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CA Forum on Anthropology in Public: Perspectives on Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

2005; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 46; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3597146

1537-5382

Demenocal, Cook,

Language and cultural evolution

Previous articleNext article FreeCA FORUM ON ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLICPerspectives on Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or SucceedPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreReferences CitedAllen, T. F. H., Joseph A. Tainter, and T. W. Hoekstra. 2003. Supplyside sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAmmerman, A. J., and L. L. CavalliSforza. 1984. The Neolithic transition and the genetics of populations in Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarBoyd, D. J. 2001. Life without pigs: Recent subsistence changes among the Irakia Awa, Papua New Guinea. Human Ecology 29:25982.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle ScholarBoyd, R., and P. J. Richerson. 2002. Group beneficial norms spread rapidly in a structured population. 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Internal sociopolitical factors affect the way societies use, regulate, and protect resources such as water or land, whereas external climatic variability introduces uncertainty and vulnerability that can limit the availability of those resources. As detailed in Diamonds book, ancient cultural collapses of advanced, urban, stratified societies such as the Maya, Anasazi, or Akkadian have been linked to these two destabilizing influences. The relative importance of these factors is debated by specialists, but evidence for both types of vulnerabilities is present for each of these case studies. The archeological records of collapse are sobering in light of the apparent complexity, sophistication, and longevity of these past cultures, with their impressively successful adaptations to often marginal physical environments.Disquieting parallels are evident between these cultural collapses and the state of global societies today, and this is perhaps the most compelling point of the book. These parallels are so striking and familiar that they are apparent to scientists and the lay public alike. Most people appreciate the view that population growth coupled with increasing resource use eventually leads to loss of environmental quality as the carrying capacity of the land is diminished. There is no shortage of examples in the modern world in which geopolitical tensions and population growth have led to widespread human suffering through restrictions on the availability of food and water (Rwanda, Darfur, the Middle East). These socially destabilizing factors are those that cultures can hope to have some measure of control over. Societies can and do adopt better and more sustainable practices given sufficient incentive to do so. This Malthusian thread runs through nearly every example of ancient cultural collapse, and the question it raises becomes how many people the Earth can support and at what level.The role of climate change in these examples of cultural collapse is equally disquieting. Climate sets the longterm, sustainable carrying capacity of a given region, and its yeartoyear variability defines how societies can adapt to it using water management and agricultural practices. Chief among the concerns in semiarid regions, where many of these past cultures thrived, is the onset of exceptional drought. Drought is a climatic variable that we know something about not only for the past century or so but also for the past millennium through the contributions of dendrochronology and ocean and lake sediment studies.The U.S. Great Plains Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s illustrates how the convergence of socioeconomic and climatic vulnerabilities can lead to exceptional societal disruption given a relatively modest climatic anomaly. Several years of diminished rainfall in the northern Great Plains between 1933 and 1938 led to one of the most devastating and bestdocumented agricultural, economic, and social disasters in the history of the United States. It displaced and impoverished millions of people, cost over $1 billion in federal relief, and extended and deepened the economic collapse which was the Great Depression.To encourage settlement in the Great Plains in the early 1930s, western land boosters advertised the exceptional suitability of western land for agriculture and popularized the myth that rain follows the plow, the pseudoscience notion that tilled soil attracts rainfall and favorable growing conditions. As the farms multiplied, these claims were fortuitously strengthened by extended periods of unusually high rainfall. In truth, however, the region was illsuited to farming. The explorer Steven Long (Wood 1966:11819) reported in 1820 that the Great Plains region was almost wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence. Motivated by increasing crop prices and favorable climatic conditions, farm lands expanded and capitalized at breakneck pace in the early twentieth century with little regard for soil conservation. Crop prices plummeted when the national economy went into decline after the economic collapse of 1929 and were further weakened in the early 1930s when bumper crop yields flooded the market. Tragically, many farmers