[SustainableTompkins] Diamond's Graphic of Collapsed Civilizations

[senecajean at aol.com]

Well this is certainly a very useful analysis, too; as I said I've only just started Collapse (and have not read the others.)  And I did, as noted in an earlier posting, have one major bone of contention with the article which is the tendency to blame the poor and powerless as much or at least almost as much as the privileged & powerful.
So I've not decided yet where I am overall on Diamond. Interesting discussion.

Jeanne   


-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Bosak <bosak at ibiblio.org>
To: Sustainable Tompkins County listserv <sustainabletompkins at lists.mutualaid.org>
Sent: Fri, 4 Jan 2008 10:52 am
Subject: Re: [SustainableTompkins] Diamond's Graphic of Collapsed Civilizations



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
hart particularly unhelpful in trying to gauge the probability of
ollapse for *our* civilization.  In fact, for all their enjoyable
iterary qualities, I haven't gotten a lot out of Diamond's recent
ooks beyond some great anecdotes (Greenlanders starving to death
hile surrounded by seafood, for example).  Apparently I'm not the
nly person who finds Diamond's approach less than compelling; see
elow for the article to which that chart was originally attached.
Jon
==================================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html
The New York Times
ecember 25, 2007
 Question of Blame When Societies Fall
y GEORGE JOHNSON
As I pulled out of Tucson listening to an audiobook of Jared
iamond’s "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the
irst of a procession of blue-and-yellow billboards pointed the
ay to Arizona’s strangest roadside attraction, "The Thing?"
The come-ons were slicker and brighter than those I remembered
rom childhood trips out West. But the destination was the same: a
urio store and gas station just off the highway at a remote
histle stop called Dragoon, Ariz.
Dragoon is also home to an archaeological research center, the
merind Foundation, where a group of archaeologists, cultural
nthropologists and historians converged in the fall for a
eminar, "Choices and Fates of Human Societies."
What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing
is two best-selling sagas of civilization -- the other is "Guns,
erms and Steel" -- Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make
ultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.
"A big-picture man," one participant called him. For
nthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae -- the
pecifics and contradictions of human culture -- the words are not
ecessarily a compliment.
"Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,"
aid Patricia A. McAnany, an archaeologist at Boston University
ho organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee of the
niversity of Michigan. "It’s accessible intellectually without
aving to really turn the wattage up too much."
Dr. Diamond’s many admirers would disagree. "Guns, Germs and
teel" won a Pulitzer Prize, and Dr. Diamond, a professor of
eography at the University of California, Los Angeles, has
eceived, among many honors, a National Medal of Science. It is
is ability as a synthesizer and storyteller that makes his work
o compelling.
For an hour I had listened as he, or rather his narrator,
escribed how the inhabitants of Easter Island had precipitated
heir own demise by cutting down all the palm trees -- for, among
ther purposes, transporting those giant statues -- and how the
nasazi of Chaco Canyon and the Maya might have committed similar
ecocide."
By the time I approached the turnoff for Amerind’s boulder-strewn
ampus, Dr. Diamond had moved on to the Vikings’ fate. But for the
oment my mind was in the grip of "The Thing."
Detouring past the conference center, I parked in front of the old
ourist trap, paid the $1 admission and followed a path of
tenciled yellow footprints to a building out back. Inside a
inder-block coffin lay the subject of my quest, what appeared to
e the mummified remains of a woman holding a mummified child.
"The Thing" looked human, or maybe like pieces of human dolled up
ith papier-mâché. Either way, it seemed like a fitting symbol for
he complaints I’d been hearing about Dr. Diamond: that through
he wide-angle lenses of his books, people appear not as thinking
gents motivated by dreams and desires, ideas and ideologies, but
s 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
nd Colonial Encounters," at a meeting of the American
nthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although "Guns,
erms and Steel" has been celebrated as an antidote to racism --
estern civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority,
ut geographical luck -- some anthropologists saw it as excusing
he excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made
hem do it, it was their geography.
"Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame," said Deborah
. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. "The haves are
ot 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
mportant pivot in the turning of history, as were freak accidents
nd chaotic "butterfly effects," in which tiny perturbations are
mplified into cataclysms. But the accidents of geography -- the
vailability of raw materials and crops, a hospitable climate,
ccessible trade routes and even the cartographical shapes of
ontinents -- step forth as prime movers.
While "Guns, Germs, and Steel" explored the factors contributing
o a society’s rise, "Collapse" tried to account for the
ownfalls. Here, human agency played a more prominent role. In
ase after case, Dr. Diamond described how a confluence of factors
- fragile ecosystems, climatic change, hostile neighbors and,
ltimately, bad decision making -- cornered a society into
nadvertently damaging or even destroying itself.
In his haunting chapter about Easter Island, he weighed the data
- radiocarbon dating, charcoal and pollen analysis and botanical
nd archaeological surveys -- and concluded that the inhabitants
ad mined the forests to extinction, setting off a
ataclysm. What, Dr. Diamond wondered in an often cited passage,
as going through the mind of the Easter Islander who cut the last
ree?
But what was intended as a cautionary tale was taken by some
eaders as blaming the victims. Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at
he University of Hawaii, came to the Amerind conference with a
ifferent story. Deforestation, he said, was caused not by people,
