Every Now and Then I Fall Apart

Recently I finished reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which is partly very good and partly frustrating. He does very well by describing the fall of the ancient socities he chooses to concentrate on (Easter Island, the Greenland Norse of the Middle Ages, the Anasazi, some others) — it’s clear and vivid science writing, and he crisply sets up a framework for common occurrences between the different situations. I found the details about fieldwork fascinating: how various specialists analyze discarded food waste to determine diets & animal husbandry patterns, or count the types of pollen found in soil strata in order to chart the course of deforestation.

But he devotes the last third of the book to drawing connections to contemporary societies, and this doesn’t come off nearly as well. His writing gets soggier and his arguments don’t sound as convincing. Foremost, he pretty much drops the five-point framework which guides his discussion of the ancient collapses, which gave me the feeling that he was copping out in the face of trying to extend it coherently. There’s a chapter on contemporary China which is largely a heap of environmental-degradation statistics, capped with a fairly empty statement along the lines of “I hold out cautious hope that they’ll address this” — the difference between this and his usual systematic approach is huge and disappointing. I think the subtext is, one has to write about China if talking about the contemporary world at large, even if one doesn’t know a particular lot about it.

Meanwhile, he starts to sound less analytical and a bit like a stereotypical environmentalist, assigning too much importance to local and NGO efforts around the margins of industry without trying to put it toughly into perspective, and harping about the costs of pollution cleanup without really contextualizing them with the explosion of economic production that’s happened at the same time. He approaches the idea of globalized trade from a vaguely defined “we’re-all-connected-and-share-the-same-
problems” angle but doesn’t give enough service to the benefits of it, especially how it could (possibly?) smooth over climate change “winners and losers” (as he puts it a couple of times) vis-à-vis agricultural production. He emphasizes the concept of sustainable food production & water use, but outside of a passing statistic regarding Australia’s agriculture, doesn’t hunt down an answer to what kind of danger the globally trading world is really in on this count. (He does say, no mistake about it, that the world could not sustain its current population at anything like first world living standards, but I think there’s a different degree of concern & immediacy here.) Given that these sustainability problems are central to the possibility of collapse, the fact that he doesn’t hit this harder is kind of baffling to me.

His moral of the story is basically: Collapses have happened before, and can happen again, to us. I found it actually surprisingly disturbing just to punch through the first tissue of my own denial about this. And there’s value in his reiteration that collapses aren’t sudden cataclysms, but rather situations of increasingly marginal living environments that can then go over the edge under temporary duress, like long droughts. (It’s not his example, but think of New Orleans being so succeptible to a 40-year hurricane, and how other cities and countries might quietly acquire a similarly short period of massive threat.) But I found it frustrating that his crowning conclusions in the book aren’t especially insightful, especially since he convincingly argues how much is at stake.