File: c:/ddc/Angel/BestIntentions/Diamond.html
Date:  Sat Jun 26 19:58:54 2010
(C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux

Jared Diamond

The book Guns, Germs and Steel made Jared Diamond famous. Still, the next one Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed goes way beyond and its 550+ pages remains a monument even after a 2nd, careful reading [Diamond].

Diamond has poured a life time of anthropological study, observations of out the way locations on the Planet of ancient civilizations and the wisdoms and thoughts of life long friends from around the world in Collapse. It is exhaustive and demands here and there perseverance to appreciate the detailed explanations for mishaps, unfortunate circumstances and human erroneous judgments or just fate that lead societies to decline and/or disappear.

He describes ancient ones: Easter Island, Pitcairn Islanders, Henderson Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, the Viking, Norse Greenland, New Guinea highlands, Tikopia Island, Tokugawa era of Japan and some others.

Surviving and succeeding of the ancient ones are New Guinea highlands, Tikopia Island, and the Tokugawa era of Japan.

Modern societies discussed: Montana, Rwanda, Haiti and The Dominican Republic, China and Australia.

Diamond gives a framework of five distinct factors that play a role in the collapse of the ancient civilizations:

  1. Damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment
    An example: Removing trees for pastoral land, grazing animals destroying a thin soil layer and storms subsequently blowing everything away.
  2. Climate change
    A marginal setting may become an impossible setting due to warming, cooling, getting too humid, too dry, too much variation over successive years, etc. An example: Norse Greenland.
  3. Hostile neighbors
    This factor may be secondary due to weakening of a civilization as a result of the other factors. An example could be the demise of the Roman Empire on AD 476.
  4. Decreased support by friendly neighbors
    Trade partners declining can have impact on a civilization. An example: Pitcairn Islanders. Current globalization will amplify this factor.
  5. Inadequate response to challenges
    Civilizations respond differently to challenges they run into. A challenge, for example, may not be recognized due to slow creep. Norse Greenland is again an example.
Diamond uses knowledge of a lifetime to describe how ecological frailties ultimately doomed extinct societies. He does mention population increases here and there but he avoids labeling them as a primary force.

Tokugawa era of Japan

An encouraging case is the Tokugawa era of Japan. Deforestation started around 800 and by 1550 one quarter had been logged. A shogun started to manage logging in 1666. All previously logged regions have now re-grown and logging is micro managed.

Tikopia

The success of Tikopia - an isolated tropical island in the Southwest Pacific Ocean - to stay occupied for close to 3000 years requires a strong stomach for how they have achieved this. The easy part is fixing the gardens for their food supply after a cyclone destroys them; 20 cyclones on average each decade. The real problem is managing their population at around 1200. Diamond lists the following methods: coitus interruptus, abortion by pressing on the belly or placing hot stones on the belly, infanticide (with different methods), celibacy for poor man, celibacy for excess woman, suicide by hanging or swimming out to sea, virtual suicide by embarking on dangerous sea voyages. A clan exterminated another clan around 1650 when a fish supply suddenly declined, causing major starvation.

Diamond describes matter of fact that a Christian mission changed the population equilibrium by preaching against abortion, infanticide, and suicide. The population grew from 1,278 in 1929 to 1753 in 1952. Two cyclones hit, which caused widespread famine. Massive intervention was required to ship in food, and relocate people to other islands. The number of permitted residents is now 1,115. Diamond does not describe how that level is maintained.

Montana

Diamond writes from the heart in the chapter about Montana because he visited it as a teenager and when he gets back 42 years later he reconnects with the people he had encountered earlier. The scientist in him gets to work also and he describes all the paradoxes, which he claims to be relevant for the contemporary US and beyond. He mixes up general data about Montana with detailed, in depth observations of the Bitterroot valley in Montana's Southwest.

This valley is atypical because its exceptional beauty has attracted the rich. They live part-time, or even less, in gated communities and have no interactions with locals. Their influx has caused land prices to rise so that the agriculture business becomes unfeasible. Diamond describes interviews of people whose goals and perspectives are incompatible. Those that do development for new comers do fine, for now, while the lifestyle of the old timers erodes. Rich new comers buy up the land for the views so that farmland is more valuable to be split up for ranchettes, which destroys the views. In Diamond's words:

... the Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the US: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened risks from wildfires, forest deterioration, losses of soil or its nutrients, losses of biodiversity, damage from introduced pest species and effects of climate change.
Water is over allocated, which is a convoluted way to say that there is overpopulation. Dairy farms (400 in 1964, 9 in 2005) have trouble to survive because expenditures go up while the price of milk does not.

Diamond interviews a developer in the Bitterroot valley who says:

I'm frequently seen by environmentalists as a cause of the problems in the valley, but I can't create demand; someone else will put up the buildings if I don't.
This is priceless, everywhere else in the world a developer can claim the same.

Zooming out: Montana "... has about 20,000 abandoned mines ... that will be leaking acid and ... toxic metals essentially forever." Orchards, originally a main source of revenue, are not economically viable any longer. Low rainfall causes low rates of plant growth. High latitude and altitude entails a short growing season. Forestry does not pay because trees grow too slow, while environmental regulations tie up all applications for logging requests. Soil deteriorates due to salination as the result of crop-and-fallow agricultural practices. There is more trouble: arson in forests, seeding with predator fish that wipe out native species, introduction of weed species that are expensive to control.

Sectors of the economy listed by Diamond as growing: tourism, recreation, retirement living, and health care. These sectors are secondary, dependent on the primary sectors spinning off enough discretionary income and wealth and are immediately in danger when there is a recession or worse.

