Societies’ five fear factors

Gloomy books about our environmental problems are pouring off the presses. They have immediate pertinence to our lives, but few people seem to be reading them except the already anxious. Scholarly monographs about various facets of the human experience from Homo erectus to Donald Trump are likewise piling up without generating much concerned interest. Jared Diamond, in his new book, has woven together materials from these two genres in hopes of delivering a credible (and loud) warning to the ecologically oblivious. He does so by providing examples of disasters that illustrate how often and how thoroughly we have achieved environmental collapse and how we have also, occasionally, avoided it.

The book’s title, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” may strike some as sensational. The author himself, pining for 18th century clarity and comprehensiveness, claims that the full title should be “Societal Collapses Involving an Environmental Component, and in Some Cases Also Contributions of Climate Change, Hostile Neighbors, and Trade Partners, Plus Questions of Societal Responses.” How many bookstore browsers would pick up anything with that on the cover? Hence, the melodramatic “Collapse.”

Readers learn on Page 1 that they are in for quite a ride. Diamond starts out by describing two similar dairy farms with roughly the same number of cows. One is in Montana and the other in Greenland. The former isn’t particularly successful, climate and dairy prices being what they are, but it’s stumbling along; the latter failed more than half a millennium ago. Before you take comfort from the contrast, note that medieval Norse settlements in Greenland lasted 450 years, a lot longer than the English-speaking settlements have in North America, much less Montana, and a whole lot longer than we moderns have been industrialized, globalized and, in our modest estimation, kings of the biosphere.

No reader may carp that Diamond has provided a set of examples that is too limited chronologically, culturally or geographically. He takes us on an educational excursion through the millennial experiences of Easter and other Pacific islands, the American Southwest, the Maya regions of Mexico and Central America, the New Guinea highlands, the Inca empire, Rwanda, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Australia, China and more. (The pages devoted to China’s prospects provide enough material for a full quota of sleepless nights.) These accounts are based on extensive readings in secondary sources, on archeological records and on the written histories of the lands and peoples concerned -- and even on some original research, a rarity in publications aimed at the general public.

Diamond, an ornithologist and a UCLA professor of physiology and geography, has been to most of the lands cited, often staying for months or even years, and what he writes about them and their populations is informed and engagingly colored by personal observation. Organizing such a motley crowd of examples is a challenge, which he meets by looking for the same five factors in each: environmental damage inflicted (usually unintentionally), such as the Greenland Norse cutting down all their trees and tearing up sod for fuel; climate change, which these Norse suffered with the return of Ice Age temperatures; hostile neighbors, for example, the Inuit (or Eskimo) rivals of the Greenland Norse; decreased support from friendly neighbors, as when expanding sea ice and a decreasing European market for walrus ivory severed the Norse Greenlanders from outside support; and finally a society’s response to all or any of the above problems. The Greenland Norse could have adopted Inuit technologies -- for instance, burning blubber instead of wood, constructing watercraft (kayaks) from animal skins -- and survived. Instead, they clung to European ways in a very un-European place, even building an impressive cathedral, and expired a few generations before Columbus and 1492.

If all five of these factors figured actively in your situation, then you were pretty surely done for. If only four or fewer did, then you might survive, but not necessarily and not comfortably. The Easter Islanders had no nearby neighbors, hostile or helpful -- which in the Pacific means no one within 1,000 miles -- and managed their collapse unilaterally. They mowed down all their trees for fuel, shelter and the transport of their giant stone statues. This was followed by severe erosion and the run-off of their best soil into the sea. They adjusted to their new situation chiefly by way of population crash, a technique open to us all.

Of the case studies Diamond offers, those of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are particularly instructive. The two nations share the same island, Hispaniola. Neither is a member of the First World club of rich, industrialized nations, but the situation of the Dominican Republic is only difficult, whereas that of Haiti is desperate, as one can discern simply by flying over the island and noticing that the dominant color of the former is green and the latter brown.

Their environmental differences are minor. The Dominican Republic has fewer mountains and more rain, but Haiti is not Arizona and once was lush. The decisive differences between the two contiguous nations are demographic, ecological and political. Haiti has two-thirds of the island’s population on one-third of its land. Only 1% of Haiti’s land is forested, compared with 28% of Dominican land. Haitian soil spills voluminously into the sea; Dominican soil much less so. Haiti is politically unstable, the Dominican Republic relatively stable, at least in recent decades.

The causes of the contrast? Diamond suggests that one important factor is that in the 20th century the Dominican Republic had a better grade of dictators than Haiti did. Several of the former’s ruthless leaders restricted logging and set aside land for national parks and forest reserves. Haiti’s dictators, most notably Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, governed as if there were, environmentally speaking, no tomorrow. That proved to be wrong; Papa Doc’s tomorrow is Haiti’s present day, and the Haitians’ plight is the worst in the Western Hemisphere and among the worst in the world.

Has Diamond nothing encouraging for us? Well, not a whole lot, but some. Consider, he suggests, the story of Iceland. The Norse arrived there a little more than 1,000 years ago and quite understandably tried to extract a living from the environment as they had back home in Scandinavia -- that is, by cultivating barley and raising cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. Most of those early choices were bad. When the settlers cleared away the birch and willow forests that grew over half the land and pastured their animals in the high meadows, they bared Iceland’s soil to wind and rain. In northern Europe, the soils were heavy and resistant to erosion. In Iceland, they were volcanic in origin -- fertile, yes, but light and easily carried away by wind and water. When the Norse first disembarked, Iceland was about one-quarter forested; the current figure is about 1%. The high deserts of Iceland are as bleak as any place on our planet. NASA chose wisely when it sent the Apollo astronauts there to train for moon landings.

Iceland seemed destined for the same fate as Greenland, but its environmental challenges weren’t quite as overwhelming as for the latter, contacts with Europe never completely ceased, and there were no hostile neighbors except for a few pirates. And the Icelanders adapted to the environmental challenges of the North Atlantic. They stopped trying to make a living like Norwegian farmers. They concentrated more heavily on livestock, but mostly sheep -- not pigs and goats, which did too much damage to the plant cover. They abandoned most of the highlands, because they couldn’t extract a living up there in the icy wind. They cut back on the homicidal violence that figures so importantly in their sagas and taught themselves to compromise on at least issues of community survival, learning to agree on such matters as the number of sheep and when to put them out to graze and when to take them in.

They also learned to exploit what the North Atlantic offered. Fish became the protein staple of their diets and the export of fish -- at first salted, then frozen -- their major export. They used the energy sources at hand: hydroelectric (the same rain and meltwater that carried off Iceland’s soil now power its microwave ovens) and geothermal (if you’re going to live on the flanks of volcanoes, you might as well harness the heat). At present, they are trying to take international leadership in the development of hydrogen energy sources, and one must wish them well.

The Icelanders’ problems are not all solved -- the fish stocks of the North Atlantic are diminishing -- but starting many generations ago, these latter-day Vikings learned to face up to reality and adapt to living within the limits of their environment. Jared Diamond has written a book to help us to do the same. *