies between the Norse and Inuit in Greenland or the British and Aborigines in Australia, where one group fails to learn lessons from the other. Finally, Diamond could have said more about a common trend in the ecologically fragile islands of Iceland and Australia, both of which are experiencing demographic polarization between metropolis and rural, with midsize towns and cities becoming unsustainable and extinct. Perhaps this necessity-driven bifurcation is a model for us all.

In fairness to Diamond, he is quite upfront (in one of his lists) that the modern world faces new ecological challenges: “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” (7). Despite this qualifier, the book barely touches on these new challenges. I suppose the effect of his particular comparative approach was to make contemporary collapse seem like a very possible threat, given that historically deforestation and erosion has brought down the strongest of societies. Yet by ignoring these new, perhaps more urgent threats, he somewhat obfuscates the modern condition. A facet of this condition which he is quick to emphasize is our global interconnectedness. This provides both heightened hope and deeper despair. On the one hand, societies can no longer collapse outside the gaze of the global community, but on the other hand, the fate of the entire world is now interlocked, such that social collapse means planetary collapse, a far more apocalyptic specter.

Despite my reservations about Diamond’s treatment of history, business, and modernity, we should by no means brush off his warning about those age old threats of deforestation and soil erosion. They are painfully real for our globe. Thin and salinated soil spells not just a decrease in food quantity – in an age of growing food crisis – but declining food quality. No nitrogen means no nutrients and no taste. We may technically have sustenance far into the future, but how healthy will that food be? While Diamond says little to address the toxicity of modern urban life or global climate change, perhaps they are moot points, if we can’t grow enough food. As to what is the most important issue, I defer to one of Diamond’s perceptive remarks: “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem…If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble” (498). If there is a way forward for life on this planet – either bare life or, better yet, abundant life – we face a multi-faceted overhaul of our “way of life.”

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Appendix

“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, salination, and fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people” (6).

“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” (7).

“Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors – environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and [loss of] friendly trade partners – may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors – the society’s responses to its environmental problems – always proves significant” (11).

“What Affects Deforestation on Pacific Islands? Deforestation is more severe on: dry islands than wet islands; cold high-latitude islands than warm equatorial islands; old volcanic islands than young volcanic islands; islands without aerial ash fallout than islands with it; islands without makatea than islands with it; low islands than high islands; remote islands than islands with near neighbors; and small islands than big islands” (116).

“What I’m going to propose instead is a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making. I’ll divide the factors into a fuzzily delineated sequence of four categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail to even try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed” (421).