Collapse

“The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.” 

These are the eight environmental issues that affect all societies, past and present. Any combination of these problems can lead to an environmental crisis and possibly the collapse of the society involved. Four additional problems burden modern societies: human-caused climate change, environmental toxins, energy shortages, and loss of photosynthetic capacity.

“Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserved to be exterminated or dispossessed, nor all-knowing conscientious environmentalists who solved problems that we can’t solve today. They were people like us, facing problems broadly similar to those that we now face. They were prone either to succeed or to fail, depending on circumstances similar to those making us prone to succeed or to fail today. Yes, there are differences between the situation we face today and that faced by past peoples, but there are still enough similarities for us to be able to learn from the past.” 

It’s easy to dismiss ancient failed cultures as foolish, but today’s civilizations often face the same problems and struggle to solve them. What matters isn’t who’s smarter or better but what we can learn from past human mistakes.

“I don’t know of any case in which a society’s collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contributing factors.” 

All ecological problems require additional stressors to tip a society into collapse. These problems are changes in climate, hostile neighbors, friendly neighbors that turn away, and a society’s failure to adapt to sudden change.

“I’m more interested in environmental issues because of what I see as their consequences for people than because of their consequences for birds.” 

Diamond answers critics who allege that he wants to protect environments at the expense of humans. Though he loves the natural world and participates in efforts to protect ecosystems, his overriding motivation is to prevent harm to societies caused by environmental degradation.

“My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems.” 

Diamond isn’t upset that environmental activists accuse him of selling out to corporations, and he’s not bothered when the other side calls him a gloom-and-doom pessimist who only cares about birds. He simply wants to solve environmental issues, and to do so, he must communicate with groups that have trouble speaking to each other.

“For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past.” 

The environmental dangers that threatened and destroyed past societies still recur today, sometimes with global effects, but the lessons of the past can serve us in solving those problems.

“Business leaders are more likely to be accountants or attorneys than members of the clergy.” 

The statutory purpose of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders. Companies normally pay the costs of their activities, but some “moral obligations,” such as mining cleanup costs, have in the past been waived. In some situations corporations can be sued for spending shareholder money on cleanup operations considered charitable expenses outside their mandate. Conflicts arise between businesses and environmentalists over how these outlays shall be borne; meanwhile, taxpayers balk at paying for the cleanup of activities that continued for decades, as these hazards are background issues for most citizens. Only when new laws stipulate that companies must assume the full costs of their operations will those enterprises be legally obligated to take responsibility.

“Montanans differ among themselves in their values and goals. They want more or less population growth, more or less government regulation, more or less development and subdivision of agricultural land, more or less retention of agricultural uses of land, more or less mining, and more or less outdoor-based tourism. Some of these goals are obviously incompatible with others of them.” 

One of the biggest challenges in protecting environments is that residents often have diametrically opposed views on how local resources should be used. If some want more wilderness and others want more development, this is a recipe for ongoing conflict over the management of ecosystems.

“In short, the reason for Easter’s unusually severe degree of deforestation isn’t that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific people.” 

Easter Island is one of the coolest, driest, smallest, lowest, and most remote islands in the Pacific. All these are factors that increase deforestation. Other Polynesian islands have partial deforestation; only at Easter did the factors pile up to cause a complete environmental catastrophe from human activity.

“All over Polynesia, human settlement on islands that had developed for millions of years in the absence of humans led to habitat damage and mass extinctions of plants and animals.” 

People tend to have a big impact on every environment they populate. Small and fragile Pacific islands are especially susceptible, as their flora and fauna are not adapted to the hardships of human occupation and are vulnerable to overuse and competition from human-introduced species.

“Viking colonies were derived from the same ancestral society: their differing fates were transparently related to the different environments in which the colonists found themselves.”

Vikings colonized several places around the North Atlantic, including Greenland, Iceland, and parts of North America. The constant was Viking culture, and the chief variable was the environment; where conditions were more severe, Viking stubbornness, elsewhere an asset, proved nonadaptive, and those locations collapsed.

“When the American space agency NASA wanted to find some place on Earth resembling the surface of the moon, so that our astronauts preparing for the first moon landing could practice in an environment similar to what they would encounter, NASA picked a formerly green area of Iceland that is now utterly barren.” 

Iceland has the most heavily damaged environment in Europe. The island once boasted forests and green hills, but Viking colonials misread the verdant environment, thinking it robust like Britain and Norway. They overgrazed and deforested the delicate land, causing loss of half the soil and most of the plant life. To this day the hillsides and valleys remain severely eroded.

“[E]nvironmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes.” 

