[SustainableTompkins] Diamond's Graphic of Collapsed Civilizations

[Jon Bosak]

Tony Del Plato wrote:
> http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/12/25/science/1211-sci-DIAMOND.gif

I guess I'm in the minority on this, but I found the Jared Diamond
chart particularly unhelpful in trying to gauge the probability of
collapse for *our* civilization.  In fact, for all their enjoyable
literary qualities, I haven't gotten a lot out of Diamond's recent
books beyond some great anecdotes (Greenlanders starving to death
while surrounded by seafood, for example).  Apparently I'm not the
only person who finds Diamond's approach less than compelling; see
below for the article to which that chart was originally attached.

Jon

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html

The New York Times
December 25, 2007
A Question of Blame When Societies Fall
By GEORGE JOHNSON

As I pulled out of Tucson listening to an audiobook of Jared
Diamond’s "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the
first of a procession of blue-and-yellow billboards pointed the
way to Arizona’s strangest roadside attraction, "The Thing?"

The come-ons were slicker and brighter than those I remembered
from childhood trips out West. But the destination was the same: a
curio store and gas station just off the highway at a remote
whistle stop called Dragoon, Ariz.

Dragoon is also home to an archaeological research center, the
Amerind Foundation, where a group of archaeologists, cultural
anthropologists and historians converged in the fall for a
seminar, "Choices and Fates of Human Societies."

What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing
his two best-selling sagas of civilization -- the other is "Guns,
Germs and Steel" -- Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make
cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.

"A big-picture man," one participant called him. For
anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae -- the
specifics and contradictions of human culture -- the words are not
necessarily a compliment.

"Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,"
said Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University
who organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the
University of Michigan. "It’s accessible intellectually without
having to really turn the wattage up too much."

Dr. Diamond’s many admirers would disagree. "Guns, Germs and
Steel" won a Pulitzer Prize, and Dr. Diamond, a professor of
geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, has
received, among many honors, a National Medal of Science. It is
his ability as a synthesizer and storyteller that makes his work
so compelling.

For an hour I had listened as he, or rather his narrator,
described how the inhabitants of Easter Island had precipitated
their own demise by cutting down all the palm trees -- for, among
other purposes, transporting those giant statues -- and how the
Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and the Maya might have committed similar
"ecocide."

By the time I approached the turnoff for Amerind’s boulder-strewn
campus, Dr. Diamond had moved on to the Vikings’ fate. But for the
moment my mind was in the grip of "The Thing."

Detouring past the conference center, I parked in front of the old
tourist trap, paid the $1 admission and followed a path of
stenciled yellow footprints to a building out back. Inside a
cinder-block coffin lay the subject of my quest, what appeared to
be the mummified remains of a woman holding a mummified child.

"The Thing" looked human, or maybe like pieces of human dolled up
with papier-mâché. Either way, it seemed like a fitting symbol for
the complaints I’d been hearing about Dr. Diamond: that through
the wide-angle lenses of his books, people appear not as thinking
agents motivated by dreams and desires, ideas and ideologies, but
as pawns of their environment. As things.

The backlash had been brewing since a symposium last year,
"Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse
and Colonial Encounters," at a meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although "Guns,
Germs and Steel" has been celebrated as an antidote to racism --
Western civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority,
but geographical luck -- some anthropologists saw it as excusing
the excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made
them do it, it was their geography.

"Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame," said Deborah
B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. "The haves are
not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots."

Dr. Diamond anticipated this kind of reaction. In the epilogue to
"Guns, Germs and Steel," he acknowledged that human will was an
important pivot in the turning of history, as were freak accidents
and chaotic "butterfly effects," in which tiny perturbations are
amplified into cataclysms. But the accidents of geography -- the
availability of raw materials and crops, a hospitable climate,
accessible trade routes and even the cartographical shapes of
continents -- step forth as prime movers.

While "Guns, Germs, and Steel" explored the factors contributing
to a society’s rise, "Collapse" tried to account for the
downfalls. Here, human agency played a more prominent role. In
case after case, Dr. Diamond described how a confluence of factors
-- fragile ecosystems, climatic change, hostile neighbors and,
ultimately, bad decision making -- cornered a society into
inadvertently damaging or even destroying itself.

In his haunting chapter about Easter Island, he weighed the data
-- radiocarbon dating, charcoal and pollen analysis and botanical
and archaeological surveys -- and concluded that the inhabitants
had mined the forests to extinction, setting off a
cataclysm. What, Dr. Diamond wondered in an often cited passage,
was going through the mind of the Easter Islander who cut the last
tree?

But what was intended as a cautionary tale was taken by some
readers as blaming the victims. Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at
the University of Hawaii, came to the Amerind conference with a
different story. Deforestation, he said, was caused not by people,
but by predatory Polynesian rats, with the human population
remaining stable until the introduction of European diseases.