took on additional debt to expand operations in an attempt to recoup their losses.A societal perfect storm was gathering. Unknown to the farmers at that time, ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic had been gradually shifting by a few tenths of a degree from their average values. These relatively slight changes in tropical ocean temperatures diverted the rainbearing winds coming up from the Gulf of Mexico away from the Great Plains, denying the region its normal rainfall for several years in a row. The Great Plains had become vulnerableoverdeveloped and unprotectedand so when the drought took hold and the soil dried, the first strong winds lifted and carried away black clouds of topsoil, gradually erasing millions of acres of farmland. Farms and businesses defaulted by the thousands, banks failed, and unprecedented federal relief programs were introduced to stabilize the crisis. As captured in Steinbecks classic novel, the fabric of American society was strained as millions of migrants dispersed from the Great Plains in search of jobs at a time when the country was just beginning to crawl out of the Great Depression.The Dust Bowl era was important because society learned from past mistakes and improved its resilience to subsequent even larger drought events, including a sixyear drought in the 1950s and a threeyear dry period in the late 1980s which led to the burning of millions of acres in Yellowstone National Park. A current multiyear drought in the American West began in 1999 and has surpassed the Dust Bowl in cumulative water deficit. Multiyear drought events thus appear to be fairly common, occurring roughly several times per century.However, it is the possibility of a megadroughta period of extreme, widespread drought lasting from several decades to even several centuriesthat is most disquieting. Megadroughts are very different from other drought events, and modern society has never experienced one. As detailed in the pages of Collapse, there is very solid evidence that at least three ancient cultures experienced such megadroughts (Anasazi, Maya, and Akkadian populations) and none survived intact. This is not to say that drought was the definitive agent in each case (the archeological record is mute on this issue), as there is equally strong evidence for growing socioeconomic vulnerabilities before collapse.A spatial and temporal history of North American drought spanning the past 1,200 years has been developed using a gridded database of dendrochronological records calibrated in terms of an instrumental drought index (the Palmer Drought Severity Index). These records are particularly valuable not only for appreciating the role of climate change in cultural collapses but also for placing modern climate variability in a longerterm context and understanding its causes. The dendrochronological reconstructions of past drought indicate that in the AD 9001300 interval, the western United States experienced an almost 400year period of elevated aridity and epic drought, punctuated by relatively short episodes of wetter conditions. The primary characteristic that differentiates this early megadrought in the West from droughts experienced during the twentieth century (for example, the Dust Bowl) was its longterm persistence. Individual drought years during the Dust Bowl (such as 1934) were probably as bad as some of the worst years during the megadrought, but overall the Dust Bowl did not last even 10 years. The difference between the twentiethcentury droughts we have experienced and that of the AD 9001300 interval tells us just how bad things could get in the West.This leads to an obvious and extremely important question: How could a 400year period of elevated aridity and epic drought happen in the West? We know with reasonable certainty now that droughts in that western United States are often associated with the development of coolerthanaverage sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. This region is part of the wellknown El Nio/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system, and belowaverage sea surface temperatures in the eastern part of the tropical Pacific are referred to as a La Nia condition. So, La Nias are associated with drought in the West, but how could one last 400 years when historical ones typically lasted only 37 years? The leading hypothesis relates to longterm warming over the tropical Pacific and the way it can promote the development of cool, La Nialike sea surface temperatures in the eastern end of that system. For much of the AD 9001300 interval, solar output was apparently above average. At the same time, large volcanic eruptions, which act to cool the atmosphere, were rare. Model results beginning in AD 1000 indicate that this combination of high solar and low volcanic activity would have produced a prolonged period of cool, La Nialike sea surface temperatures just when the megadrought in the West occurred. If warming over the tropical Pacific Ocean led to the development of persistent droughts in the past, why not in the future as the world is increasingly warmed by greenhouse gases? The message in Collapse may be even more relevant for the future than we would like to believe. David DemerittDepartment of Geography, Kings College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom ([email protected]). 