Feeding the Beast

In last week's issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a review of Jared Diamond's new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond's thesis is that, more often than not, civilizations end not because of cataclysmic events but because of their own doing, specifically the destruction of the resources they depend on for their very existence. It's particularly fitting at a time when the President and his cohorts on the Senate and Congress have shown their utter disregard for the environment in favor of economics and cultural "rights."

Don't have a lot of time to write comments, but here are some key excerpts from the article. While describing how the Norse came to disappear from Greenland in the 14th and 15th centuries:

In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmens robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

On mankind's rational tendency to destroy itself:

The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. "I have often asked myself, 'What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?'" Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of "Collapse." Those trees were felled by rational actors - who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of Collapse is that societies, as often as not, aren't murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

Summing up the importance of the environment and ecological factors in society's survival:

Rivers and streams and forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held beliefs - with making sure that Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdotter are married before the right number of witnesses following the announcement of wedding banns on the right number of Sundays - that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the forest cover is gone.

Read the full article. It's worth it.

UPDATE: Here's another review from Matthew Yglesias.

Comments

[Bob S.]

Did you notice the comment in the Yglesias thread that takes Fiamond to task?

Also, might be interested in Diamond's work on ethnic differences in testicle size

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003206.html

published in Nature.

[Drew]

Hi Bob - I did indeed notice the comments (there were numerous) taking Diamond to task; I noticed several in defense of him also. I really can't give an opinion either way on Diamond's work, considering I haven't actually read any of it (but plan to soon) aside from Gladwell's explanations in the New Yorker.

As for his calling for an ethnic testicle size study, I'm not sure how that conflicts with the view that societies often vanish due to ecological factors, and especially with his hope that his theories will eliminate racist views of -history-. There's a whole debate on GNXP and other sites that I'm definitely not knowledgeable enough to enter into, so I'll leave it at that for now.

[Bob S.]

Drew,

I've followed Diamond's work for a while now and when I came across the GNXP post I remembered that 1986 Nature study. Diamond talks out of both sides of his mouth and changes his opinion to fit the newest popular thoughts.

After the testis study he came out and said that there is little variation in humans. Quite PC and something touted in his follow-on book.

Simply, you can't trust that he means what he writes.

[Drew]

Sounds to me like he's saying there are indeed differences among groups of humans but that these biological differences don't account for how history and societal development have played out.

That may or may not be valid, but I don't think it changes the point emphasized in my post, which is that we place too much importance on extravagant economics and arbitrary cultural customs and ignore what we are doing at the most basic level - destroying the environment we rely on for our very existence.