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How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
In fact, both extreme sides in this controversythe racists and the
believers in a past Edenare committing the error of viewing past indigenous
peoples as fundamentally different from (whether inferior to or superior to)
modern First World peoples. Managing environmental resources sustainably has
always been difficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness,
efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago.
Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent
around 46,000 years ago, and the subsequent prompt extinction of most of
Australia's former giant marsupials and other large animals, every human
colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humanswhether of Australia,
North America, South America, Madagascar, the Mediterranean islands, or Hawaii
and New Zealand and dozens of other Pacific islandshas been followed by a
wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and
were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human-associated habitat changes,
introduced pest species, and diseases. Any people can fall into the trap of
overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we
shall consider later in this book: that the resources initially seem
inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by
normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it's
difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared
resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later
chapters); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of
some human-caused perturbation virtually impossible to predict even for a
professional ecologist. Environmental problems that are hard to manage today
were surely even harder to manage in the past. Especially for past non-literate
peoples who couldn't read case studies of societal collapses, ecological
damage constituted a tragic, unforeseen, unintended consequence of their best
efforts, rather than morally culpable blind or conscious selfishness. The
societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Maya) among the most creative
and (for a time) advanced and successful of their times, rather than stupid and
primitive.
Past peoples were neither ignorant bad managers who deserved to be
exterminated or dispossessed, nor all-knowing conscientious environmentalists
who solved problems that we can't solve today. They were people like us,
facing problems broadly similar to those that we now face. They were prone
either to succeed or to fail, depending on circumstances similar to those making
us prone to succeed or to fail today. Yes, there are differences between the
situation we face today and that faced by past peoples, but there are still
enough similarities for us to be able to learn from the past.
Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical
assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify
treating them fairly. In many or most cases, historians and archaeologists have
been uncovering overwhelming evidence that this assumption (about Eden-like
environmentalism) is wrong. By invoking this assumption to justify fair
treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if
that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them
isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices:
it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one
people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people.
That's the controversy about past ecological collapses. As for the
complications, of course it's not true that all societies are doomed to
collapse because of environmental damage: in the past some societies did while
others didn't; the real question is why only some societies proved fragile,
and what distinguished those that collapsed from those that didn't. Some
societies that I shall discuss, such as the Icelanders and Tikopians, succeeded
in solving extremely difficult environmental problems, have thereby been able to
persist for a long time, and are still going strong today. For example, when
Norwegian colonists of Iceland first encountered an environment superficially
similar to that of Norway but in reality very different, they inadvertently
destroyed much of Iceland's topsoil and most of its forests. Iceland for a
long time was Europe's poorest and most ecologically ravaged country. However,
Icelanders eventually learned from experience, adopted rigorous measures of
environmental protection, and now enjoy one of the highest per-capita national
average incomes in the world. Tikopia Islanders inhabit a tiny island so far
from any neighbors that they were forced to become self-sufficient in almost
everything, but they micromanaged their resources and regulated their population
size so carefully that their island is still productive after 3,000 years of
human occupation. Thus, this book is not an uninterrupted series of depressing
stories of failure, but also includes success stories inspiring imitation and
optimism.
From Collapse by Jared Diamond. Copyright Jared Diamond 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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