Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive for the British edition) is a 2005 book by academic and popular science author Jared Diamond, in which the author first defines collapse: "a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time." He then reviews the causes of historical and pre-historical instances of societal collapse—particularly those involving significant influences from environmental changes, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners, and the society's response to the foregoing four challenges. It also considers why societies might not perceive a problem, might not decide to attempt a solution, and why an attempted solution might fail.
While the bulk of the book is concerned with the demise of these historical civilizations, Diamond also argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same issues, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations.
Synopsis
In the prologue, Jared Diamond summarizes his methodology in one paragraph:
Collapses of past societies
Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbours, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and the society's response to the foregoing four factors.
The root problem in all but one of Diamond's factors leading to collapse is overpopulation relative to the practicable (as opposed to the ideal theoretical) carrying capacity of the environment. One environmental problem not related to overpopulation is the harmful effect of accidental or intentional introduction of non-native species to a region.
Diamond also writes about cultural factors (values), such as the apparent reluctance of the Greenland Norse to eat fish. Diamond also states that "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is an ancient one. It's obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice".
Modern societies
He also lists twelve environmental problems facing humankind today. The first eight have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:
Deforestation and habitat destruction
Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
Water management problems
Overhunting
Overfishing
Effects of introduced species on native species
Overpopulation
Increased per-capita impact of people
Further, he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:
Anthropogenic climate change
Buildup of toxins in the environment
Energy shortages
Full human use of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity
Conclusions
In the last chapter, he discusses environmental problems facing modern societies and addresses objections that are often given to dismiss the importance of environmental problems (section "One-liner objections"). In the "Further readings" section, he gives suggestions to people who ask "What can I do as an individual?". He also draws conclusions, such as:
Finally, he answers the question, "What are the choices that we must make if we are to succeed, and not to fail?" by identifying two crucial choices distinguishing the past societies that failed from those that survived:
Long-term planning: "... the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions." Diamond says it can be especially bad when the short-term interest of elite leaders conflicts with the long-term interests of the society, and the elite are insulated from the direct consequences.
Willingness to reconsider core values: "... the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of these treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches?"
Book structure
Collapse is divided into four parts.
Part One describes the environment of the US state of Montana, focusing on the lives of several individuals to put a human face on the interplay between society and the environment.
Part Two describes past societies that have collapsed. Diamond uses a "framework" when considering the collapse of a society, consisting of five "sets of factors" that may affect what happens to a society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trading partners, and the society's responses to its environmental problems. A recurrent problem in collapsing societies is a structure that creates "a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole."
The societies Diamond describes are:
The Greenland Norse (cf. Hvalsey Church) (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, hostile neighbors, irrational reluctance to eat fish, chiefs looking after their short-term interests).
Easter Island (a society that, Diamond contends, collapsed entirely due to environmental damage)
The Polynesians of Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners)
The Anasazi of southwestern North America (environmental damage and climate change)
The Maya of Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors)
Finally, Diamond discusses three past success stories:
The tiny egalitarian Pacific island of Tikopia
The agricultural success of egalitarian central New Guinea
The forest management in stratified Japan of the Tokugawa-era, and in Germany.
Part Three examines modern societies, including:
The collapse into genocide of Rwanda, caused in part by overpopulation
The failure of Haiti compared with the relative success of its neighbor on Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic
The problems facing a developing nation, China
The problems facing a First World nation, Australia
Part Four concludes the study by considering such subjects as business and globalization, and "extracts practical lessons for us today" (pp. 22–23). Specific attention is given to the polder model as a way Dutch society has addressed its challenges and the "top-down" and most importantly "bottom-up" approaches that we must take now that "our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course" (p. 498) in order to avoid the "12 problems of non-sustainability" that he expounds throughout the book, and reviews in the final chapter. The results of this survey are perhaps why Diamond sees "signs of hope" nevertheless and arrives at a position of "cautious optimism" for all our futures.
The second edition contains an Afterword: Angkor's Rise and Fall.