Dr. Diamond, he said, "shifts all of the burden to people and
their stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these
things interact."

Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an
anthropologist at Trinity College in Hartford, as a "one-two
punch." The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their
control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise.

Dr. Errington and Dr. Gewertz, who are husband and wife, work in
Papua New Guinea, a treasure trove of ethnic groups speaking more
than 700 languages. Dr. Diamond has also spent time on the island,
where he first went to study birds.

Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up "Guns, Germs,
and Steel" and seeing that it had been framed around what was
called "Yali’s question."

Yali was a political leader and a member of a "cargo cult" that
sprung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing
strips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets,
islanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food,
weapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that
had been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.

One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, "Why is it that you white people
developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black
people had little cargo of our own?"

Thus began Dr. Diamond’s tale about the combination of
geographical factors that led to Europeans’ colonizing Papua New
Guinea rather than Papua New Guineans’ colonizing Europe.

"We think he gets Yali’s question wrong," Dr. Gewertz said. "Yali
was not asking about nifty Western stuff."

With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted,
the islanders would have been able to trade with them as
equals. Instead, they were subjugated.

What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had
never treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility
and struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the
world through others’ eyes.

In "Collapse," Dr. Diamond proposed that a precipitating factor in
the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of
Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu compatriots, was Malthusian. The
country had let its population outstrip its food supply.

Christopher C. Taylor, an anthropologist at the University of
Alabama at Birmingham, saw the tragedy through the other end of
the telescope. One afternoon, he sat in the living room of
Amerind’s old mission-style lodge, which looks out onto the
desolate beauty of the Little Dragoon mountains, calmly describing
how he and his Tutsi fiancée had fled Rwanda just as the massacres
began. Safely back in the United States, he studied the country’s
popular political cartoons, sensing that for many Rwandans,
politics was tangled in a web of legends involving sacred kingship
and fertility rites. The king, and by implication the president,
was the conduit for imaana, a spiritual current symbolized by
liquids like rain, rivers, milk, honey, semen and blood.

In times of droughts, floods, crop failures, infant mortality or
other misfortunes, he might have to be sacrificed to spill his
imaana back into the soil.

"In order to understand the motives of the Rwandans, you have to
understand the local symbolism and the local cosmology,"
Dr. Taylor said. "Because, after all, what Diamond is doing is
imposing his own cosmology, his own symbolic system."

By the time I left Amerind, I realized that what I had witnessed
was a clash of world views. Central to the "cosmology" of
Dr. Diamond’s tribe is a principle celebrated throughout the
physical and biological sciences -- to understand is to simplify
and seek patterns.

In an e-mail message, he said that progress in any field depends
on syntheses and individual studies. "In both chemistry and
physics, the need for both approaches has been recognized for a
long time," he wrote. "One no longer finds specialists on
molybdenum decrying the periodic table’s sweeping superficiality,
nor advocates of the periodic table scorning mere descriptive
studies of individual elements."

For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than
the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to
"contextualize," "complexify," "relativize," "particularize" and
even "problematize," a word that in their dialect was given an
oddly positive spin. At some moments, the seminar seemed less like
a scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language
Association.

But the anthropologists had a point. As Einstein put it,
explanations should be as simple as possible -- but no simpler. Is
it realistic to hope, as Dr. Diamond did at the end of "Guns,
Germs and Steel," that "historical studies of human societies can
be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs"?

One afternoon I drove out to Casa Grande Ruins National Monument,
about 130 miles northwest of Dragoon. Turning off North Arizona
Boulevard near a Blockbuster Video store and KFC/Taco Bell, I saw
the Great House, four stories high, loom into view. Abandoned over
half a millennium ago by the Hohokam people, the earthen ruins
have been incongruously protected from the elements by a steel
roof on stilts designed in 1928 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

One suspects that the Hohokam were content to let the place
melt. Depending on which eyeglasses you are wearing, Casa Grande
is a story of environmental collapse or of adaptation and
resilience. When conditions no longer favored centralization the
people moved on, re-emerging as the O’odham tribes and a thriving
casino industry.

Abandonment as a strategy. Driving back on Interstate 10, past an
umbilical cord of eastbound railroad container cars owned by
Hanjin Shipping and the latest crests of urban sprawl, I tried to
imagine the good people of Tucson or Phoenix bowing out with such
grace.

At the seminar, Dr. McAnany suggested that the very idea of
societal collapse might be in the eye of the beholder. She was
thinking of the Maya, whose stone ruins have become the Yucatan’s
roadside attractions. But the descendants of the Maya live on. She
recalled a field trip by local children to a site she was
excavating in Belize: "This little girl looks up at me, and she
has this beautiful little Maya face, and asks, 'What happened to
all the Maya? Why did they all die out?’"

No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to
the English.