A Usable Past (Diamond's 'Collapse' reviewed in Sigma Xi's journal)

[struggle4progress]

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond. xvi + 576 pp. Viking, 2005. $29.95.

Convinced that the world is in big environmental trouble, Jared Diamond offers readers a hefty tome that looks to the past to help us face the future. A fuller title, Diamond says, 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." Several societies in the past have collapsed in part because of environmental overexploitation, whereas others, despite similar overexploitation, have survived. What makes the difference between collapse and survival? Diamond argues that by examining the environmental problems of past societies and analyzing how they either escaped or succumbed to them, we can learn useful lessons for our own times. In this way he aims to help us recognize the seriousness of the planet's environmental condition and to provide what historians sometimes call "a usable past," so as to raise the chances that we can rescue the situation and avoid a very unpleasant fate, the mother of all collapses. <snip>

The variables Diamond refers to are five considerations that together he calls a "five-point framework" for analyzing the environmental evolution of societies: the degree and nature of environmental damage; the degree and nature of climate change; the level of hostility of neighboring societies; the degree of reliance on friendly trading partners; and the nature of a society's responses to its environmental problems. In offering this framework, Diamond goes beyond simplistic formulations about ecological collapse, recognizing that environmental deterioration always operates as a force among other forces, and sometimes in synergistic conjunction with other forces. Historians and social scientists will probably see the framework as imperfect for its neglect of other variables—which are legion—that can contribute to societal collapses. But a complete roster of potentially relevant variables leads to an unworkably complex model, and Diamond's has the virtue of simplicity. <snip>

The most convincing case for the relevance of past collapses is that of the Greenland Norse, to whom Diamond devotes two full chapters. Here he broadly follows the interpretation advanced by Thomas McGovern, according to which the settlement after some 450 years went extinct in the early 15th century because of social rigidities that prevented the Norse from adapting both to a cooler climate and to the cessation of trade links to Scandinavia—in short, rigidities that prevented them from living like the Inuit, on abundant stocks of fish, seals and whales. It is an interpretation in which the five-point framework shows its worth, although one in which actual environmental deterioration played only a modest role. These chapters are a wonderful, and to my mind convincing, account of the fate of the Greenland Norse. Here, as throughout the sections on past societies, Diamond has relied on the best authorities (mainly archaeologists) and has done his homework well. <snip>

Reviewer Information
J. R. McNeill is a professor at Georgetown University in the history department and at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environment and International Affairs. He is the author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World (Norton, 2000) and The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and is coauthor (with W. H. McNeill) of The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (Norton, 2003).

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/40741;jsessionid=aaa57IR2d128bZ

[Mojambo]

1. An absolute must read, IMO n/t