*****
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Look on These Ruins, Ye Mighty, and Ponder Your Fate
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 11, 2005, Tuesday
'Collapse'
'How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed'
By Jared Diamond
Illustrated. 575 pages. Viking. $29.95.
Jared Diamond's fascinating but not always convincing new book, ''Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,'' tries hard to live up to its apocalyptic title.
It begins with the stories of several historical collapses, including the demise of the Easter Islanders, remembered now for the iconic stone heads they left behind on their Pacific island home; the fall of the ancient Mayan cities that were once the hub of the New World's most advanced Native American civilization; and the disappearance of the Norse colony on Greenland after surviving for 450 years as Europe's most remote outpost. In all these cases, Mr. Diamond diagnoses a similar pattern of catastrophe: environmental damage (usually deforestation leading to soil erosion, food shortages and eventually social and political crises), worsened by other factors like climate change, shifting trade patterns and shortsighted or venal leadership.
From these dire historical tales, Mr. Diamond -- the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller ''Guns, Germs and Steel'' -- quickly fast-forwards, suggesting that these ancient examples may hold a lesson for our environmentally challenged world today. He argues that current environmental problems include the same ones that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: ''human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages and full human utilization of the earth's photosynthetic capacity.'' Many of these problems, he adds, are expected to ''become globally critical within the next few decades.''
''Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization,'' he writes, ''would be 'just' a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources.''
Already, he argues, societal collapse has become a palpable specter in some troubled third-world countries. He contends that environmental problems and resulting land and food shortages played a key role in fueling the ethnic slaughter that plagued Rwanda in the 1990's, and that similar environmental destruction has contributed to Haiti's current plight.
With this volume, Mr. Diamond wants very much to write a kind of bookend to ''Guns, Germs and Steel.'' That earlier book attempted to explain why Western civilizations developed the technologies and social and political strategies that enabled them to dominate the world; this volume attempts to explain in a far more haphazard manner why some societies failed to flourish and eventually vanished from the face of the earth.
Mr. Diamond -- who has academic training in physiology, geography and evolutionary biology -- is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readily accessible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling. He presents some intriguing digressions about methods used by scientists and historians to diagnose the trajectory of long dead societies, and provides some provocative analyses of current environmental problems in Australia, the United States and China.
Noting that China is rapidly progressing toward its goal of achieving a first-world economy, Mr. Diamond writes that if that gigantic nation's per-capita consumption rates do in fact rise to first-world levels, it will result in the approximate doubling of the ''entire world's human resource use and environmental impact.'' Something has to give way, he concludes: ''That is the strongest reason why China's problems automatically become the world's problems.''
Toward the end of ''Collapse,'' Mr. Diamond poses the question of why some societies undermine themselves and even commit suicide by making disastrous decisions. He comes up with four fuzzily defined categories: 1) failure to anticipate a problem (i.e. the British introduction of foxes and rabbits to Australia -- two alien mammals that have cost billions of dollars in damage and control expenditures); 2) failure to perceive a problem that has actually arrived (often because a slow trend like global warming is concealed by wide up and down fluctuations); 3) failure to attempt to solve a problem once it has been identified (usually because leaders put self-interest before the public good or focus on short-term benefits over long-term needs); and 4) failure to find a viable solution to the problem (frequently because of prohibitive costs or because too little has been done too late).
Such discussions are useful in getting the reader to think about the big picture -- about matters like the sustainability of current consumption patterns in a world of shrinking resources, and the role that cultural values can play in a society's welfare. Did the reluctance of the Norse settlers in Greenland to learn survival skills from their Inuit rivals help seal their fate? Did the obsession of Easter Island chiefs with trying to outdo their rivals by building bigger and bigger statues (which consumed precious natural resources and labor) effectively doom their civilization?
Interesting as such questions might be, this book remains, in the end, a messy hodgepodge of case studies, glued together with speculation and questionable analogies. For one thing, Mr. Diamond's selection of failed civilizations from the past seems arbitrary in the extreme: Why Easter Island and not ancient Rome? Why the Anasazi of the American Southwest and not the Minoans of ancient Crete?
In addition, the reader is left wondering if the examples he has selected truly offer useful analogies to the world's current situation. After all, as Mr. Diamond himself points out, there are huge differences between the historical examples he cites and the plight of the world today: most notably, the role that technology plays in accelerating change (speeding up both environmental damage and possible solutions to that damage) and the role of globalization in linking the fates of wildly disparate and distant societies. Although Mr. Diamond talks about these differences, he does so in a highly cursory manner -- more as a pre-emptive strike against possible critics than as part of a carefully considered analysis central to this book.
Published: 01 - 11 - 2005 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 1 , Page 9
