Collapse is the sequel to an amazing, complex and challenging book that saw a huge success. It brought the author, Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize – Guns, Germs, and Steel. If the first book (Guns) is an archeological speculation on how the current ordering of nations was reached, the second one (Collapse) questions the ability of the respective nations to last throughout time.
Put together, these two books make one of the most complex, meaningful and controversial projects ever undertaken by a contemporary intellectual. They make a delightful reading, impressive through their originality, their erudition, their ability to relate modernity, the digitized present, with the savage, far past. Although both stem with clear and carefully formed arguments, their conclusions are at least controversial.
While Guns asks why the nations' food chain is dominated by the West and concludes that the success of the West was just a coincidence, a matter of luck, Collapse suggests that the Western lifestyle is threatened by the same sudden ruin that led to the disappearance of societies like the Mayans and the Anasazi.
Diamond ends Guns with the suggestion that human history should be developed as a science, and he follows on this suggestion in Collapse, trying to use history as a science in order to forecast the success or failure of the current world order.
The author explains his intentions and methods in the prologue: understanding and presenting society collapse as caused or influenced by environmental factors using the comparative method. He will compare past and present societies with different environmental perspectives, neighbor relations, political institutions, or other variables meant to influence their stability, in order to assess or predict their ability to survive hardships or their likelihood to collapse (p. 18).
In anticipation of his predictions, he identifies five main factors considered to bring about collapse, namely: climate changes, hostile neighbor relations, the collapse of essential trade partners, environmental issues and societies' failure to adapt to them. According to him, today's societies face twelve environmental problems, out of which eight already contributed to the fall of other societies in the past.
1. Deforestation and, through it, habitat destruction
2. Soil loss through erosion, reduced fertility, and salinization
3. Faulty water management
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. The effects of introducing new species over native species
7. Overpopulation
8. The increased impact of the individual on the surrounding world.
The newer four factors that could weaken and collapse today's societies are:
1. Anthropogenic climate changes,
2. Toxins buildup in the environment,
3. Energy shortages, and,
4. Humans fully using the photosynthetic capacity of Earth.
Many of these factors work together to bring about collapse. Thus, overpopulation is, usually, doubled by the overexploitation of resources, which, in turn, favors toxin buildup in the atmosphere, and, through it, brings about global warming, etc.
Such connections are easy to make, but, as the author warns, "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses", and the collapses of Carthage (146BC) and of the Soviet Union are the best counter-examples. Sometimes, collapse is the result of economic factors or military factors alone (p. 15).
Numerous pages of Collapse contemplate life in the past, on islands like Greenland, Henderson, Pitcairn and Easter Island. Deforestation is emphasized as one of the most important factors in the breakdown of the local societies. Due to the fact that trees need so much time to grow, their cutting has long-term negative effects, more severe than crop failure, often involving disastrous erosion.
Thus, the Easter Island deforestation led to the blowing off of the topsoil layer by the wind, followed by inherent crop failure, "starvation, a population crash and a descent into cannibalism" (p. 40). The decline of the Mayan and Anasazi populations was determined, in turn, by climate changes and deforestation, which led to soil loss.
Collapse compares soil with fossil fuels, considering it a valuable resource which took millions of years to accumulate and is now being lost at a rate 10 to 40 times higher than its formation rate. Deforestation was the major collapse factor in all the fallen societies described, with climate changes as a recurring threat.
But can the author's case studies be used to draw conclusions regarding the world we live in? He covers mostly isolated islands and civilizations in the pre-technology era. Due to their isolation and to the fact that they are surrounded by waters, islands are more vulnerable and more exposed to threats like climate changes than continents.
Biologists, for example, base their warnings related to species extinction on studies performed on island ecologies, but, in this environment, the stressed species have no retreat alternative. Diamond warns that many of the world's species could disappear within the next 50 years, and that is the type of conclusion usually reached by biologists who conduct their research on islands, but not all of the species in question live on islands.
The same applies to people. The author starts from environment failures on isolated islands to show that societies around the world are at risk but neglects the fact that those societies do not inhabit isolated islands.
However, leaving the island factor aside, Collapse does bring thoughtful warnings regarding alarming trends threatening biodiversity and life itself, such as soil loss, freshwater depletion, overfishing and climate changes. These trends, among others, could lead to a global crash in the long term.
"Our world society", and especially the West, "is presently on a non-sustainable course" (p. 498), because, the "prosperity" that it "enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital". The decline could begin within only one or two decades from when the peak numbers, the wealth and power of that society are reached (p. 509).
Due to the prominent role played by population pressure in the collapse of past societies, the author fears population growth as well. He dreads the thought of the globe's population going from 6 billion to 8.5 billion and blames population growth defenders, referring to Los Angeles and to the fact that its increasing population makes it "less appealing" to support his case. He argues that he never met people who "personally expressed a desire for increased population" (p.500).
Obviously, a population growth of 2.5 billion people would not be acceptable for Diamond, but he never mentions if he would do anything to prevent their birth? The only forces strong enough to stop this population growth would be a nuclear war, a comet striking the earth, mass sterilization or maybe the old but dreadful plague.
If the trends remain the same, it is justified to say that the global economy has no sustenance. But trends do change, so there is still hope. For example, deforestation, one of the major destruction factors according to the author, seems to no longer be a threat in the US.
After the terrifying statistics of the 19th century, things started changing for the better and the forested acreage began rising. On one hand, wood stopped being one of the primary fuels and, on the other hand, the improved agricultural practices allowed that millions of acres be removed from the farming circuit and introduced in the forests circuit.
Yes, many countries have yet to achieve the Western development standards, but they will. When that happens, they will find and exploit new energy sources and allow the forest cover to regrow. Diamond claims to embrace a cautiously optimistic attitude, but his book betrays a worrying grim view on the future of humanity.
The author worries that humanity's fate was Diamond fears our fate was determined ever since antiquity – people live by exploiting resources bequeathed by their ancestors in the distant past, and without profound behavior changes, their legacy commodities will run out and everything will crash.
Despite his academic background and his evolutionary influences, the writer does not seem to take into account the evolutionary arc as far as our society is concerned. His ideas rely on facts and assumptions going back as much as 13,000 years, but his predictions for the future rarely exceed a decade or two.
He warns that societies will collapse, but he assumes that people will never give up the destructive path that they have embraced, despite the numerous occasions when humanity proved its ability to adjust and turn its fate around. He also neglects the power of technology and the new horizons science opens.
Yes, perhaps resources will run out, but, considering the progress made so far, hopes of finding resources on other planets or learning to multiply the remaining ones would not be unjustified. So, instead of worrying about an imminent future collapse of our society, why not take Jared Diamond's book as a wake-up call and think of ways and implement solutions to turn things around, change our destiny and avoid collapse at all cost?
Works Cited
Diamond, Jared M. COLLAPSE How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Penguin, 2005. Print.
