[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Book review: 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond

Sun Jan 30 01:27:16 PST 2005

>
>      Jonathon Porritt appreciates Jared Diamond's
>      timely reminder of our destructive instincts.
>
>Saturday January 15, 2005
>The Guardian
>
><http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1390552,00.html>
>
>Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
>by Jared Diamond, 400pp, Allen Lane, £20
>
>As no other phenomenon in living memory, the Indian
>Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami have reminded
>people of the raw power of natural forces at work. There
>was nothing "man-made" about this particular disaster,
>though it may well be that the overwhelming scale of its
>impact was exacerbated by the way in which we have
>developed some of the worst-affected coastal areas.
>
>In Collapse, Jared Diamond uses that elemental power of
>nature as his background, but fills his foreground with
>an astonishing cavalcade of different peoples and
>cultures from across the planet. They are linked by
>Diamond's inquiry into what caused some of these
>societies (such as the Mayan civilisation or the people
>of Easter Island) to collapse, while others facing
>similar challenges managed to survive.
>
>He admits to having started out on this inquiry assuming
>it would prove to be straightforward abuse of their
>physical environment that precipitated their demise. In
>other words, serial ecocide. It turned out to be a lot
>more complex, with several equally influential factors
>involved, such as climate change, the presence of
>hostile neighbours, any involvement in trade, and a host
>of different response mechanisms on the part of those
>facing potential collapse. Each collapse or near-
>collapse throws up a different balance of those key
>factors.
>
>Diamond is at pains to stress the objectivity he has
>brought to bear on a sequence of collapse scenarios that
>often continue to generate serious controversy, and for
>the most part (until the final chapter) leaves it up to
>the reader to draw down any conclusions from these
>scenarios that may be relevant to our own societies
>today. This pursuit of objectivity drives him into a
>depth of detail that on several occasions clearly
>impedes the narrative line he is seeking to develop.
>There is only so much about the middens on Easter Island
>or the soil structures of Greenland that one needs to
>know to embrace a particular collapse hypothesis.
>
>The diversity of the case studies he uses (both past and
>present) is extraordinary. Ranging from the highlands of
>New Guinea to the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, from
>Greenland and Iceland to Rwanda and the Maya, from Haiti
>and the Dominican Republic to the US southwest and China
>- with many an additional stop-off in between. His
>starting point and most lovingly elaborated case study
>is Easter Island ("the clearest example of a society
>that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own
>resources"), which he invites the reader to see as a
>"metaphor, a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead
>of us in our own future".
>
>How could this particular collapse have happened? Or, as
>one of his own students put it, what do you suppose the
>islander who cut down the last tree on Easter Island
>said to himself as he was doing it? Given that in this
>instance there was no extreme shift in the island's
>climate at that time and no hostile invaders, why would
>any group of people commit "ecocide" in such a dramatic
>fashion?
>
>He advances potential explanations to that question (in
>relation to all the different collapses and near-
>collapses that he explores) in the final third of the
>book. And several of these explanations have direct
>relevance to our own ecological crisis: a failure to
>anticipate future consequences; an inability to read
>trends or see behind the phenomenon of "creeping
>normalcy", with things getting just a little bit worse
>each year than the year before but not bad enough for
>anyone to notice; the disproportionate power of detached
>elites, particularly when they condone or even
>positively promote what he describes as "rational bad
>behaviour" on the part of those who manage or use
>natural resources.
>
>For those interested in the role of big business (either
>as "saints" or as "sinners" in the pursuit of more
>sustainable ways of creating wealth), Diamond devotes a
>whole chapter to examining the behaviour of oil, mining
>and forestry companies around the world. Their recurring
>and often egregious "bad behaviour" can indeed be
>interpreted as "rational", inasmuch as governments have
>consistently failed to proscribe such behaviour (either
>through legislation or by forcing companies to pay a
>proper price for the use of the natural world), while
>the majority of consumers would appear to be relatively
>indifferent to the environmental damage done in pursuit
>of their cornucopian fantasies.
>
>But Diamond reserves his most insightful analysis for
>the more "irrational" reasons why we are not as yet
>responding to the scale and urgency of today's
>converging environmental problems. The often
>irreconcilable clash between the pursuit of short-term
>gratification and the defence of future generations'
>long-term interests features prominently in many of his
>collapse case studies - the concept of
>"intergenerational justice" was clearly no more
>compelling to some of these long-gone societies than it
>is for us today. What's more, the greater the level of
>change required (to a society's core values), the easier
>it becomes to lapse into systematic and falsely
>reassuring denial.
>
>Here Diamond finally nails his colours to the mast.
>Anticipating a wide range of rebuttals to his central
>hypothesis (that the kind of collapse experienced by
>many cultures and civilisations in the past could easily
>happen to modern-day societies), he reminds people that
>we are already witnessing the conditions for collapse in
>a number of different countries: "Just as in the past,
>countries that are environmentally stressed,
>overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting
>politically stressed, and of their governments
>collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished
>and without hope, they blame their governments, which
>they see as responsible for or unable to solve their
>problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight
>each other over land. They kill each other. They start
>civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose,
>so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate
>terrorism."
>
>Interestingly, however, Diamond chooses not to conclude
>his arguments on that apocalyptic note. Reverting to the
>inference of his subtitle ("how societies choose to fail
>or survive"), he briefly reviews the intriguing history
>of the Netherlands, the country with the highest level
>of environmental awareness and membership of
>environmental organisations anywhere in the world. One-
>fifth of the total land mass of the Netherlands is below
>sea level, reclaimed from the sea over centuries, and
>protected by a complex system of dykes and pumping
>operations. These reclaimed lands are called "polders",
>and the Dutch have a clear sense of themselves as "all
>down in the polders together - we've learned throughout
>history that we're all living in the same polder, and
>that our survival depends on each other's survival".
>This is a country that has chosen to avoid collapse
>through a combination of solidarity and smart
>engineering.
>
>The title for Diamond's final chapter, "The World as a
>Polder", is premised on his optimistic instinct that
>even as the threat of ecological meltdown seems to get
>greater by the year, so too does our awareness of our
>interdependence and the need for unprecedented
>solidarity if we are to secure any kind of sustainable
>future. Diamond may well see in the extraordinary
>response of the rich world to those countries shattered
>by the Indian Ocean tsunami precisely the kind of
>empathy and engagement on which our ability to avoid
>ecological collapse will surely depend.
>
>===
>
>Jonathon Porritt is chairman of the UK Sustainable
>Development Commission and programme director of Forum
>for the Future
>
>Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand