Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

3/5 rating. 525 pages.

Book #23 of 2021. Read March 18, 2021.

While this was not as good as Guns, Germs, and Steel, it’s another insightful and thought-provoking book by the great anthropologist Jared Diamond.

Jared takes an interesting look at many past and present societies to see why some fail and some succeed. He reviews places like Montana and Australia today, as well as past societies such as the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, and more.

Jared looks at 5 main points that can lead to a society’s eventual fall or continuation: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and their responses to these problems. While it is possible to overcome almost any of these, you start being plagued by more than a few, and the likelihood of success drops significantly.

While looking at past, unconnected societies seems like an odd way to try to connect to the modern world, it is possible to learn a lot from these past failures. As Jared (somewhat facetiously) says: “Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild animal sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water.”

Does this sound familiar!?! This could easily be written about how we are treating our world today. What’s even more important to realize is that we do not live in a disconnected world like so many past cultures: this is both good and bad. We have the help of other countries if we are struggling, but when one society faces collapse today, the whole world is impacted.

This book definitely made me think, and I enjoyed reading it, but at 525 pages, you’ve really got to be invested in that to check it out.

Quotes:

“My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems.”

“In either case, either the mine site and areas downstream of it remain toxic, thereby endangering people, or else the U.S. federal government and the Montana state government (hence ultimately all taxpayers) pay for the cleanup through the federal Superfund and a corresponding Montana state fund.”

“While denial or minimization of responsibility may be in the short-term financial interests of the mining company, it is bad for society as a whole, and it may also be bad for the long-term interests of the company itself, or of the entire mining industry.”

“Some of my Montana friends now say: in retrospect, when we compare the multi-billion-dollar mine cleanup costs borne by us taxpayers with Montana’s own meager past earnings from its mines, most of whose profits went to shareholders in the eastern U.S. or in Europe, we realize that Montana would have been better off in the long run if it had never mined copper at all but had just imported it from Chile, leaving the resulting problems to the Chileans!”

“Only when the public pressures its politicians into passing laws demanding different behavior from mining companies will the companies behave differently: otherwise, the companies would be operating as charities and would be violating their responsibility to their shareholders.”

“By refusing to harvest our own dead trees and instead importing live trees from Canada, we have exported both the environmental effects of logging, and the economic benefits of it, to Canada.”

“Virtually all my Montana friends, even those who consider themselves dedicated environmentalists, told me that they consider the pendulum to have swung too far in the direction away from logging. They feel frustrated that logging proposals appearing well justified to them (such as for the purpose of reducing the forest fire fuel loads discussed below) encounter long delays in court.”

“This recent increase in fires has resulted partly from climate change (the recent trend towards hot dry summers) and partly from human activities, for complicated reasons that foresters came increasingly to understand about 30 years ago but whose relative importance is still debated. One factor is the direct effects of logging, which often turns a forest into something approximating a huge pile of kindling: the ground in a logged forest may remain covered with lopped-off branches and treetops, left behind when the valuable trunks are carted away; a dense growth of new vegetation springs up, further increasing the forest’s fuel loads; and the trees logged and removed are of course the biggest and most fire-resistant individuals, leaving behind smaller and more flammable trees.”

“Instead of a regular program of expenditures for maintaining our western forests in a less fire-susceptible condition, the federal government tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money unpredictably whenever firefighting emergency arises: e.g., about $1.6 billion to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles.”

“Within the Bitterroot, people build trophy homes next to or surrounded by flammable forests at the urban/wildland interface and then expect the government to protect those homes against fires.”

“We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.”

“[N]either life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”

“[G]enerals often plan for a coming war as if it will be like the previous war, especially if that previous war was one in which their side was victorious.”

“Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.” – Friedrich von Schiller

“I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.”

“What makes you think that, as of January 1, 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems, while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?”

“All too often, a focus by politicians or industries on the promise of hydrogen cars and wind energy for the distant future distracts attention from all the obvious measures needed right now to decrease driving and fuel consumption by existing cars, and to decrease consumption by fossil fuel generating plants.”

“Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing.”

#collapse #jareddiamond #anthropology #society #newyorktimesbestseller

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