Collapse

A small community can work together to develop methods that sustain environmental and other resources. This is a “bottom-up” form of decision-making that relies on many individuals contributing their input; a “top-down” approach is more appropriate for large regions or nations. Modern Western democracies tend to use a combination of local “bottom-up” management and regional/federal “top-down” control to deal with environmental issues.

The Clearcut Controversy centers on the practice, in Montana, of logging all the trees from a mountainside. This causes hillside snow to melt too quickly, reducing water resources, and it damages fish populations and looks ugly. Residents and ranchers rebelled, and federal rules now restrict clearcutting and mandate multiple-use practices on national forest lands. Court cases sometimes stymie useful practices, such as reducing forest fire fuel loads. Logging has declined by 80%, causing local economic dislocations.

Diamond defines collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time” (3). Five factors influence collapse: damage to the environment, variations in climate, hostile neighbors, disappearing trade partners, and societal resistance to change. The first stressor, environmental abuse, seems always to be involved, especially deforestation; the last stressor, resistance to change, is the variable over which societies have the greatest control and is most crucial to solving today’s environmental crises.

In science there are various ways to develop knowledge. Often lab experiments do the job, but out in the field it’s hard—or unethical—to perform experiments on living environments. Instead, researchers can, for example, compare ecosystems that are similar except that one sustains a lifeform of interest while the other doesn’t. In Collapse, Diamond compares various civilizations that crashed and charts how their differences affected various collapses. In this way he can discover which variables have the most effect—in short, which factors might be most important to study in today’s environmentally overburdened societies.

Creeping normalcy is the slow change in environmental conditions over years or decades, changes that can go unnoticed by local people. The slow rise in worldwide temperatures, for example, or the slow-but-steady drying out of the weather in the classical Mayan and Anasazi civilizations, have left populations unaware and unprepared because the changes are so slight over time. One form of creeping normalcy is “landscape amnesia,” in which local residents see their area as continuously normal because they have forgotten how different it was decades earlier, as with the progressive loss of Montana’s glaciers, a process so gradual as to be invisible in any given year.

study of tree rings, especially to determine the age of the tree or the structure in which a tree’s wood is used. Tree rings grow thicker in wetter years, and the distinctive pattern of wide and narrow rings helps scientists determine when the tree lived. With this information, researchers can determine the climate patterns for a given past society and learn when a building was constructed, giving them more clues about that society

A portmanteau of “ecological suicide,” ecocide is the self-inflicted environmental damage that pulls a society toward collapse. Ecocide can take many forms, including habitat destruction, over-farming, water mismanagement, and human population overgrowth.

Environmental determinism is the theory that the environment dictates outcomes in many societies. Diamond believes that environmental factors influence the success or failure of civilizations, but that the final outcomes ultimately depend on the beliefs, attitudes, and decisions of those societies.

An international organization made up of forestry companies, environmental groups, governments, and foundations, FSC certifies forests that meet strict criteria for sustainability and environmental protections. The FSC brand assures buyers that the wood comes from well-cared-for forests and not ones being overlogged or otherwise misused.

Thomas Malthus theorized that increased food production leads not to improved living conditions but to an increased population, such that per-capita food supplies return to their original level and famine recurs. Such a “Malthusian dilemma” can lead to a “Malthusian crisis” of warfare and societal collapse, something that happened many times in the past and, today, in overpopulated and environmentally abused hotspots like Rwanda and Haiti.

Like the Forest Stewardship Council in form and purpose, the MSC establishes criteria for marine fishery sustainability and environmental care, awarding certification to complying fishing companies, and chain-of-custody audits that award the MSC logo to retail products.

A midden is a trash heap. Middens are especially useful to archaeologists, since they contain pieces of the physical life of ancient societies. Midden bones indicate the kinds of meat eaten by a group; broken pottery can be analyzed for telltale foodstuffs and stored materials; the quality other items reveals the relative status of the group that deposited the trash. A packrat midden is a rat’s nest with trash accumulated by the rat and covered in rat urine. Preserved for centuries in dry climates, packrat middens can be “a paleontologist’s dream: a time capsule preserving a sample of the local vegetation” (146) as well as remains of small animals and insects.

“Rape-and-run” is a technique whereby mining and logging companies extract all the available resource in an area and then leave, causing environmental damage that someone else must clean up. Rape-and-run has given those industries a bad name. Some major players have become much better corporate citizens on the theory that careful management of extraction processes engenders local trust and support, fixes small problems before they become big and costly, and generates more revenue overall.

If a farmer lets acreage on his hillside go fallow for a year, rainwater isn’t respired back into the atmosphere by plants and, instead, pools against the bedrock and leaches salts from the rock; these can seep downhill onto the neighbors’ farmlands, damaging their crops.

Basically the deliberate growing of trees, silviculture can be practiced in forest plantations, where preferred types of trees are grown and nurtured over decades. On top of long-term logging benefits, trees also protect underlying and nearby soils that also aid the growth of food crops. Deliberate reforestation can help repair previous ecological damage. On New Guinea, the Casuarina tree is planted everywhere, especially in gardens, where it provides shade and soil enhancement. On Tikopia, most of the island is effectively an orchard of useful and protective trees. Japan, suffering from over-logging in the 1600s, instituted comprehensive reforms, so that today most of the countryside is forested.

A large region or nation will have multiple ecosystems that might best be managed using a “top-down” approach that oversees all the country’s ecosystems. Tokugawa rulers of medieval Japan used top-down directives to sustain a large population, on an island with limited resources, for centuries; their rule also protected and rebuilt the country’s over-logged forests, so that today Japan is the most forested nation in the world. Modern Western democracies tend to use a combination of local “bottom-up” control and regional/federal “top-down” management.

When farmers graze their sheep on public land they don’t have to maintain or pay for, the land can become seriously overused and damaged. When fishing boats each try to pull in the largest catch possible, all the boats together can overexploit a fishing grounds to the point of ruination. If a timber company can cut down trees in a national forest for a nominal filing fee, it may over-log the region, leaving bare hillsides and eroded soil. These are examples of the “tragedy of the commons,” whereby areas available for public use are exploited by private interests because the costs, including for damage, are paid for by the public. These incentives can lead to serious environmental damage.