Collapse

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that I've finished reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. I started reading it way back in April, put it down to do some higher priority reading, and have only just got round to finishing it. I'm glad I made the effort.

Much of Collapse consists of the stories of past societies which, for one reason or another, disappeared. Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasasi of the American Southwest are just some of the examples. Many of these stories (and particularly those of Pitcairn and Henderson and the Greenland Vikings) are relentlessly depressing. Diamond identifies four factors which may contribute to a society's collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours and disruption of trade links. But the most important factor is how that society responds to its challenges. Sometimes, as in the case of Pitcairn and Henderson, nothing can be done. These societies were locally unsustainable colonies effectively supported by trade; when that trade dried up (due to the parent society engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices), the colonies slowly died off. In other cases, as with Tokogawa Japan and Tikopia, changes can be made which ensure sustainability and social survival (Tokogawa Japan enacted strict laws to prevent deforestation; the Tikopians killed all their pigs because they recognised that they were destroying their island's fragile environment). But the most tragic cases are those where a solution was clearly possible, but was not taken - as in Greenland, where a Viking colony died out because of their refusal to eat fish (!) and insistence on trying to live as European sheep-herders in an environment which simply did not support it.

There are also some chapters devoted to modern societies under pressure - Rwanda, Haiti, China and Australia - which provide modern examples of the same problems. Rwanda has effectively already suffered a collapse, with a genocide at least partly driven by overpopulation and intense pressure for land. Haiti's poverty is at least partly the result of their having destroyed their environment through deforestation. China and Australia face longer-term problems (pollution and outright unsustainability, respectively), which while less likely to lead to collapse, are going to have to result in significant changes if their societies are to survive.

There are two key points I took from Collapse. The first is the dependence of a society on its environment. The environment is the basis of the economy; it provides the food we eat, the water we drink, and the resources and services which make the production of houses and books and oil tankers and computers possible (there is now an entire subdiscipline of ecological economics devoted to studying these links, as well as applying economic thinking to environmental problems and vice versa). Most of Diamond's examples collapsed because they lived substantially beyond their ecological means (though sometimes they had no way of knowing they were doing so until it was too late). There's a leson there for all of us. The second, as mentioned above, is the importance of human choice. Faced with a crucial environmental challenge, we can choose to ignore it, or we can choose to adapt to or resolve it. Which choice we take will affect our quality of life, sometimes drastically. As Diamond notes,

[s]evere problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don't succeed in solving them by our own actions.

In a world which is increasingly living beyond its means, we will be facing such situations more often. But thanks to globalisation and increasing interconnectedness (not to mention science, technology, and the lessons of the past), we have more capacity than ever before to solve those problems. I'm just hoping that we collectively manage to make the right choices...

Collapse: Pitcairn, Henderson - and New Zealand?

I'm reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive at the moment. In the outline chapter he identifies five broad factors which can determine a society's fate: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners, and how that society responds to its challenges. An early chapter examines Easter Island, which due to its lack of outside influences and isolation from the rest of Polynesian culture is perhaps the textbook example of a society killing itself off by degrading its environment (they cut down all their trees, which both decreased agricultural production due to erosion and reduced soil fertility, and meant they had no canoes, meaning much reduced access to seafood). But a sadder story is told in the next chapter, on Pitcairn and Henderson. These societies were not self-sufficient, but sustained by trade from the larger island of Mangareva; when that trade disappeared, Mangareva having made the same mistake as Easter and cut down all the trees which provided it with ocean-going canoes, so did the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson. Not immediately - there is evidence that human habitation continued for up to a century after trade ceased - but by the time these islands were "discovered" by Europeans (1606 and 1790 respectively) they were empty. Diamond thinks that this should be a warning to us; globalisation has led to increasing economic interdependence, which allows us to offset the cost of degraded environments and sustain a well-fed, high-tech society through imports. But what happens if a vital part of the global economic system falls over?

Diamond uses the specific example of oil, and its fairly easy to see what the consequences of a sudden and sustained disruption of oil supplies (due to a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, for example) would be. The price would skyrocket, and in much of the world, transport would grind to a halt - resulting in a disruption of industrial production, economic recession, and possibly famine. If the disruption was long-lasting, societies would adapt, but more expensive transport would change patterns of industrial production and habitation; as in the nineteenth century, before we began using oil, factories would need to be closer to suppliers, and people closer to food sources.

What about total disruption? You'd need to look very hard to find a modern society as isolated and dependent on external trade as Henderson or Pitcairn was, but we can always do a though experiment. What would happen if New Zealand was completely cut off from the rest of the world? I think we'd actually do pretty well - we'd have to drop down to a 1900's or maybe 1940's level of existence, but we wouldn't die. And I think most western societies are probably in the same boat. The loss of imported fuel and raw materials would lead to vastly reduced standards of living, and the transition would be painful, but it wouldn't necessarily result in that society disappearing.

And OTOH, a painful transition is bad enough...

Following on from Diamond's point, if globalisation exposes us to risk, how can we manage it? Autarchy - self-sufficiency on a national level - may seem a tempting answer, but this throws out the benefits of interdependence along with the risks. I think a better solution is to use globalisation itself. Just as countries can ameliorate famine by working with others, we may be able to ameliorate other distributional disruptions (and on a global scale, famine is a distributional problem, not one of there not being enough food). Of course, self-interest and history will interfere with this, just as they interfere with other efforts to resolve global problems collectively - but I think its a lot better than each society trying to solve its own problems alone.