5 vii 05In both its style and its substantive concerns Diamonds Collapse is the kind of book that academic geographers have not attempted for several generations. Indeed, it uncannily echoes many of the founding impulses of geography as an academic discipline, highlighting both how far the profession has come and some of what it has lost along the way.Diamond operates comfortably across a sweeping canvas, from prehistoric Easter Island and Norse Greenland to contemporary Rwanda, China, and Montana. While specialists will doubtless quibble with the details of particular chaptersI found his account of Montanas resourcedependent economy both superficial and half again too longit is difficult not to admire Diamonds determination not to let conventional divisions of discipline and areal specialism stand in his way. This marks a refreshing return to the roving curiosity of Carl Sauer, the earlytwentiethcentury founder of the influential Berkeley school of cultural geography. Although subsequent generations of geographers were often less catholic in their interests (and all too concerned with policing disciplinary boundaries), many shared Sauers commitment to geography as a kind of synthetic discipline bridging the social and natural sciences. Likewise Diamond brings the various places he describes to life by interweaving the documentary and other source materials of the social sciences together with dendrochronological and other data from the natural and physical sciences. He boldly marshals these cases to explain the role of the environment in triggering societal collapse. In this way his book also demonstrates a return to the kind of environmentalist concern that dominated geography for the first half of the twentieth century.Though Diamonds condemnation of reckless environmental destruction would warm the heart of most contemporary environmentalists, he is actually an environmentalist in the original sense of the word. Like the first professional geographers, he is concerned with the role of environment in shaping or even determining human history. While some might sense that he protests too much, he is at pains to distinguish his brand of environmentalism from the crude determinisms of old. A full title for this book, he explains, would be Societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses (p. 15). His subtitle underlines his salient point that societies choose to fail (italics added). In this respect, the tone of Collapse is more hopeful than its title and depressing subject matter might otherwise suggest. Diamond argues that the fate of our society, like that of our planet, is still largely in our hands. By contrast, his Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) suggested a biogeographical inevitability to European dominance whose spirit, if not its precise empirical details, would have been familiar to environmental determinists of a century ago.If only by way of contrast, Diamonds book emphasizes three notable features about the evolution of geographical research since the collapse of that earlytwentiethcentury environmentalist paradigm. First, the research of individual geographers has become steadily more specialized and narrow in its scope. As a result, human and physical geography have been increasingly alienated from one another while within those two very broad churches further subdisciplinary specialization (the Association of American Geographers, for instance, recognizes 53 subdisciplinary specialty groups) has sometimes made it seem as if the only thing that the geographers of any department share is that their mail all gets delivered to the same address. Geography, of course, is hardly alone in facing such a dilemma. The intellectual smorgasbord on offer on my one visit to a meeting of the American Anthropological Association was almost overwhelming. Interdisciplinarity has become something of a buzzword in universities these days. If there were more of it, I might find it easier to talk with my colleagues down the hall and draw on the same dramatic range of empirical materials as Diamond does with such apparent ease.Such interdisciplinarity is, at best, only a partial solution to a second feature of recent geographical scholarship: its lack of a public audience. In geography there is no strong monograph tradition, and the vast majority of scholarship is published in specialist journals accessible only at large research libraries and even then read only (if at all) by a select few. By contrast, Diamonds book is a trade book explicitly aimed at a wide general audience. The first thing a couple seated across from me in the dining car on a recent Amtrak journey asked when told I was a geographer was what I thought of Diamonds book, which their monthly book club was reading. Whereas there is much handwringing among historians about the professions collective abdication of the role of public intellectual, geographers do not appear much bothered that about the only bestselling author in our discipline is Diamond (and even he is an interloper, having only recently been crossappointed to the UCLA geography department after spending most of his career in the medical school). Instead, we geographers have been much more concerned about our professions relevance for policy or lack of it. In the UK, especially, there has been a heated debate about whether the cultural turn amounted to a turn away from wider social concerns, but it is a myopic view of relevance to society (as the recent National Research Council [1997] report about