Reviews
Tim Flannery gave Collapse the highest praise in Science, writing:
The Economists review was generally favorable, although the reviewer had two disagreements. First, the reviewer felt Diamond was not optimistic enough about the future. Secondly, the reviewer claimed Collapse contains some erroneous statistics: for instance, Diamond purportedly overstated the number of starving people in the world. University of British Columbia professor of ecological planning William Rees wrote that Collapses most important lesson is that societies most able to avoid collapse are the ones that are most agile, able to adopt practices favorable to their own survival and avoid unfavorable ones. Moreover, Rees wrote that Collapse is "a necessary antidote" to followers of Julian Simon, such as Bjørn Lomborg who authored The Skeptical Environmentalist. Rees explained this assertion as follows:<ref>William Rees, "Contemplating the abyss", Nature, volume 433, 6 January 2005, pages 15-16.</ref>
Jennifer Marohasy of the coal-mining backed think-tank Institute of Public Affairs wrote a critical review in Energy & Environment, in particular its chapter on Australia's environmental degradation. Marohasy claims that Diamond reflects a popular view that is reinforced by environmental campaigning in Australia, but is not supported by evidence, and argues that many of his claims are easily disproved.
In his review in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell highlights the way Diamond's approach differs from traditional historians by focusing on environmental issues rather than cultural questions.
While Diamond does not reject the approach of traditional historians, his book, according to Gladwell, vividly illustrates the limitations of that approach. Gladwell demonstrates this with his own example of a recent ballot initiative in Oregon, where questions of property rights and other freedoms were subject to a free and healthy debate, but serious ecological questions were given scant attention.
In 2006 the book was shortlisted for The Aventis Prizes for Science Books award, eventually losing out to David Bodanis's Electric Universe.
Criticisms
Jared Diamond's thesis that Easter Island society collapsed in isolation entirely due to environmental damage and cultural inflexibility is contested by some ethnographers and archaeologists, who argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and slave raiding, which devastated the population in the 19th century, had a much greater social impact than environmental decline, and that introduced animals—first rats and then sheep—were greatly responsible for the island's loss of native flora, which came closest to deforestation as late as 1930–1960.
The book Questioning Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a collection of essays by fifteen archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians criticizing various aspects of Diamond's books Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel. The book was a result of 2006 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in response to the misinformation that Diamond's popular science publications were causing and the association decided to combine experts from multiple fields of research to cover the claims made in Diamond's and debunk them. The book includes research from indigenous peoples of the societies Diamond discussed as collapsed and also vignettes of living examples of those communities, in order to showcase the main theme of the book on how societies are resilient and change into new forms over time, rather than collapsing.
Film
In 2010, National Geographic released the documentary film Collapse based on Diamond's book.
See also
List of environmental books
List of important publications in anthropology
Creeping normality
Decline of the Roman Empire
Deforestation during the Roman period
Ecocide
Environmental disaster
Global catastrophic risk
Global warming
Human impact on the environment
Societal collapse
Sustainability
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy Wicked problem
Notes
References
External links
Chapter 1 of Collapse
Tokugawa Shoguns vs. Consumer Democracy: Diamond interview on the subjects raised in the book with NPQ, Spring 2005, concentrating on the intersection of politics and environmentalism.
How Societies Fail – And Sometimes Succeed, video of a seminar given in June 2005 at the Long Now Foundation.
Learning from Past Societies: The Sustainability Lessons Are There, If Only We Can Find Them – This is an assessment of the process maturity used in Collapse and a similar book, Treading Lightly, to answer their driving questions. The assessment sheds light on the process maturity of any similar effort to solve difficult complex social system problems, particularly the sustainability problem.
COLLAPSE? – museum exhibit developed by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in collaboration with Jared Diamond (pdf archive)
Environmental-issues – A public annotated bibliography containing print and online sources discussing the 12 most serious environmental problems that Diamond discusses in Collapse''.
2005 non-fiction books
2005 in the environment
Environmental non-fiction books
Non-fiction books adapted into films
Viking Press books
Works about the theory of history
Works by Jared Diamond