Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed/twilight in the Desert (2006)

COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED by Jared Diamond, Viking, 2005 TWILIGHT IN THE DESERT by Matthew R. Simmons, Wiley & Sons, 2005 need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need or solve the problem. - Plato in the Republic And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. - President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 31, 2006 Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed gives the lie to the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. In his walk through a selected history of human catastrophes, Diamond concludes that in more cases than not necessity is simply the precursor to further deprivation and eventual disaster. As Diamond's history demonstrates, the success of human endeavor is not inevitable, and the choices made by a people and their leaders regarding the assumptions underlying their economic organization and the use of their resources can be critical to survival. The world is littered with the remains of civilizations that failed to alter their productive processes, even when it became apparent that they were unsustainable, and there were viable alternatives. A biologist and geographer by training, Diamond has been classified as an environmentalist. Yet, in Collapse he pays little attention to the preservation of a pristine environment for its own sake. More hard-headedly, Diamond's survey focuses on the use to the point of exhaustion of resources upon which economies have been based, and upon the failure of many societies either to recognize impending disaster or to find a means or reorganizing their productive resources in order to accommodate the scarcity of critical assets. While histories of the demise of communities and civilizations have obviously been written before, Diamond's effort to link these stories with a common economic and ecological thread is unique. His accounts include: the demise of civilization on Easter Island; the disappearance of Norse settlements in Greenland; the destruction of the American West's Anasazi civilization; and the collapse of the Maya. Diamond's history of Easter Island is perhaps the most dramatic. The Island's massive stone sculptures, left by the Easter Islanders amidst what is otherwise a completely denuded landscape, are compelling evidence that the Island once supported an ecological system that was completely decimated. In an analysis substantially drawn from the work of others, but no less compelling for that fact, Diamond demonstrates that like other South Pacific islands, Easter Island was once fully forested (as would have been necessary to erect and transport the massive sculptures) and that it supported an environment which included substantial agriculture and a significant domestic and wild bird population. With no evidence of significant climate change, Diamond concludes that the Easter Islanders simply used up their resources. The deforestation of the island and the resulting erosion of topsoil spelled destruction of the entire habitat. Should the Easter Islanders have seen this coming? Diamond's conclusion is that their direction was as obvious as the fact that they were toppling the last of the trees. The Islanders simply couldn't help themselves. Similarly compelling is Diamond's account of the Norse settlements in Greenland. Near the start of the first millennium, wandering Vikings settled in verdant meadows alongside Greenland's fjords, and imported a way of life that had supported them in Norway, including a dependence on livestock for food. While Greenland looked superficially similar to Norway, its topsoil was dramatically less durable, the growing season shorter, and the impact of logging far greater. While the settlements lasted nearly 500 years, the effect of the settlers on the land eventually took its toll, with deforestation, followed by massive soil erosion, the starvation of livestock, and, eventually, of the inhabitants themselves. …