On the Brink

During the many hours I spent on airplanes last week, I devoured all 525 pages of Jared Diamond's new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I never made it through his Pulitzer Prize winner Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I found Collapse to be a very interesting and fairly quick read.

In it, Diamond identifies five sets of factors that have played a role in the collapse of societies both past and present: environmental impact, climate change, hostile neighbors, decreased trade, and response to problems. He then gives thorough examples of these playing out in the demise of ancient societies such as the Maya and the Vikings and in modern ones such as Rwanda and Haiti. Many of his observations and conclusions have frightening reflections on our own society:

One of the main lesson to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies is that a society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power … The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.

Diamond goes onto talk about the affects of globalization and how much increased dependencies between the nations of the world makes the problems of China, Rwanda, Somalia, and Afghanistan our problems in the First World as well.

One of the patterns I found emerging from Collapse is how often it is those at the bottom whose problems ultimately bring down a society. In Rwanda, it was ultimately the economic disparities and lack of productive land that brought about the genocide that resulted in the death of over 800,000 people, many of them landowners killed by those with little or no land on which to support themselves. In Norse Greenland, people on less productive farms leaned on the people with more productive farms which ultimately weren't able to support the whole population.

In our own society, I see parallels to David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America which details the plight of those eking out a living in the bottom-level jobs of the United States and how their problems should be the concern of all of us. Diamond takes that further; in an age of globalization, we need to be concerned not only with those at the bottom locally but also those globally.

The picture isn't so bleak though:

One basis for hope is that, realistically, we are not beset by insoluble problems … Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up to for grabs, lying in our own hands. We don't need technologies to solve our problems … We "just" need the political will to apply solutions already available.

While Diamond focuses on the environmental impacts, I would add that ensuring economic opportunities for those at the bottom of society is equally as important. Either way I highly recommend both of the above mentioned books.