[SustainableTompkins] Diamond's Graphic of Collapsed Civilizations

[Tony Del Plato]

Thanks Jon for your take on the chart & Diamond. While the chart is
simplistic, it does graph the issues in ways that make societal collapse
more intelligible even if it doesn't address the complexities of our
civilization. I'll eventually pick up the book.
Tony

On 1/4/08, senecajean at aol.com <senecajean at aol.com> wrote:
>
> 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 majorbone of contention with the article which
> is the tendency to blame the poor and powerless as much or at least almost
> as much asthe 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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