Archaeologists struggle to convince local governments to fund studies of previous peoples whose environmental practices may have caused severe damage. Such information can help today’s policymakers navigate ecological problems. The only country enthusiastic about such projects is Iceland, where environmental devastation is evident across the island.

“To turn a first-contact situation into a friendly relationship, let alone to survive the situation, requires extreme caution and patience. Later European colonialists eventually developed some experience at dealing with such situations, but the Norse evidently shot first.” 

The Vikings who settled Greenland, and tried to settle in Northeastern North America, brought their aggressive raiders’ approach to encounters with natives and other strangers, usually fighting them instead of trading. The result was that they couldn’t benefit from the local inhabitants’ knowledge and resources. This contributed to the colonists’ weakness against bad weather and privation, and may have added to those settlements’ ultimate failure.

“[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.” 

In Greenland the Norse settlers clung tightly to Viking and dairy-farming traditions that helped them settle other new lands. Those same traditions may have interfered with their ability to adapt to Greenland’s alternate food sources during the final cold and lean years, contributing to their extinction.

“Leaders who don’t just react passively, who have the courage to anticipate crises or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. So can similarly courageous, active citizens practicing bottom-up management. The Tokugawa shoguns, and my Montana landowner friends committed to the Teller Wildlife Refuge, exemplify the best of each type of management, in pursuit of their own long-term goals and of the interests of many others.” 

Environmental problems can be solved locally or nationally; the best course depends on circumstances. Local communities with strong interests in their environments can manage them in a bottom-up manner; likewise, top-down central authorities that oversee large and uniform territories can effectively coordinate the maintenance of those ecosystems.

“It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.” 

The 1994 Rwandan genocide against minority Tutsi quickly became a general civil war, as Hutu militants turned on each other to settle land disputes in areas beset by overcrowding and famine.

“But it is important that we understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide—not so that we can exonerate the killers, but so that we can use that knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening again in Rwanda or elsewhere.” 

Studying the factors that underlie atrocities doesn’t excuse those actions, but it does help us understand the stressors that press on bad actors so that such factors might in the future be headed off or resolved to prevent barbarities.

“We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.” 

Diamond refers specifically to Dominican Republic leader Joaquín Balaguer, who between 1966 and 2000 behaved as a Machiavellian dictator, manipulating elections and killing thousands of opponents, yet who also worked tirelessly to protect the Dominican environment. Private and secretive, Balaguer will likely remain a mystery, at least with respect to his true motives. Whether he was a bad person who did good things or a good person navigating a corrupt and deadly system may ultimately be imponderable.

“China uses some distinctive, environmentally friendly, traditional technologies on a large scale, such as the common South Chinese practice of raising fish in irrigated rice fields. That recycles the fish droppings as natural fertilizer, increases rice production, uses fish to control insect pests and weeds, decreases herbicide and pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use, and yields more dietary protein and carbohydrate without increasing environmental damage.” 

Some old things are new again in China, where serious environmental degradation has lately been met with simple, old-fashioned approaches such as rice-and-fish farming. Another time-honored if labor-intensive approach is reforestation, which returns major benefits through reduced erosion, enhanced soil, improved rainfall, and—in the case of tree plantations—sustainable wood products.

“Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, like the gold in a gold mine.” 

Societies past and present often have overused their renewable resources: forests are cut down for timber faster than they can regrow; pastures are overgrazed, causing erosion and loss of range; fish are caught faster than they can reproduce. As overuse continues, the population often increases until the resources finally are exhausted, causing the society to collapse.

“It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one’s core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live?” 

Settlers who struggle hard to make new homes for themselves often have hard-won beliefs as well, beliefs that may get in the way when environmental after-effects of colonization begin to interfere with, or even threaten, their existence. At that point the choice is between giving up a beloved culture—a sense of a meaningful life—or giving up life itself. For some hardy, tough people like Viking Greenlanders, the decision to uphold tradition proved fatal. Others, such as Australians and Montanans, still have options, and their decisions will determine their fate.

“If we want coal and copper, we have to recognize the environmental costs of extracting them as a legitimate necessary cost of hardrock mining, as legitimate as the costs of the bulldozer that digs the pit or the smelter that smelts the ore. The environmental costs should be factored into metals prices and passed on to consumers, just as oil and coal companies already do.” 

In the past governments were lenient with mining operations to encourage their work; today the environmental harm caused by mining has come back to haunt everyone. Mining is a high-risk, low-profit industry, and governments are picking up the tab for their previous leniency. Recent mining agreements have begun to stipulate that the costs of repairing environmental damages must be borne by the companies that cause them.