Abstract
This major work is very important, and will be widely read. Since it deals in detail with traditional strategies for managing plant and animal resources, every ethnobiologist will need to know something about it, both because of its contributions and because so many students and colleagues will read it.
Diamond covers several cases of societies that collapsed because of, or partly because of, ecological reasons. He also tells a number of success stories. The title is thus misleading: the famous “collapses” of history, from those of the Roman Empire and Assyria to the more recent implosions of the USSR and Yugoslavia, receive no attention, while much of the book is devoted to societies that did not collapse in spite of major ecological problems.
The collapses in question are Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, the central lowland Classic Maya, and the Norse settlements in Greenland. Easter Island is compared with Tikopia, another small Polynesian island but one that kept itself in business by strong social controls. The Green-landers are matched with the Icelanders, who survived in a less marginal environment. The Maya are less closely comparable with Japan, but Tokugawa Japan serves as a model case of a traditional society that rebuilt its ecosystem after devastation. New Guinea's highlands are considered for their traditional agroforestry practices.
The book then shifts to two modern collapses—Rwanda and Haiti—where we know much more about the actual complexity of the political and economic situations lying behind the civil meltdowns. Haiti begs for, and receives, comparison with the Dominican Republic—a relative success story on the same island.
All the collapses were in rather marginal and fragile environments. Often, climate change—the Little Ice Age in Greenland, drought in the Anasazi and Maya cases—gave a coup de grace. The successes were, in general, better off ecologically. But the record is fairly clear: political will was a more important consideration. The Greenlanders refused to learn from the Inuit when the Little Ice Age made Nor-wegian-style farming less viable. The Maya were torn by wars between petty kings, and thus failed to get it together to meet the challenge. The Rwandan and Haitian situations had deep roots in colonial and neocolonial politics.
Diamond discusses at length the lessons of these societies. Runaway population growth, depletion of resources that could have been used sustainably, and refusal to see and confront obvious problems appear to be his greatest concerns. He is rather upbeat and describes himself as “a cautious optimist” (p. 521). Clearly, today's world has far more resources, far more knowledge, and far more political options than the Greenlanders or Easter Islanders. To be sure, we also have more problems, including chemical pollution, giant multinational extractive firms, and rapidly increasing luxury consumption; but Diamond recounts a number of enlightened initiatives by industry, even the usually retrograde mining and oil-drilling firms. Diamond also details what he thinks are the most direct and immediate threats we face—from population growth to pollution—and gives sensible, moderate, even-handed answers to critics of environmentalism.
Diamond has been criticized in the past for cavalier biological reductionism and other oversimplifications, and for unfair portrayal of indigenous peoples as sheer wasters without ecological sense. He has reformed. This book is remarkably free of oversimplification, given its enormous scope. Indigenous people get fairer treatment, partly through success stories, partly through the nuanced and qualified accounts of the failures. Proper attention is given to wealth disparities, globalization, and other socioeconomic factors. Overall, this is a sensible, rational book, a great relief in this time when overheated and extreme rhetoric is common not only in the popular press but even in all too much academic writing on environmental issues.
I found the book remarkably free from errors. I did question some of the material on the Maya. Diamond follows the late Linda Schele in seeing the classic monuments as portraying a society of war and power. But if the American Midwest were to collapse tomorrow, in a thousand years the only thing remaining would be the bronze and granite statues of generals, soldiers, and warriors; gone would be the farm accounts, schoolbooks, community leaflets, newspapers full of local births and weddings, and everything else dealing with ordinary life. Proof that the same bias exists in our Maya materials is found in the few surviving Maya books; they are calendric and astronomical works, not war stories. The Maya had war (and so do we), but they had much else. Diamond also stresses the extreme depopulation at the collapse, using high-end estimates for the Classic period and low-end ones for the Postclassic. These figures may be wrong. Moreover, the marginal Maya lands did not really collapse. Also, in my research area at least, the towns were depopulated, but a vast number of inconspicuous local sites—farmsteads, hamlets, waterhole settlements—appeared in the Postclassic. The showy stuff disappeared, but the Maya and their culture survived, if reduced in number and in glory. Maya knowledge of and care for the environment is truly stunning; they survived horrific drought and they are surviving still.
Probably many readers of this book will have their own theories of collapse and success. Anthropologists will no doubt wish to go deeper into the political and social causes of collapse. Certainly, as a major cause of collapse, ecological stress does not necessarily explain much. What usually happens in the world is not Easter-Island-style total system failure, but cyclic collapses of empires, driven by militarism and buildup of wealth disparities more than by environmental problems—though environmental problems are not trivial. (The best theory of cyclic collapse is still that of Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century; see Anderson and Chase-Dunn 2005.) But the areas of the world that have been most ecologically devastated are the Near East and north China—still centers of population and wealth.
On the other hand, small and marginal societies have faded out in the past. More to the point, as Diamond says, is the desperate situation in several countries today—those that are densely populated, environmentally devastated, and weakly or poorly led. Besides Rwanda and Haiti, recent civil meltdowns and civil wars have occurred in Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Congo (Zaire), Guatemala, El Salvador, ex-Yugoslavia (Serbia), and a dozen other countries. Of the lot, only Yugoslavia was relatively affluent and environmentally healthy. However, several equally impoverished and ecologically stressed countries have managed to survive through political toughness and flexibility. Clearly, environmental stress is one factor; clearly it is not the only factor. Poverty and hunger add to misgovernment, corruption, lack of order, and so on. Diamond discusses this, but not in great depth. This is not his fault—it is not his field—but someone will now need to do it.
I wish I could share Diamond's optimism. For one thing, he does not adequately explain just how bad the world situation is. One thing that scares me is the slow, steady disappearance of even the most familiar, human-tolerant, formerly common birds and mammals. Sometimes a known disease is responsible; parvovirus killed off the gray foxes that used to abound on my campus, and West Nile in the last two years has reduced our local crow population by 90%. But often no one really knows what has happened. Blackbirds, meadowlarks, shrikes, and many other birds that adjusted well to humans and were abundant 30 years ago are now going or gone. Shorebirds are almost gone from our coasts. Skunks and even the near-indestructible opossums are rare on my campus; they used to be abundant. Amphibians are about gone here, as elsewhere in the world. A lot is very wrong, and we don't even understand most of it.