In The Last Days of Easter Island, We Are All Easter Islanders: Jared Diamond's Collapse
Written: Apr 03 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Enthralling and inspiring, and remarkably enjoyable considering what it's about.
Cons: Its length and subject matter may daunt some readers.
The Bottom Line: In which the author discovers the revelatory powers of crystallized rat urine. (And likes it!)
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| plorentz's Full Review: Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose To ... |
In considering the monuments of a long-gone society – say, those bizarre statues lining the ridges of Easter Island – we tend more readily to wonder at just how those primitive humans were able to construct such monuments without the benefits of our bulldozers and cranes and 21st Century brains. How did those ancient Egyptians build those pyramids, we ask, and, for centuries, forests of trees have been felled putting our theories about such things on paper.
But it’s a rare occasion when we actually look beyond the monuments and wonder to ourselves, hey, if these people were so capable of building such incredible things without all the technology we enjoy, well then, what the hell happened to them? If they were so smart, why aren’t they around now to tell us what they could do? To my mind, that’s a far more useful question, but it’s also a scarier one. Because if we really take the time to look for answers to it, we may find ourselves vulnerable to the same problems they faced; and scarier: we may find ourselves implicated in the very behavior that destroyed that society.
Then again, even more seldom is it that we wonder about the societies that have faced the same problems in the past, and have overcome them, and thrive to this day. For instance, while watching the last season of The Amazing Race, I was stunned by the strange beauty of the Icelandic landscape. I took the almost lunar barrenness of the land as a matter of the intrinsic nature of the place, but in fact, when it was first settled by the Vikings more than one thousand years ago, it was a heavily wooded place with rich volcanic soil that, on first appearance at least, seemed as promising for agriculture as other contemporaneous discoveries such as the Faeroes Islands (almost due north of Scotland). Considering this, the deforestation of this relatively isolated island located at such an inhospitable latitude must have been a catastrophe for the people living there.
And yet, there they still are. And thriving! How did they do it? And why weren’t the folks of Easter Island, or even the Norse settlers of Greenland, capable of the same? And why should we care, even? Why shouldn’t we simply admire the ruins, write our poetry, and take our snapshots, and finally return home to the relative comfort of our suburban homes and bottled water?
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Here’s something else: I love disaster flicks, don’t you? Is there anything more exhilarating than the suspense of knowing that a Texas-sized asteroid is heading for the earth, and unless the team of misfits assembled to fly into space to blow it up succeed in their task, the earth would succumb to Precambrian desolation? And of course, even as a gargantuan digitally-constructed mega-tsunami devastates the entire Eastern Seaboard, is there anything more heartwarming than knowing that because of Bruce Willis’s sacrifice, the world will ultimately be safe, and America can theretofore accept the undying adulation of the nations of the planet from Namibia to Myanmar for our can-do spirit and technological ingenuity?
Sigh.
Something I realized about disaster flicks while reading Jared Diamond’s excellent new book entitled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: in these movies, the forces that would destroy our society are almost exclusively external. Whether it’s the Texas-size asteroid, or the conquering fleet of intergalactic alien ships, whether it’s the tornadoes, the volcanoes, or the earthquakes, (and with the notable exception of clearly activist pictures like the TV movie The Day After or the more recent box office bomb The Day After Tomorrow), we humans are rarely if ever implicated in our own destruction.
Still, no matter what happens, we (and by we, I don’t mean human beings in general, but we Americans specifically) always save the world. Hooray for us!
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In general, when we think about the collapse of a society, we think of the political or social causes of that collapse. And indeed, if we were to listen closely to our politicians, the problems that our country faces, the problems bringing about our collapse as a society (if indeed our society is collapsing) are purely social and moral and political. Many of the folks we’ve elected to represent us are far more concerned with the ramifications of two men exchanging rings in front of family and friends than with those of say, oil drilling in Alaska, the disposal of nuclear waste in Nevada, or the clean-up of a Montana goldmine. Those problems are made to seem distant and insignificant, while Congress convenes an emergency legislative session to involve itself in what is essentially the private life-and-death decision of a single family in Florida – in a strangely panicky effort to promote a “Culture of Life”.
By the same token, environmentalists are often so obsessed with their apocalyptic vision of the future that they make real environmental problems seem far-fetched and easy to mock. Moreover, so taken are they with their own radicalism that they often divorce themselves from genuine knowledge-gathering related to environmental problems; and so self-identified are they with their opposition to oil companies, logging companies, mining companies, and big business in general, that they willingly exclude themselves from possible environmental solutions, sometimes even counteracting them.
In Collapse, Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA (a Pulitzer recipient for Guns, Germs, and Steel), examines societal collapse with an integrated point of view. Diamond shows us, in carefully detailed studies of numerous societies, from all around the world, and from various time periods how forces external, socio-political and environmental can cause the destruction of a society. And yet, Diamond also successfully steers clear of panicky fatalism: Collapse is not a depressing - or even frightening - book. In fact, it’s exhilarating, eye-opening, and empowering – with a strong message of personal and collective responsibility (and even a section of “Further Reading” devoted to questions of “What Can I Do?”)
