Posted in book reviews

I recently read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.  It really was a "bait and switch" experience, because what I thought was a history book ended up being about environmentalism.  I wouldn't have read it if I had known that.  Although, by the end it seemed to me that a lot of environmentalism is just common sense, in which case the environmentalists have been doing a pretty bad job explaining the issues to other people. It only makes sense to not cut down all your trees, or to not eat all the fish in the world faster than they can reproduce, or to not let all your topsoil disappear.

This book is very long and could probably stand to be shorter.  If it were a movie I would have been saying, "Isn't this OVER yet???"  I skipped the first part about Montana so I could get into the historical stuff.  The historical collapsed societies he covers are Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson islands, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Vikings in Greenland.  He also analyzes some modern societies, like Rwanda, a contrast of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (which are on the same island), China, and Australia.  There are also some success stories to contrast the failed societies. 

To me, by far the most interesting section was about Viking Greenland.  He briefly covers the other Viking settlements, all of which succeeded except for North America.  (Apparently, when you kill 8 out of 9 of the first Native Americans you run into, word gets around and you aren't really welcomed! They couldn't send enough settlers to overcome the locals.) Vikings survived in Greenland for 450 years and then the last settlers starved to death even though they were surrounded by edible fish.  They did not eat fish!

The last section of the book is his analysis of the world's situation.  He makes some really big leaps in logic, and his suggestions of what any one person can do about the problems in the world are buried in the "Further Readings" section.  They aren't really that earth-shaking either, things like vote, pay attention to what you buy, talk to your family and friends about the issues, etc.

I could tell that the author and I have very different viewpoints on many things.  He stops just short of full-blown admiration for China's one-child policy.  At one point he talks about how elite people tend to try to isolate themselves from problems, but says that elites (ie, rich people) still have to breathe and drink water, and then links "chemicals in the environment" with increased infertility.  Then, later, he mentions his "Third World friends" who have heard of the "benign forms of birth control" that the First World has and want them, but the US won't include family planning in its overseas aid.  I think if he did a little research in this area, he would find that those benign forms aren't so benign, and that increased infertility in the First World is directly related.  And it seems contradictory as well - he should probably be happy for any form of infertility because it decreases the population.

He also discusses an interesting concept of a society's core values and how these can help or hinder.  His best example of this is Australia viewing itself as British and how Australians tried to recreate England there (for example, by disastrously introducing rabbits and foxes). However, when he introduces this concept and says what he believes the US's core values are, he mentions things like racism and homophobia.  Huh? If you were going to ask me, I would say things like "individualism" and "radical self-sufficiency" were core values that might not be serving us so well.

I'm not sure that all his societies even make the points he is trying to illustrate.  For example, he says over and over that because of globalization, one society collapsing will inevitably affect the rest of the world.  However, the only modern collapse he examines is Rwanda (the rest just might collapse).  Whether or not it was a collapse according to his criteria, it is really difficult to see how the collapse affected the average person in the US, for example.

My suggestion for this book would be, if you are interested in any of the societies he examines, read that section.  I finished this book nearly two weeks ago, and upon further reflection, it wasn't really worth all the time I spent reading it.