Summarize Diamond’s discussion (chapters 7 & 8) of the Greenland Norse. Identify the biological (e.g. weather patterns, geology of Greenland, etc.) and th

COLLAPSE HOW S O C I E T I E S CHOOSE

TO FAIL OR S U C C E E D

J A R E D D I A M O N D

V I K I N G

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To Jack and Ann Hirschy,

Jill Hirschy Eliel and John Eliel, Joyce Hirschy McDowell,

Dick (1929-2003) and Margy Hirschy, and their fellow Montanans:

guardians of Montana's big sky

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things, The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

C O N T E N T S

List of Maps xiu

Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms

1 Two farms « Collapses, past and present » Vanished Edens? A five-point framework Businesses and the environment The comparative method Plan of the book

PartOne: MODERN MONTANA 25

Chapter 1: Under Montana's Big Sky 27 Stan Falkow's story « Montana and me Why begin with Montana? Montana's economic history Mining • Forests Soil Water «» Native and non-native species Differing visions » Attitudes towards regulation • Rick Laible's story Chip Pigman's story » Tim Huls's story John Cook's story Montana, model of the world *

PartTwo: PAST SOCIETIES 77

Chapter 2: Twilight at Easter 79 The quarry's mysteries « Easter's geography and history People and food * Chiefs, clans, and commoners Platforms and statues Carving, transporting, erecting The vanished forest Consequences for society Europeans and explanations Why was Easter fragile? Easter as metaphor •

Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands 120 Pitcairn before the Bounty Three dissimilar islands » Trade The movie's ending *

Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors 136 Desert farmers • Tree rings * Agricultural strategies * Chaco's problems and packrats • Regional integration Chaco's decline and end * Chaco's message

X Contents

Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses 157 Mysteries of lost cities The Maya environment Maya agriculture Maya history Copan * Complexities of collapses Wars and droughts Collapse in the southern lowlands The Maya message

Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues 178 Experiments in the Atlantic The Viking explosion Autocatalysis Viking agriculture Iron Viking chiefs Viking religion Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes Iceland's environment Iceland's history Iceland in context Vinland

Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering 211 Europe's outpost Greenland's climate today Climate in the past

Native plants and animals « Norse settlement Farming Hunting and fishing An integrated economy Society Trade with Europe * Self-image

Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End 248 Introduction to the end Deforestation » Soil and turf damage The Inuit's predecessors Inuit subsistence Inuit/Norse relations * The end Ultimate causes of the end «

Chapter 9: Opposite Paths to Success 277 Bottom up, top down New Guinea highlands Tikopia Tokugawa problems Tokugawa solutions Why Japan succeeded Other successes

Part Three: MODERN SOCIETIES 309

Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide 311 A dilemma Events in Rwanda * More than ethnic hatred Buildup in Kanama Explosion in Kanama Why it happened

Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti 329

Differences * Histories Causes of divergence * Dominican environmental impacts Balaguer The Dominican environment today The future

Contents xi

Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant 358 China's significance Background Air, water, soil Habitat, species, megaprojects Consequences Connections The future •

Chapter 13: "Mining" Australia 378 Australia's significance * Soils Water Distance Early history E Imported values Trade and immigration Land degradation • Other environmental problems Signs of hope and change

Part Four: PRACTICAL LESSONS 417

Chapter 14: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? 419

Road map for success Failure to anticipate Failure to perceive Rational bad behavior Disastrous values Other irrational

failures Unsuccessful solutions • Signs of hope «

Chapter 15: Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes 441

Resource extraction « Two oil fields » Oil company motives Hardrock mining operations * Mining company motives • Differences among mining companies The logging industry « Forest Stewardship Council The seafood industry Businesses and the public »

Chapter 16: The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? 486

Introduction The most serious problems • If we don't solve them … Life in Los Angeles • One-liner objections The past and the present Reasons for hope

Acknowledgments 526 Further Readings 529 Index ' 561 Illustration Credits 576

LIST OF MAPS

The World: Prehistoric, Historic, and Modern Societies 4-5

Contemporary Montana 31

The Pacific Ocean, the Pitcairn Islands, and Easter Island 84-85

The Pitcairn Islands 122

Anasazi Sites 142

Maya Sites 161

The Viking Expansion 182-183

Contemporary Hispaniola 331

Contemporary China 361

Contemporary Australia 386

Political Trouble Spots of the Modern World; Environmental Trouble Spots of the Modern World 497

I

C O L L A P S E

P R O L O G U E

A Tale of Two Farms Two farms Collapses, past and present Vanished Edens? A five-point framework * Businesses and the environment

The comparative method * Plan of the book

few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were

by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnifi- cent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their pro- duction of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respec- tively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teaming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or fjord (below Gardar Farm).

Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, be- cause their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to wnich they could market their products, so that transportation costs and

A

hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more cen- trally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners' control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies.

The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabi- tants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me to- day of Gardar's former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceiv- able as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today.

Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms, I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed to decline. At present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the process of expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for adoption by neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most pow- erful country in the world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in gen- eral are prone to collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar, others have survived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing envi- ronmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also strug-

gled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse), and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding.

Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or van- ished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imag- ined in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is thus an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse. Some of those milder types of decline include the normal minor rises and falls of fortune, and minor political/ economic/social restructurings, of any individual society; one society's con- quest by a close neighbor, or its decline linked to the neighbor's rise, with- out change in the total population size or complexity of the whole region; and the replacement or overthrow of one governing elite by another. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zim- babwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4-5).

The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a roman- tic fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vaca- tions in order to experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders—they boast "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?— did they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleas- ant way? Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought: might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists

someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?

It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandon- ments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadver- tently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scien- tists). The processes through which past societies have undermined them- selves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat de- struction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), wa- ter management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per- capita impact of people.

Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses consti- tuting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double- cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally mar- ginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society in- cluded food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or dis- ease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural com- plexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives—to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senes- cence, and death—and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, every- body in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajec- tory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion:

different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies didn't collapse at all.

The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern; indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civi- lization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apoca- lyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be "just" a future of signifi- cantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could as- sume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources. If this rea- soning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generation of children and young adults lives out their middle and late years.

But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigor- ously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they un- derestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population of almost seven billion, with our potent modern technology, is causing our en- vironment to crumble globally at a much more rapid rate than a mere few million people with stone and wooden tools already made it crumble locally in the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g., wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (e.g., plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn't the rate of human population growth declining, such that we're already on course for the world's population to level off at some manageable num- ber of people?

All of these questions illustrate why those famous collapses of past civili- zations have taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those

past collapses. We know that some past societies collapsed while others didn't: what made certain societies especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes by which past societies committed ecocide? Why did some past societies fail to see the messes that they were getting into, and that (one would think in retrospect) must have been obvious? Which were the solutions that succeeded in the past? If we could answer these questions, we might be able to identify which societies are now most at risk, and what measures could best help them, without waiting for more Somalia-like collapses.

But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems. We shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons.

Efforts to understand past collapses have had to confront one major controversy and four complications. The controversy involves resistance to the idea that past peoples (some of them known to be ancestral to peoples currently alive and vocal) did things that contributed to their own decline. We are much more conscious of environmental damage now than we were a mere few decades ago. Even signs in hotel rooms now invoke love of the environment to make us feel guilty if we demand fresh towels or let the water run. To damage the environment today is considered morally culpable.

Not surprisingly, Native Hawaiians and Maoris don't like paleontologists telling them that their ancestors exterminated half of the bird species that had evolved on Hawaii and New Zealand, nor do Native Americans like archaeologists telling them that the Anasazi deforested parts of the southwestern U.S. The supposed discoveries by paleontologists and archaeolo-

gists sound to some listeners like just one more racist pretext advanced by whites for dispossessing indigenous peoples. It's as if scientists were saying, "Your ancestors were bad stewards of their lands, so they deserved to be dis- possessed." Some American and Australian whites, resentful of government payments and land retribution to Native Americans and Aboriginal Aus- tralians, do indeed seize on the discoveries to advance that argument today. Not only indigenous peoples, but also some anthropologists and archaeolo- gists who study them and identify with them, view the recent supposed dis- coveries as racist lies.

Some of the indigenous peoples and the anthropologists identifying with them go to the opposite extreme. They insist that past indigenous peo- ples were (and modern ones still are) gentle and ecologically wise stewards of their environments, intimately knew and respected Nature, innocently lived in a virtual Garden of Eden, and could never have done all those bad things. As a New Guinea hunter once told me, "If one day I succeed in shooting a big pigeon in one direction from our village, I wait a week before hunting pigeons again, and then I go out in the opposite direction from the village." Only those evil modern First World inhabitants are ignorant of Na- ture, don't respect the environment, and destroy it.

In fact, both extreme sides in this controversy—-the racists and the be- lievers in a past Eden—are committing the error of viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from (whether inferior to or superior to) modern First World peoples. Managing environmental resources sustain- ably has always been difficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago. Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent around 46,000 years ago, and the subsequent prompt extinction of most of Australia's former giant marsupials and other large animals, every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans—whether of Aus- tralia, North America, South America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean is- lands, or Hawaii and New Zealand and dozens of other Pacific islands—has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human- associated habitat changes, introduced pest species, and diseases. Any peo- ple can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the re- sources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels be- tween years or decades; that it's difficult to get people to agree on exercising

restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the com- mons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosys- tems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation virtually impossible to predict even for a professional ecologist. Environ- mental problems that are hard to manage today were surely even harder to manage in the past. Especially for past non-literate peoples who couldn't read case studies of societal collapses, ecological damage constituted a tragic, unforeseen, unintended consequence of their best efforts, rather than morally culpable blind or conscious selfishness. The societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative and (for a time) advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and primitive.

Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserved to be ex- terminated or dispossessed, nor all-knowing conscientious environmental- ists who solved problems that we can't solve today. They were people like us, facing problems broadly similar to those that we now face. They were prone either to succeed or to fail, depending on circumstances similar to those making us prone to succeed or to fail today. Yes, there are differences be- tween the situation we face today and that faced by past peoples, but there are still enough similarities for us to be able to learn from the past.

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke histori- cal assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. In many or most cases, historians and archaeolo- gists have been uncovering overwhelming evidence that this assumption (about Eden-like environmentalism) is wrong. By invoking this assumption to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on