 For two years I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Jared Diamond's follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel. The book was due out well over a year ago and was supposed to be called Ecocide. Instead, we have a disappointing and irrationally optimistic rehash of Diamond's articles over the past three years, entitled Collapse.
This has to be one of the most pre-reviewed books in history. Diamond
himself announced it with a very long NYT op-ed 'reflection' on New
Year's Day entitled "The Ends of the World as We Know Them" (thanks to Truthout
for keeping the archive), in which the author lays out the entire
thesis of the book: that a combination of five factors leads to the
downfall of human societies:
- the damage that people have inflicted on their environment;
- climate change;
- enemies;
- changes in friendly trading partners; and
- the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts
The book then goes on to review which combinations of factors were
responsible for each collapse in his study, and concludes with a
warning that the current state of our civilization exhibits all of
these factors, and therefore "we" citizens need to pressure our
governments, notably in the US, to heed these warnings and act to
prevent collapse.
With respect, Diamond has been saying this for a long time, and it has been well covered. Here's a transcript
of a 2002 speech Diamond gave at Princeton, courtesy of the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation. I was hoping for some new material, new
insights and, most important, new solutions. Although the critics seem
content to review the book as something new, faithful Diamond readers
who were expecting something as astonishing and provocative as his
essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race will probably be disappointed.
What have the critics said so far? Well, Oliver Broudy in a Salon.com article called Are We Doomed
interviews Diamond and asks him some provocative questions: "[Your
argument on] the importance of trying to work with big business [is] a
notion that I think strikes many environmentalists as alien, if not
offensive." But Diamond won't bite: "Businesses along with governments
are the most potent forces in the world today...it's the responsibility
of the public to pass laws, buy products and boycott products that will
encourage businesses to behave better" -- who's he kidding? Diamond is
still talking about his meeting with Bill Gates three years ago, when
Gates offered his inane opinion that technology would solve all the
world's environmental problems.
Wired Magazine features a review by Stewart Brand called Will We Ever Learn,
which is an excellent, and brief, summary of the book, and calls it "a
great work of case study [but] without the breakthrough insight [of
earlier works]".
Seed Magazine has an excerpt of the book.
Blogger Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution didn't like the book because it was too pessimistic,
and links to a gaggle of right-wingers who cite the wacko discredited
eco-holocaust-denyer Bjorn Lomborg. They, of course, deny that the
problem Diamond talks about even exists.
In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell's review, called The Vanishing, brilliantly and colourfully digs out the important messages buried in the 'case study': "The lesson of Collapse
is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit
suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many
decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death."
Gladwell gloms on to the fifth and most interesting of Diamond's 'five
factors':
Diamond’s distinction between
social and biological survival is a critical one, because too often we
blur the two, or assume that biological survival is contingent on the
strength of our civilizational values. That was the lesson taken from
the two world wars and the nuclear age that followed: we would survive
as a species only if we learned to get along and resolve our disputes
peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and
peace-loving and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and
true to our own values and still behave in ways that are biologically
suicidal. The two kinds of survival are separate...Diamond quite
convincingly defends himself against the charge of environmental
determinism...The real issue is how, in coming to terms with the
uncertainties and hostilities of the world, the rest of us have turned
ourselves into cultural determinists.
Gladwell goes on to talk about Oregon's Measure 37. "Specifically,
Measure 37 said that anyone who could show that the value of his land
was affected by regulations implemented since its purchase was entitled
to compensation from the state. If the state declined to pay, the
property owner would be exempted from the regulations." This carefully
hashed-out political and cultural compromise was designed to balance
the need to protect land-owners' constitutional rights against the need
for governments to manage land use for development in a cohesive manner:
The thing that got lost in the
debate, however, was the land. In a rapidly growing state like Oregon,
what, precisely, are the state’s ecological strengths and
vulnerabilities? What impact will changed land-use priorities have on
water and soil and cropland and forest? ... Rivers and streams and
forests and soil are a biological resource. They are a tangible, finite
thing, and societies collapse when they get so consumed with addressing
the fine points of their history and culture and deeply held
beliefs...that they forget that the pastureland is shrinking and the
forest cover is gone.
This is the most important lesson of the book, and it belies Diamond's
optimism by showing that, exactly as was done with Measure 37, we are
doomed to stay loyal to our culture to the bitter end, against all
reason, and contrary to our instincts. Cultures just change too slowly,
and our current one has 30,000 years of baggage attached to it, way too
much acquisition-and-population momentum and I-can't-hear-you-la-la-la
inertia to respond to Diamond's urgings for quick, citizen-driven
action, even if that action is, some day, forthcoming. So in the end,
Diamond re-presents the problem he's been talking about for years, and
then raises foolish expectations that the counter-cultural solution he
proposes will work -- despite the evidence in his own cases that counter-cultural solutions don't work.
And if there was any doubt, the fact that most of the criticism of Collapse is coming from those who say there's no problem to solve, kind of makes the point.
If you want a more engaging, brutally candid, and thoroughly supported
analysis of the mess our civilization has got us into, read instead
John Zerzan's extraordinary Future Primitive. You can find it on activist Oneida Kincaid's wonderful Earth Crash/Earth Spirit website.
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