geography was subtitled) that equates this solely with instrumental policy relevance. Unfortunately, the professional circuits of promotion and acclaim tend to reward peerreviewed publication over public engagement. The first generation of professional geographers was not encumbered with such narrow understanding of the public service functions of geographical research and so made more time for the kind of popular science writing and public speaking for which Diamond is so well regarded.Finally, by returning to the older environmentalist terrain about impacts on society, Diamond is asking some questions that geographers have shied away from in their concern with the other side of the environmentsociety dialectic. While Mans Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, as the title of Thomass (1956) influential edited tome put it, has long been an abiding concern, the most exciting recent scholarship in geography has involved denaturalizing environmental problems and showing them to be, at base, social and cultural constructions. Such critiques are invaluable, but their denaturalizing impulse and focus on the discursive beg important questions about the extent of any environmental limits to human activity.Diamonds book addresses that issue headon, but he might well have drawn some different conclusions from his stories of collapse if he had paid more attention to the insights stemming from that more recent geographical scholarship. He is not especially selfconscious about his units of analysis. Many of his historical case study sites are either islandsGreenland, Easter Island, New Guinea, and Hispaniolaor, like the Anasazi, relatively isolated groups, and in keeping with his comparative method of natural experiments he tends to treat them as cases of endogenous collapse within essentially closed systems. The stories of their collapse make for dramatic reading, to be sure, but it is not entirely clear what, in an age of relentless global flows and interconnection, their presentday analogues would be or, for that matter, what would constitute their collapse. Whereas chapters about Rwanda, China, and Australia suggest that the nationstate is the relevant unit to adapt or die (an internationalist scale of reference reinforced by the maps on p. 497, which depict the blackened entirety of nations such as Mongolia as Political and Environmental Trouble Spots of the Modern World), Diamonds discussion of Montana suggests that it also might be a smaller spatial unit. Either way, his focus on societies as undifferentiated wholes tends to play down important questions about the identity of any winners and losers in their transformation. Recent work in political ecology, for example, has emphasized the importance for analysis of identity politics and social unevenness in exacerbating or alleviating environmental problems, but these are also important politically. Insofar as the audience addressed by Diamond in the final section on practical lessons is left deliberately vague, the book tends to appeal alternatively to individualsDiamond offers suggestions to anyone who asks, What can I do as an individual? (p. 487)and to a collective global wehis final chapter is entitled The World as a Polder. While the example of human rights suggests that such appeals to universal human interests do have a place, they tend to steer attention away from the difficult politics that result from differentiated social groups having different interests in causing and alleviating environmental problems. To that extent, then, Collapse is more successful as an evocative warning of potential problems to come than as a guide to how to avoid them. Alf HornborgHuman Ecology Division, Lund University, Finngatan 16, 223 62 Lund, Sweden ([email protected]). 5 vii 05Everybody seems to be reading Diamonds Collapse. This is probably not only because of his clear and accessible prosehis previous book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) earned him a Pulitzer Prizebut because its central theme, the ecological selfdestruction of past and present societies, appeals to a widespread concern with the sustainability of contemporary, U.S.dominated industrial civilization. Diamonds main ambition is to scrutinize a selection of archaeological and historical examples of societal failure and success in order to draw general conclusions about how modern societies ought to behave so as to increase their chances of survival. He summarizes and popularizes relevant archaeological research on socioenvironmental collapse on Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, the Maya, and Norse Greenland, contrasting such failures with the historical success of Iceland, the New Guinea highlands, Tikopia, and Japan. The book begins with a long chapter contemplating the problems and prospects of modern MontanaDiamonds cherished summer resortand devotes four chapters to a motley assortment of other modern case studies, including Rwanda, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, China, and Australia. In the penultimate chapter we are treated to assessments of the contrasting environmental records of some industrial corporations, including two oil companies, and the final chapter includes a section on the authors experience of living in Los Angeles.This remarkable mix of case studies predictably fills the book with peculiar analogies that few anthropologists would be prepared to draw. The mere idea