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First off, there’s no reason to be intimidated by Diamond’s academic credentials. While Collapse is clearly a scholarly work, it is also – by design - eminently readable, and I found myself devouring it by the hundreds of pages. Diamond bookends his case studies with two areas near to his heart – the Bitterroot Valley of Montana and the continent of Australia – and his love not only of these specific places, but of people and the earth in general, is the very life blood of this book, and quite literally, Diamond’s primary reason for writing it.
More, Diamond is capable of making even the most esoteric tasks of such esoteric disciplines as palynology (pollen analysis) accessible, and even (gasp!) interesting to the masses. In the early chapters of Collapse, we the readers find ourselves crouched over in the dust of the Mangareva Islands sifting through the garbage piles of a long-deceased civilization as Diamond methodically, but with contagious enthusiasm, explains how the bones from one long dead family’s supper tell not just of their culture’s social stratifications, but also how many and what kind of trees and vegetation inhabited their island, and until what point. Even among the ruins of societies without writing, Diamond finds an encyclopedia of information in the midden-ball (“dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage” in one of Diamond’s typically straightforward and picturesque descriptions) of a 13th Century pack rat in the Anasazi ruins of the southwest United States.
His compelling reconstructions of these past societies and their downfalls emerge from a combination of rigorous multidisciplinary scientific method and when that is exhausted, through (clearly delineated) flights of educated imagination. Considering the demise of the obscure Dorset settlements of Northwestern Greenland, Diamond chucklingly muses that the Dorset women ultimately recognized the superiority of Inuit men and left their own husbands for them.
Still, as enthralling as these passages related to older societies often are, in fact, they mainly serve as an especially vivid context for Diamond’s study of current societies throughout the world. The hypotheses explored in the collapse of the Norse settlements in Greenland (and the successful turnaround of Iceland) inevitably haunt Diamond’s exploration of Australia’s agricultural mismanagement – the very same issues of a fragile and woefully misunderstood ecology settled by a people all too eager to hold on to a geographically remote, ecologically irresponsible, and economically impossible cultural identity come into play.
And in fact, a single question which Diamond attributes to one of his students haunts the entire book: “What were the people of Easter Island thinking when they cut down that last tree?”
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Yes, folks. Easter Island used to be full of trees. And though we are accustomed to believing that the ecological-sociopolitical-ecomonic-cultural devastation of tiny islands in the Pacific was generally the work of vicious European explorers and conquerors, the truth is that when Europeans first arrived at Easter Island in the early 19th Century, they found the island completely devoid of any kind of vegetation (a condition which, with the exception of a few pathetic plantings, persists to this day), and they found those statues we all associate with the island, mostly toppled and broken. In a strange reversal of roles, the work of restoring and preserving the artifacts of Easter Island’s culture was largely undertaken by the missionaries and explorers to whom we tend to attribute so many crimes against archaeology.
The Easter Island story is one of the book’s most haunting, for it involves a tiny island prohibitively isolated from the rest of the world, whose territory (including the coastline and fishing waters) was divided up amongst twelve interdependent clans. And ultimately it’s the story of how those clans, in the face of catastrophic ecological devastation squandered their island’s resources warring with each other, and building statues (and toppling the statues of others) in an effort to prove dominance – and in so doing, becoming the authors of their own extinction.
It’s hard not to see the parallel dangers facing us as a planet, especially as laid out in such studied detail and clear-headed language as in Collapse. But Diamond never stoops to the kind of pessimistic scenario laid out at the end of Planet of the Apes. There’s no Charleton Heston “Damn You!” moment on the beach. Even as Diamond delivers the most cogent analysis I’ve ever read of the origins of the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi in the mid-90s, he never sinks to easy finger-pointing, bleeding heart handwringing, or defeatism.
Likewise, Diamond lays his biases bare, early and often. Collapse is clearly written from one man’s point of view, and that man is a well-traveled, affluent university professor who has his own disappointments with his country’s politics, and his own suspicions of the motives of the more easily labeled environmental villains like big business and the Republican Party. But, most admirably, he never lets those biases govern his observations. He allows himself to see the heroism in the courageously forward-thinking environmental policies of Dominican Republic president Joaquin Balaguer, even as he acknowledges the general ugliness of Balaguer’s regime, and the despicable fraud and violence through which he attained power.
Similarly, Diamond may not think much of oil companies, but that doesn’t stop him from composing what is essentially a ten page love letter to the Chevron Corporation, congratulating them for their deft synthesis of environmentalism and capitalism exemplified by their Kutubu oil fields in Papua New Guinea, which he describes as something like the most strictly managed wildlife refuge in that country. It’s an inspiring and counterintuitive passage that should be required reading for the grandstanders on both sides of the ANWR oil-drilling debate.
And most importantly, as Diamond is careful to note repeatedly throughout the book, his point of view is a hopeful one (or, in his words, “cautiously optimistic”). He means this book to serve a practical purpose, and that purpose has little use for labeling good guys and bad guys, nor for the doomsday scenarios of the radical environmentalist left or the fanatical religious right. Both incredibly thoughtful, and incredibly enjoyable (really!), Collapse is an essential read.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: Paul Lorentz
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