ut by predatory Polynesian rats, with the human population
emaining stable until the introduction of European diseases.
Dr. Diamond, he said, "shifts all of the burden to people and
heir stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these
hings interact."
Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an
nthropologist at Trinity College in Hartford, as a "one-two
unch." The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their
ontrol, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise.
Dr. Errington and Dr. Gewertz, who are husband and wife, work in
apua New Guinea, a treasure trove of ethnic groups speaking more
han 700 languages. Dr. Diamond has also spent time on the island,
here he first went to study birds.
Dr. Gewertz still bristles as she recalls picking up "Guns, Germs,
nd Steel" and seeing that it had been framed around what was
alled "Yali’s question."
Yali was a political leader and a member of a "cargo cult" that
prung up after World War II. By building ritualistic landing
trips and control towers and wearing hand-carved wooden headsets,
slanders hoped to summon the return of the packaged food,
eapons, medicine, clothing and other gifts from the heavens that
ad been airdropped to troops fighting Japan.
One day Yali asked Dr. Diamond, "Why is it that you white people
eveloped so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black
eople had little cargo of our own?"
Thus began Dr. Diamond’s tale about the combination of
eographical factors that led to Europeans’ colonizing Papua New
uinea rather than Papua New Guineans’ colonizing Europe.
"We think he gets Yali’s question wrong," Dr. Gewertz said. "Yali
as not asking about nifty Western stuff."
With more of the cargo their European visitors so clearly coveted,
he islanders would have been able to trade with them as
quals. Instead, they were subjugated.
What Yali was really asking, she suggested, was why Europeans had
ever treated them like fellow human beings. The responsibility
nd struggle of anthropology, Dr. Gewertz said, is to see the
orld through others’ eyes.
In "Collapse," Dr. Diamond proposed that a precipitating factor in
he Rwanda genocide of 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of
utsis were slaughtered by Hutu compatriots, was Malthusian. The
ountry had let its population outstrip its food supply.
Christopher C. Taylor, an anthropologist at the University of
labama at Birmingham, saw the tragedy through the other end of
he telescope. One afternoon, he sat in the living room of
merind’s old mission-style lodge, which looks out onto the
esolate beauty of the Little Dragoon mountains, calmly describing
ow he and his Tutsi fiancée had fled Rwanda just as the massacres
egan. Safely back in the United States, he studied the country’s
opular political cartoons, sensing that for many Rwandans,
olitics was tangled in a web of legends involving sacred kingship
nd fertility rites. The king, and by implication the president,
as the conduit for imaana, a spiritual current symbolized by
iquids like rain, rivers, milk, honey, semen and blood.
In times of droughts, floods, crop failures, infant mortality or
ther misfortunes, he might have to be sacrificed to spill his
maana back into the soil.
"In order to understand the motives of the Rwandans, you have to
nderstand the local symbolism and the local cosmology,"
r. Taylor said. "Because, after all, what Diamond is doing is
mposing his own cosmology, his own symbolic system."
By the time I left Amerind, I realized that what I had witnessed
as a clash of world views. Central to the "cosmology" of
r. Diamond’s tribe is a principle celebrated throughout the
hysical and biological sciences -- to understand is to simplify
nd seek patterns.
In an e-mail message, he said that progress in any field depends
n syntheses and individual studies. "In both chemistry and
hysics, the need for both approaches has been recognized for a
ong time," he wrote. "One no longer finds specialists on
olybdenum decrying the periodic table’s sweeping superficiality,
or advocates of the periodic table scorning mere descriptive
tudies of individual elements."
For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than
he rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to
contextualize," "complexify," "relativize," "particularize" and
ven "problematize," a word that in their dialect was given an
ddly positive spin. At some moments, the seminar seemed less like
 scientific meeting than a session of the Modern Language
ssociation.
But the anthropologists had a point. As Einstein put it,
xplanations should be as simple as possible -- but no simpler. Is
t realistic to hope, as Dr. Diamond did at the end of "Guns,
erms and Steel," that "historical studies of human societies can
e pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs"?
One afternoon I drove out to Casa Grande Ruins National Monument,
bout 130 miles northwest of Dragoon. Turning off North Arizona
oulevard near a Blockbuster Video store and KFC/Taco Bell, I saw
he Great House, four stories high, loom into view. Abandoned over
alf a millennium ago by the Hohokam people, the earthen ruins
ave been incongruously protected from the elements by a steel
oof on stilts designed in 1928 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
One suspects that the Hohokam were content to let the place
elt. Depending on which eyeglasses you are wearing, Casa Grande
s a story of environmental collapse or of adaptation and
esilience. When conditions no longer favored centralization the
eople moved on, re-emerging as the O’odham tribes and a thriving
asino industry.
Abandonment as a strategy. Driving back on Interstate 10, past an
mbilical cord of eastbound railroad container cars owned by
anjin Shipping and the latest crests of urban sprawl, I tried to
magine the good people of Tucson or Phoenix bowing out with such
race.
At the seminar, Dr. McAnany suggested that the very idea of
ocietal collapse might be in the eye of the beholder. She was
hinking of the Maya, whose stone ruins have become the Yucatan’s
oadside attractions. But the descendants of the Maya live on. She
ecalled a field trip by local children to a site she was
xcavating in Belize: "This little girl looks up at me, and she
as this beautiful little Maya face, and asks, 'What happened to
ll the Maya? Why did they all die out?’"
No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to
he English.
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