of juxtaposing the fate of a few dozen prehistoric residents of Henderson Island with the prospects of modern nations such as China or Australiaas comparable societies confronted with similar dilemmasseems a bizarre confusion of scales. The list of explicit analogies includes comparisons between prehistoric Easter Islanders and modern Montana farmers (p. 75), Hollywood moguls (p. 98), Romanians (p. 110), and Rwandans or Haitians (p. 151); Easter Island and the whole modern world (p. 119); Mangareva Island and the United States (p. 120); Chaco Canyon Anasazi and citizens of Rome and London (p. 150) or New York (p. 154); Maya kings and modern American CEOs (P. 177); the Greenland Norse and oilimporting Americans (p. 267), the Soviet Union (p. 272), rioters in Los Angeles (p. 273), and the Bush administration (p. 425); Japanese shoguns and President John F. Kennedy (p. 439); and so on. This proliferation of startling analogies is ironic given that Diamond himself lists false analogy as one reason a society may fail to anticipate problems (p. 423).As so often happens, when a scholar with a background in natural science turns to human history, there is a disturbing silence on the role of specificities of culture and social structure in accounting for historical processes and events. (The 15page index does not even include culture or cultural.) Diamonds assumptions about failures in societal decisionmaking (p. 420) underestimate the role of power structures and irreconcilable conflicts of interest throughout human history. Ultimately, it is his notion of societies as a unit of analysis that is misguided. Neither the Maya, the Anasazi, nor medieval Iceland or Japan was a selfcontained managerial unit that could choose to fail or succeeda rhetoric more properly evoking a U.S. presidential administration or the board of an oil company. All these populations, not to mention those of modern Montana, Rwanda, and Haiti, should be recognized as components of larger regional or global systems of societal reproduction within which some subsystems progress and accumulate at the expense of others. When Diamond begins by expressing hopes that, by learning from the past, we may keep on succeeding (p. 3), it is not evident who is to be included in the category we.A paradox of this book is therefore that Diamonds recurrent recognition of longdistance trade, interdependency, and globalization does not prompt him to abandon his atomistic approach to societies as geographically delineated populations managing their own destinies. The concept of a world system seems as alien to him as a serious penetration of nonEuropean cosmologies or social structures. In order to understand the specific trajectories of different societies over the past millennia, it seems, all we need is a physiologistcumornithologist with an interest in archaeology and climate change. Social science theory is completely absent, and the only reference to anthropology is a scornful mention of its generally sceptical attitude to reports of cannibalism (p. 152), which Diamond does not hesitate to identify in most of the cases he lists as failures.Another paradox is that Diamonds refreshingif navecriticism of selfserving power elites inflicting harm on others through their bad behaviour (pp. 42731) in no way seems to shake his confidence in industrial capitalism and the imperative of making profits (pp. 44142). Although he makes a point of showing that environmental and political problems tend to go hand in hand and often demonstrates an awareness that the wealthy and powerful are the last to suffer from environmental deteriorationfor instance, by being able to import resources and export garbage (p. 370)he seems unaware of the burgeoning literature on political ecology and environmental justice. His recipes for sustainability have little to offer beyond the familiar invocations of consumer power (pp. 48485) and general pleas for new values (pp. 43233), First World restraints (pp. 496, 519), better decisionmaking routines, and courageous leadership (p. 440).Still, Collapse is often thoroughly entertaining reading, particularly in the wellwritten and detailed summaries of archaeological reports from various parts of the world. It is easy to share Diamonds fascination with the practicalities of daily life and metabolism in the dying societies of Easter Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and Greenland Norse. He is certainly right that current debates on sustainability have much to learn from studies of past societies, and his book deserves the wide readership that it is attracting. Many anthropologists will lament that their meticulous research reports and theoretical sophistication do not sell as well as simplified popular summaries and vivid tales of cannibalism and catastrophe, but thanks to Jared Diamond many people who have hardly heard of anthropology will be excited by these tantalizing encounters with other cultures. PatrickV. KirchDepartment of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 5 vii 05When U.S. universities began to import the model of the German research university in the late nineteenth century, academic culture was increasingly cast in the mold of disciplinary specialization and eventually intellectual balkanization. We have only just recently become aware of how badly we need interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research if we are to address the worlds pres