| On page 500 of Collapse, Jared Diamond’s new book, he writes: “[M]y friends in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, now carry a portable small chemical toilet in their car because travel can be so prolonged and slow; they once set off to go out of town on a holiday weekend but gave up and returned home after 17 hours, when they had advanced only three miles through the traffic jam.”
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| This is a fine example of the pithy, telling anecdotes that pepper Diamond’s writing. Yet, his book does not deal with the micro, but the very macro. His last book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was about why some societies flourished and some didn’t.
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| This one has quite as vast a scale, covering hundreds of years in each case study, but more contemporary relevance. In Collapse, Diamond examines societies that have failed, and examines the causes for those failures, a mix of environmental and manmade factors.
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| Then he turns his gaze towards modern times to see the dangers we face, and might be in denial of.
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| Diamond begins—and this seems curious at first—with Montana, America’s “Big Sky State”, which would hardly appear to have the environmental problems of other states.
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| But he gradually demonstrates how it contains a microcosm of the problems the world faces, of “toxic wastes, forests, soils, water (and sometimes air), climate change, biodiversity losses, and introduced pests”.
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| He writes about how mining, logging and agriculture—the three industries from which Montana builds its self-image—are declining, and how Montana faces both social pressures from immigrants, and environmental ones.
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| But what Diamond demonstrates is that there is no clear solution to these problems. There are those who favour more government regulation to protect the environment, and those who oppose this for fear that it will restrict individual freedoms, and they are all correct, in their own ways.
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| Of all the alternative scenarios that could play themselves out, we can’t know for sure which will work and which will lead to disaster. We wil l only know in hindsight.
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| One would have imagined, for example, that logging and the extensive fire suppression programmes of the government would have led to a decrease in forest fires in Montana over the last century.
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| Yet, Diamond shows us how the unintended consequences of those actions actually led to a huge increase in forest fires. This book is littered with such unintended consequences.
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| Who would have thought, for example, of the damage that would follow when British colonists took foxes and rabbits to Australia. “Foxes have proceeded,” Diamond writes, “to prey on and exterminate many species of native Australian mammals without evolutionary experience of foxes, while rabbits consume much of the plant fodder intended for sheep and cattle, outcompete native herbivorous mammals, and undermine the ground by their burrows.”
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| Australia still struggles with these problems more than a century-and-a-half later, but they’re doing okay otherwise, especially in cricket.
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| But many societies have collapsed because of just such unintended consequences, and the most fascinating part of this book is the case studies Diamond presents of societies such as of Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans and Easter Island.
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| Take Easter Island, famed for its vivid postcard imagery, for example: one of the ways in which the islanders finished themselves was by complete deforestation, which led to “losses of raw material, losses of wild-caught food and decreased crop yields”. All this led to collapse.
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| Diamond asks the crucial question: what was the islander who cut down the last palm tree on that island thinking as he did it? The multiple explanations come from, and illustrate, how we think about the environment.
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| Diamond tells us about “creeping normalcy”, for example, which refers to change that is so slow and gradual that we do not notice it happening, but our perception of what is “normal” slowly shifts.
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| In Easter Island, for example, the deforestation would have been so gradual that they would not even have noticed the process. Or, as is also typical of us today, they would have been in denial about its repercussions.
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| Diamond lists not just the various environmental problems that the world confronts today, but also the many reasons why we avoid dealing with them, all of which make the collapse of previous societies comprehensible.
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| Collapse is not an environmental polemic, though, but a balanced work that ends by mixing caution and hope.
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| This is evident in a chapter entitled “Big Businesses and the Environment”, which contains the expected denunciation of some big companies, but is also full of praise for companies like the oil giant Chevron, detailing how one of their oil fields had led to the forest around it actually becoming enriched rather than depleted because of their caution and care for the environment, ending up as “by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea”.
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| Diamond shows how this concern arises not out of the goodness of the hearts of oil company executives, but out of the profit motive: already, in the first world, it helps the bottom line to have environment-friendly practices because the people—the consumers—often make choices based on this, and the legal system is geared to punish transgressions heavily.
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| It demonstrates that sometimes, what governments cannot achieve, markets can. “The conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behaviour of even the biggest businesses,” Diamond writes, “is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing.”
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He is right, of course, and books like Collapse play a large part in giving “the public” the tools to make its mind up. For that reason, it’s an essential read.
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COLLAPSE
HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR COLLAPSE
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Jared Diamond
Allen Lane
Price: £15
Pages: 592 |
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Content Guide
