Book Review: Collapse

I have been wanting to read Collapse since it first hit the bookshops in 2005. Some well dropped hints led to it being among the gifts in my Christmas stocking at the end of 2008 but it was half way through 2009 when I eventually delved into its 560 pages. The book loses none of its relevance with the four years since it was first published.

Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography and Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). This is probably an appropriate position from which to write books such as Collapse which espouse a global overview. However, Professor Diamond is a polymath who has had at least two earlier distinguished scientific careers in other fields. The blurb on the inside of the back cover states that, after training in laboratory biological science, he became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School in 1966. He was 28 years old when that happened.

At the same time, he developed a parallel career in the ecology and evolution of the birds of New Guinea. He became famous in that discipline by re-discovering the long-lost golden-fronted bower bird. It was not until he reached his fifties that he developed the third string to his bow, addressing environmental history, which led to his present position.

Personal factors also carry significance for his work and writing. Professor Diamond was fifty when he became the father (that is, a father for the first time) of twin boys. As he describes in Collapse, becoming a father at a relatively late age allowed him to empathise much more easily with events that might come to fruition beyond the term of his own life.

It is not surprising then that Jared Diamond is visible on every page of Collapse, always conversing in personal terms with the reader. In the Prologue, he lays out the scheme of the book with ample sign posting in the manner of a well written university assignment. He uses as his opening example of a region with a mix of environmental problems, the big sky state of Montana with the mountains for which it is named. He introduces Montana through the life story of “Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco”. He then narrates his own experiences over the more than fifty years which have passed since he first experienced Montana as a fifteen year old.

Professor Diamond has visited most, if not all of the locations on which his case studies are based. He has often travelled with, and spoken to, many of the primary researchers from whose painstaking research he draws the insights on which Collapse is based. They and many others are introduced as the author’s friends so that the reader also feels a connection with the esoteric work of documenting thousand year old remains of pollen from sediment cores of holes drilled into crater swamps on Easter Island or the even more exotic work of identifying plant remains in the thousand year old, urine encrusted pack rat middens from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

He is still there, in the final pages, tying any loose ends of the argument; knocking down reasons often proffered for ignoring environmental problems; and reminding the reader of a point he made 150 pages earlier based on the demise of a state of the art dairy in the Greenland Norse “Eastern Settlement”. This is not a dry academic tome narrated by a neutral and disengaged third person. This is a chatty anecdotal piece of writing whose author does not want you, the reader, to miss a single aspect of his argument or the evidence on which he bases it.

Collapse presents case studies from the ancient past and from the recent past and from the present. The book considers the extent to which environmental problems interact with other factors operating in the societies that are considered. Professor Diamond argues that environmental problems can lead to dramatic breakdowns in societies which, previously, have been very successful. Two of his leading case examples concern the diminution of the Easter Island society which had previously existed in large numbers and achieved impressive cultural and engineering feats and the demise of the Viking settlement in Greenland which had maintained a presence in two separate centres for hundreds of years before disappearing completely.

Professor Diamond eschews charges of environmental determinism and argues that, in most cases, societies have choices which can allow them to adjust their modus operandi so as to prevent or overcome environmental issues which may lead to the partial or complete collapse of the society. He is interested and he explores the social, political and personal factors which can contribute to better environmental outcomes for a society. As well as great societal failures, the case studies include remarkable successes such as the management of tiny Tikopia in the south Pacific³ as a wholly integrated, population controlled, agricultural exercise; the Shogun of Japan’s four hundred year old and successful efforts to re-forest that archipelago and the specialised and very productive farming techniques carried on for more than a thousand years in the highland valleys of New Guinea.

The purpose of the book is to draw attention to the serious implications of ignoring or failing to take effective action to deal with the environmental problems which beset the world. The lesson is clearly stated that the different circumstances that operate in a globalised world make all in that world more, rather than less, exposed to societal collapse than the Easter Islander statue builders and the Greenland Norse dairy farmers. It also explores, however, the societal attitudes which can make effective responses difficult and the sorts of normative adjustments which may be necessary to achieve effective change. This leads to a consideration of the initial changes to laws and institutions which can spur further responses at all levels of society.

Not unexpectedly, Collapse has been attacked from both the right and the left.⁴ Some environmentalists have attacked the book as far too optimistic in its prognostications for the possibility of change and giving too much praise to good corporations like Chevron Texaco (for its operations at Kikori in Papua New Guinea). Among the critics from the right is a reviewer from the Australian think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, Jennifer Marohasy, who published a review that, inter alia, stated that Professor Diamond had overstated the environmental problems faced by Australian society.

For me, one of the important contributions of Collapse is the way in which it lays out the full dimensions of the environmental problems facing the world. The effect of the continuing build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere on climate has rightly been the focus of much public and international discussion. Professor Diamond, however, reminds us that, even were that problem to be solved overnight, a multitude of issues would remain to be addressed.

These problems include the plundering and disappearance of many of the world’s forests; increasing water shortages in many densely populated areas of the world; the loss of valuable soil to salinity and erosion; the build up and concentration of agricultural and industrial pollution, especially, at the top of the food chain; collapse of many of the world’s most valuable fisheries; and loss of biodiversity through a variety of causes in most areas of the world. The environmental problems that face the world are serious and numerous. We must continue to address each of them.        

The acknowledgements section of most books may be skipped over by all but the author’s family and the folk who work at the publisher. Professor Diamond’s list is longer and more interesting because he includes for each chapter a list of those who helped by doing things such as sharing their research and guiding him in the field in the locality dealt with by that chapter. Interestingly, the acknowledgements for chapter 13, which deals with Australia, mention both Tim Flannery and Senator Bob Brown.

Collapse contains an appendix of thirty-two pages of “further readings”. This is a very valuable section of the book. It is useful to be reminded of the volume of research drawn upon for the writing of each chapter. Professor Diamond writes so engagingly, with his anecdotes and arguments and insights based on personal experience, that one could easily forget the degree of scholarship that underlies that easy style. But he also uses “further readings” to provide his own guide to personal activism to save the world from environmentally induced collapse and he even supplements the argument of the main text with a few more examples and mini-case studies. The reward for persisting with the extra 32 pages is like finding that bonus track on the new CD. 

Collapse was always going to be a widely read book. The success of Guns, Germs and Steel had already ensured that Professor Diamond’s next book would have an enthusiastic readership. The title and its suggestion of a new Armageddon ensured that the book would receive plenty of attention.

Collapse is worthy of the hype and attention. The history, modern and ancient, of the societies which form its case studies is fascinating. The argument is coherent and well-presented. The writing is a tour de force.

And, ultimately, the point is well made and will not go away. Individually and collectively, we face the choice: as a society that spans the whole planet, do we choose to fail or to survive?

Stephen Keim SC

Footnotes

1. 
   

   Also the author of The Third Chimpanzee, Why is Sex Fun? and the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction winning Guns, Germs and Steel.

2. Allen Lane is the name of the founder of Penguin. He was working for another publisher in 1930s England when he famously noticed how hard it was to buy a decent book for a reasonable price while waiting for a train. Hence he conceived of publishing classics in paper back and at a reasonable price. The Allen lane imprint is used by Penguin to publish  important new non-fiction works.
   

3. 
   

   Tikopia is administratively part of the Temotu Province and the most southern of the Solomon Islands. Unlike the rest of the Solomons, Tikopia is historically populated by people with a Polynesian heritage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikopia

4. 
   

   For a collection of reviews of Collapse favourable to mixed to negative go to http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/diamondjared/collapse.