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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Collapse - a fascinating book
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The more I read "Collapse", the more I like it. I enjoyed Jared Diamond's previous book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" as well. That book addressed the question - why did European and Asian societies achieve such higher levels of technology than the rest of the world? To boil it down (read the book!) - it had to do with resource advantages in the areas where civilization arose.
"Collapse" is about something else - why some societies have collapsed (Easter Island, the Maya, the Norse in Greenland, for example) - and why others have succeeded - like the Inuit in Greenland, who displaced an earlier people there and outlasted the Norse. Diamond traces a number of things that led to problems for various societies - climate changes, hostile peoples, loss of trade relations with friendly peoples, and environmental damage. He adds a fifth crucial one - the responses a people have to their changing environmental conditions.
When the term "climate change" comes up, he's not using it to discuss the global warming debate - rather, he's talking about changes in climate that affected a society. For instance - when the Norse settled Greenland, it happened to be in a long term spell of moderate (for Greenland) weather. The seas were navigable (less ice), the growing season was long enough to (barely) support an agricultural society. Things got more difficult during the little ice age, a period when the climate in Europe and the Americas grew much colder. The Norse did not adapt to that change at all well, and died out. The Inuit, on the other hand, lived through that period.
So far, I've read about modern problems in the American midwest (Montana), the disappearance of the Anasazi, the problems of the Polynesian settlements on Easter Island, Henderson Island, and Pitcairn, and about the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland - as opposed to their long term survival on Iceland, and the Inuit success in Greenland.
There's a lot more of this book to read - Diamond addresses the genocide in Rwanda in light of his research elsewhere, and I expect that section of the book to challenge my current assumptions - all learned from press reporting - on what happened there.
There are cautionary tales for modern society in this book, having to do with the growth of interdependence. The Polynesian settlements on Pitcairn and Henderson island were wholly dependent on the "mother country" of Mangareva, for instance - and when that island stopped communicating with the colonies (due to their own near collapse), they both died off completely. I'm not going to get into any of the environmental, trade, or political issues relating to this subject here - it's not something I address on this blog. What I will say is that this book is worth reading regardless of how you see any of those things. Definitely food for thought.
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