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The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By Jared Diamond
The New York Times
Saturday 01 January 2005
Los Angeles - New Year's weekend
traditionally is a time for us to reflect, and to make resolutions based
on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly
at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term,
Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are
going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10
years from now, or even next year?
Such questions seem especially appropriate
this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse,
they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much
of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and
hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could
help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must
expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex:
while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have
managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.
When it comes to historical collapses, five
groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage
that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change;
enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's
political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to
say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of
this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose
relative importance varies from case to case.
For instance, in the collapse of the
Polynesian society on Easter Island three centuries ago, environmental
problems were dominant, and climate change, enemies and trade were
insignificant; however, the latter three factors played big roles in the
disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland. Let's
consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of
causes: the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian
settlements on the Pitcairn Islands.
Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan
Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New
World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators
in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around
2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250,
reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.
Thereafter, societies in the most densely
populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and
cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large
areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population
disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last
known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count
calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?
A major factor was environmental degradation
by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems,
all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by
droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through
deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more
people fought over less and less land and resources.
Why weren't these problems obvious to the
Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills
becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to
insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By
extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while
everyone else was slowly starving.
What's more, the kings were preoccupied with
their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one
another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of
wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of
society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among
the last to starve.
Whereas Maya societies were undone by
problems of their own making, Polynesian societies on Pitcairn and
Henderson Islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean were undone largely by
other people's mistakes. Pitcairn, the uninhabited island settled in
1790 by the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers, had actually been populated by
Polynesians 800 years earlier. That society, which left behind temple
platforms, stone and shell tools and huge garbage piles of fish and bird
and turtle bones as evidence of its existence, survived for several
centuries and then vanished. Why?
In many respects, Pitcairn and Henderson are
tropical paradises, rich in some food sources and essential raw
materials. Pitcairn is home to Southeast Polynesia's largest quarry of
stone suited for making adzes, while Henderson has the region's largest
breeding seabird colony and its only nesting beach for sea turtles. Yet
the islanders depended on imports from Mangareva Island, hundreds of
miles away, for canoes, crops, livestock and oyster shells for making
tools.
Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Pitcairn
and Henderson, their Mangarevan trading partner collapsed for reasons
similar to those underlying the Maya decline: deforestation, erosion and
warfare. Deprived of essential imports in a Polynesian equivalent of the
1973 oil crisis, the Pitcairn and Henderson societies declined until
everybody had died or fled.
The Maya and the Henderson and Pitcairn
Islanders are not alone, of course. Over the centuries, many other
societies have declined, collapsed or died out. Famous victims include
the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who abandoned their cities in the
12th century because of environmental problems and climate change, and
the Greenland Norse, who disappeared in the 15th century because of all
five interacting factors on the checklist. There were also the ancient
Fertile Crescent societies, the Khmer at Angkor Wat, the Moche society
of Peru - the list goes on.
But before we let ourselves get depressed, we
should also remember that there is another long list of cultures that
have managed to prosper for lengthy periods of time. Societies in Japan,
Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands and Central and Northwest
Europe, for example, have all found ways to sustain themselves. What
separates the lost cultures from those that survived? Why did the Maya
fail and the shogun succeed?
Half of the answer involves environmental
differences: geography deals worse cards to some societies than to
others. Many of the societies that collapsed had the misfortune to
occupy dry, cold or otherwise fragile environments, while many of the
long-term survivors enjoyed more robust and fertile surroundings. But
it's not the case that a congenial environment guarantees success: some
societies (like the Maya) managed to ruin lush environments, while other
societies - like the Incas, the Inuit, Icelanders and desert Australian
Aborigines - have managed to carry on in some of the earth's most
daunting environments.
The other half of the answer involves
differences in a society's responses to problems. Ninth-century New
Guinea Highland villagers, 16th-century German landowners, and the
Tokugawa shoguns of 17th-century Japan all recognized the deforestation
spreading around them and solved the problem, either by developing
scientific reforestation (Japan and Germany) or by transplanting tree
seedlings (New Guinea). Conversely, the Maya, Mangarevans and Easter
Islanders failed to address their forestry problems and so collapsed.
Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country
faced its own crisis of deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the
peace and prosperity following the Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph
that ended 150 years of civil war. The subsequent explosion of Japan's
population and economy set off rampant logging for construction of
palaces and cities, and for fuel and fertilizer.
The shoguns responded with both negative and
positive measures. They reduced wood consumption by turning to
light-timbered construction, to fuel-efficient stoves and heaters, and
to coal as a source of energy. At the same time, they increased wood
production by developing and carefully managing plantation forests. Both
the shoguns and the Japanese peasants took a long-term view: the former
expected to pass on their power to their children, and the latter
expected to pass on their land. In addition, Japan's isolation at the
time made it obvious that the country would have to depend on its own
resources and couldn't meet its needs by pillaging other countries.
Today, despite having the highest human population density of any large
developed country, Japan is more than 70 percent forested.
There is a similar story from Iceland. When
the island was first settled by the Norse around 870, its light volcanic
soils presented colonists with unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to
cut down trees and stock sheep as if they were still in Norway, with its
robust soils. Significant erosion ensued, carrying half of Iceland's
topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders became the
poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their
mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other
strict controls, and establishing an entire government department
charged with landscape management. Today, Iceland boasts the
sixth-highest per-capita income in the world.
What lessons can we draw from history? The
most straightforward: take environmental problems seriously. They
destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so
now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy
Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and
bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected
just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now
means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone
else. Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped
the United States today.
Other lessons involve failures of group
decision-making. There are many reasons why past societies made bad
decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even to perceive the problems
that would eventually destroy them. One reason involves conflicts of
interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig
farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland)
can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society.
Another is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term
survival, as when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their
livelihoods ultimately depend.
History also teaches us two deeper lessons
about what separates successful societies from those heading toward
failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the
elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why
Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices
that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not
begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their
landscape.
Could this happen in the United States? It's
a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by
gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with
people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send
their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the
motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply,
Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much
for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters
eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of
Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy
districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.
In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan,
as in modern Scandinavia and the Netherlands, could not ignore or
insulate themselves from broad societal problems. For instance, the
Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been unable to insulate
itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a simple
reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the
poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off
Dutch know that they will drown along with everybody else, which is
precisely what happened during the floods of 1953.
The other deep lesson involves a willingness
to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those
values no longer make sense. The medieval Greenland Norse lacked such a
willingness: they continued to view themselves as transplanted Norwegian
pastoralists, and to despise the Inuit as pagan hunters, even after
Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had grown too cold
for a pastoral existence. They died off as a result, leaving Greenland
to the Inuit. On the other hand, the British in the 1950's faced up to
the need for a painful reappraisal of their former status as rulers of a
world empire set apart from Europe. They are now finding a different
avenue to wealth and power, as part of a united Europe.
In this New Year, we Americans have our own
painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States
as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained
consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world of finite resources.
We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much
of the rest of the world.
Historically, oceans protected us from
external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily
during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global
interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we
have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military
solutions at the last minute.
But how long can we keep this up? Though we
are the richest nation on earth, there's simply no way we can afford (or
muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where
emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days
can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.
A genuine reappraisal would require us to
recognize that it will be far less expensive and far more effective to
address the underlying problems of public health, population and
environment that ultimately cause threats to us to emerge in poor
countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either charity
or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our
own economy and protect American lives.
Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends
are pessimistic when they contemplate the world's growing population and
human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from
the knowledge that humanity's biggest problems today are ones entirely
of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don't
figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don't
need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our
problems of population and the environment.
I also draw hope from a unique advantage that
we enjoy. Unlike any previous society in history, our global society
today is the first with the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of
societies remote from us in space and in time. When the Maya and
Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no historians or
archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the
consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed
chronicle of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we
choose to use it?
Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer
Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies," is the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How
Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."
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