We All Fall Down

[bibliogramma]

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

This is an interesting exploration of the role that ecology and social/political choices about ecological issues have played in the survival or failure of a number of cultures at various times and places in human history.

Perhaps in response to some criticism of his previous works that seem to make geological and ecological environment the determining factor in the development of civilisations, Diamond goes out of his way several times in the book to stress that in his analyses, the basic environmental/ecological conditions are only one of many factors that affect how - and whether - a society thrives or fails, or just barely manages to survive. Good versus poor soils, local biodiversity in terms of exploitable food sources and both food and working animals, water sources, weather patterns, degree of physical isolation and so on, influence societies, and in extreme cases may determine success or failure by themselves, but the most important element is how societies choose to address environmental and ecological concerns.

Diamond looks at a range of societies in terms of how environment and choice affected historical development, including the inhabitants of Easter, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the South Pacific, the Anasazi of the North American southwest, Mayan civilisation in the Yucutan, Norse settlements in the North Atlantic from the Shetlands and Orkneys to Iceland, Greenland and Vinland, New Guinea highlanders and Tokugawa Japan. He also looks at several modern situations from the same perspective of environment and choice, including China, Australia, Rwanda, Haiti and The Dominican Republic, and Montana and California in the U.S.

The detailed analyses of conditions and developments in all of these areas, viewed from this perspective of environmental and ecological situation and societal and political choices (or lack thereof) make interesting reading. What delivers the punch is the final chapters, where Diamond takes his theses and applies them to the situation of the world as a whole today.

The chapter on choice, entitled "Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions," contains a number of insights and analyses worth thinking about, especially if you're one of those people who, like me, has a sound loop running in the back of her mind that goes something like "the sky really is falling, the seas are rising, the weather is changing, species are dying out, the air, the water, the soil, everything is really poisoned and polluted and just plain fucked up here and why isn't anyone doing anything?!?!?"

The final chapter stresses that one of the consequences of our current levels of technological activity and globalisation has been that we are all connected. The world is a single ecosystem, a self-contained environment, a polder, and if we don't all find a way to make the choices that will preserve and sustain the ecological base that we have built our common human civilisation on, then the dam will fail and the ocean will sweep us away.