The clincher is the following quotes:

... half of the income of Montana residents doesn't come from their work within Montana, but instead consists of money flowing into Montana from other US states: federal government transfer payments (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and poverty programs) and private out-of-state funds (out-of-state pensions, earnings on real estate equity and business income).
Montanans especially bristle at the ... remote federal government in Washington DC, telling them what to do ... But they don't bristle at the federal government money of which Montana receives and accepts about a dollar-and-a-half for every dollar send from Montana to Washington.

If Montana would be isolated like Eastern Island their society would have collapsed already, whether gradually or, why not, with the convulsions of genocide as in 1994 Rwanda.

Diamond does not mention that Montana is not an exception. There are 31 other states that like Montana get more from the federal government than their 'fair' share [taxfoundation2005]. (Montana ranks on the 11th spot from the bottom; see the list in the Economy chapter.) There are no penalties for the plight of these states and there are no other pressures to become self-reliant. Hence the 'on the dole status' of these states may deteriorate over time. It resembles the tolerance of the society for a growing, now majority of the population being net-consumers.

States being self-reliant would be an excellent requirement expressed by a constitutional amendment. And, as we stated in the Economy chapter, states should contribute their fair share to the security services that the Federal government provides.

The Montana chapter is the first one in Diamond's Collapse book. If it would have been the one before last, he may have had more impact on our sleeping-at-the-wheel politicians.

The last chapter

Diamond's last chapter with 37 pages focuses on the problems endangering our current world. He lists 12 concrete problems (taking him 10 pages), which we summarize here in one-liners.
  1. Natural habitats are destructed (forest, wetland, coral reef, ocean bottom).
  2. Wild food sources (fisheries) have already collapsed or are in steep decline.
  3. Wild species have already been lost and most of the remainder will disappear within half a century (after 2005).
  4. Farmland soil is carried away by wind and water erosion at rates 10-40 times of soil formation; forest soil erosion causes disappearance at way higher rates.
  5. Readily available energy sources will last only for a few more decades.
  6. Fresh water source are getting scarce. Aquifers are being depleted.
  7. Solar energy is limited and its potential will max out in the middle of the 21st century
  8. Toxic chemicals are released in the air, soil, oceans, lakes and rivers, causing havoc with all life forms, deaths, infertility, etc.
  9. 'Alien' plants and animals get out of control when they are brought intentionally or by accident in a novel environment.
  10. Human activities (including keeping ruminant animals) produce gases that damage the atmosphere.
  11. The world's population growth increases demand for resources ...
  12. ... and it increases the impact on the environment.
Diamond admits immediately that these problems are interconnected and that, #11, population growth amplifies all others. In passing, he argues against a scenario where an affluent West can isolate itself against turmoil elsewhere in the world. By then the reader may think that Diamond's vision is gloom and doom for the future of Mother Earth's (human) life. However, twenty-five pages before the end of his text he announces suddenly "... a position of cautious optimism".

He does not proceed with the cause(s) of his optimism. Instead he demolishes a whole series of other optimisms that would invalidate his extensive 500-page analysis and observations. Fresh data supporting more gloom and doom is provided thereby wiping out these straw-men hopes.

Finally, the last three pages has the causes for his hopes:
- "... we are not beset by insoluble problems."
- "We don't need new technologies ... we 'just' need the political will to apply solutions already available."
- "The environmental movement has been gaining adherents at an increasing rate ..."
- "... encouraging examples of courageous long-term thinking ... of NGOs, business, and government."
- Regarding the courage to change core values: "The government of China restricted the traditional freedom of individual reproductive choice ..."
- "Intrinsic population growth in Japan and Italy is already below the replacement rate ..."
- In contrast with previous collapsing societies: "Past societies lacked archeologists ..." and "... we have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past peoples."

Again, we have great admiration for Diamond's Collapse book and thus the following comments do not diminish our recommendation to read his text.

We found only one minor item we actually disagree with. He claims about wealthy people in the United States that they "... vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as public services to everyone else." Wealthy people are such a small minority (less than 5%) that their votes do not count and they pay already more than 50% on the income taxes. Diamond is apparently not aware that great majorities in welfare states have become dependent on the redistribution transfer function of the government (thereby limiting - actually blocking - the government's policy choices for the long-term common good of the society).

Diamond's expertise is at the 'physical' level, humanity's ability to mess up its environment and now the planet's biosphere. But, he is short in his analysis on what we (all levels) are doing about our current global foul-ups. He avoids proposing fixes. He, likely, hopes that his diagnosis text will trigger wake up calls in our leaders. It is not happening ... yet ...

Diamond does mention that a society needs to abandon core values in order to survive, but he does not get into the gory details what that means in our 21st century setting. Specifically, he mentions overpopulation repeatedly but he refuses to advocate a worldwide 1-child policy; a crucial omission, from our perspective.

We have described in the Public Education chapter that IQ was sucked out over time from the bottom 50% of societies with free, public education. This process increased (and increases) the difference between the haves and have-nots within those societies. An analogous process happens worldwide now for many decades. Centers of excellence in affluent countries are buying up the brightest, thereby depleting the brainpowers of the regions from which they are recruited.

The planet is splitting up in three regions:
- Affluent (for now), developed and with most brain power
- Rich in raw resources and able to buy into affluence and/or support an exploding population
- The rest, which is already descending into poverty if not chaos

Diamond's collapse - which he shies away from - looks unavoidable as discussed in the next chapter.

References

[Diamond] Diamond, J., Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking Books, ISBN 1-58663-863-7, 2005.

[taxfoundation2005] http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html

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