Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - MODERN MONTANA

  CHAPTER 1 - Under Montana’s Big Sky

  PART TWO - PAST SOCIETIES

  CHAPTER 2 - Twilight at Easter

  CHAPTER 3 - The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

  CHAPTER 4 - The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors

  CHAPTER 5 - The Maya Collapses

  CHAPTER 6 - The Viking Prelude and Fugues

  CHAPTER 7 - Norse Greenland’s Flowering

  CHAPTER 8 - Norse Greenland’s End

  CHAPTER 9 - Opposite Paths to Success

  PART THREE - MODERN SOCIETIES

  CHAPTER 10 - Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide

  CHAPTER 11 - One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic ...

  CHAPTER 12 - China, Lurching Giant

  CHAPTER 13 - “Mining” Australia

  PART FOUR - PRACTICAL LESSONS

  CHAPTER 14 - Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

  CHAPTER 15 - Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, ...

  CHAPTER 16 - The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgements

  FURTHER READINGS

  INDEX

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  COLLAPSE

  Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by the Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines. His previous books include The Third Sex and The Third Chimpanzee. His most recent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  Chosen as Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Economiser, and Discover

  Praise for Collapse

  “Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in [its] ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Readers learn on page 1 that they are in for quite a ride. No reader may carp that Diamond has provided a set of examples that is too limited chronologically or geographically. Diamond . . . 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. The Icelanders . . . learned to face up to reality and adapt to living within the limits of their environments. Jared Diamond has written a book to help us do the same.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “With Collapse, Jared Diamond has written a fascinating account of the collapse of civilizations around the world.... A reader cannot help but leave the book wondering whether we are following the track of these other civilizations that failed. Any reader of Collapse will leave the book convinced that we must take steps now to save our planet.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spacially—across an array of disciplines—to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren’t. . . . Thank heavens there is someone of the stature of Diamond willing to say so.”

  —Robert D. Kaplan, The Washington Post

  “Diamond looks to the past and present to sound a warning for the future.”

  —Newsweek

  “Rendering complex history and science into entertaining prose, Diamond reminds us that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.”

  —People (four stars)

  “Taken together Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care.”

  —The New York Times

  “Essential reading for anyone who is unafraid to be disillusioned if it means they can walk into the future with their eyes open.”

  —Nature

  “On any short list of brilliant minds in the world today, Diamond makes the cut.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Read this book. It will challenge you and make you think.”

  —Scientific American

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005 Published in Penguin Books 2006 This edition with a new afterword published 2011

  Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2005, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond. p. cm. Includes index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50200-6

  1. Social history—Case studies. 2. Social change—Case studies.

  3. Environmental policy—Case studies. I. Title.

  HN13.D5 2005

  304.2’8—dc22 2004057152

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  To

  Jack and Ann Hirschy,

  Jill Hirschy Eliel and John Eliel,

  Joyce Hirschy McDowell,

  Dick (1929-2003) and Margy Hirschy,

  and their fellow Montanans:

  guardians of Montana’s big sky

  I met a traveler from an antique land

&nbs
p; Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

  Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

  PROLOGUE

  A Tale of Two Farms

  Two farms ■ Collapses, past and present ■ Vanished Edens? ■ A five-point framework ■ Businesses and the environment ■ The comparative method ■ Plan of the book ■

  A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnificent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their production of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respectively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teeming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or fjord (below Gardar Farm).

  Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, because their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to which they could market their products, so that transportation costs and hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more centrally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners’ control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies.

  The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm’s owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me today of Gardar’s former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today.

  Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms, I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed to decline. At present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the process of expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for adoption by neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most powerful country in the world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in general are prone to collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar, others have survived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse), and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding.

  Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or vanished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imagined in his poem “Ozymandias.” By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is thus an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse. Some of those milder types of decline include the normal minor rises and falls of fortune, and minor political/ economic/social restructurings, of any individual society; one society’s conquest by a close neighbor, or its decline linked to the neighbor’s rise, without change in the total population size or complexity of the whole region; and the replacement or overthrow of one governing elite by another. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4-5).

  The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a romantic fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vacations in order to experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders—the boast “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” in Shelley’s words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?—did they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleasant way? Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought: might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?

  It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least par
tly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). 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.

  Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives—to talk of a society’s birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death—and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, everybody in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajectory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion: different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies didn’t collapse at all.