 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Collapse
By Jared Diamond
Penguin $32.95
 In both senses the 'big' non-fiction book of the year, Professor Diamond's 570-page follow-up to his best-selling Guns, Germs & Steel, brims with facts and hypotheses about how significant societies of the past fell into disarray and how present nations, including Australia, need to take assertive action to avoid similar fates.
The most graphic symbol of collapse are the massive stone heads of Easter Island, ghostly reminders of a civilisation that arose, flourished and then vanished, leaving only its artefacts.
Polynesians came to the dry Pacific island around 900 AD and established a hierarchical society whose chiefs sought to out-display each other through the size of their carvings. When not destroying their rivals' statues they were denuding the landscape of tree cover.
Finally, reduced to burning grasses and crop wastes for fuel, and having no wild food except rats, they resorted to eating each other. "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth," was the greatest taunt for an enemy.
Diamond identifies five criteria responsible for societal collapse: extreme damage to environment, usually deforestation; climate change and natural disaster; hostile neighbours; the decreased support of friendly neighbours who kept the society stable; and a society's response to its problems.
The disaster scenarios described include Easter, Pitcairn and Henderson islands, central America's Maya and southwest America's Anasazi, but it is the Viking invaders of Greenland and other parts of Europe who provide the most complete example, having damaged their environment, suffered climate change and a breakdown in trading relations, and faced the hostility of the indigenous Inuits.
He then examines societies that succeeded in overcoming challenges, whether by 'bottom up' strategies, as in PNG's Highlands (where villagers engaged in large-scale casuarina planting) and the tiny Pacific island of Tikopia (where damaging pigs were outlawed), or 'top down' ones, as with the ban on forestry enforced by Japan's Tokugawa rulers of the 17th-18th century.
Today, Japan has 74 per cent forest cover, the world's greatest, although it does impact upon other countries whose timbers it can afford to import.
Facing profound enviro-challenges are fast-developing China, the author's hometown of Los Angeles and Australia with its over-clearing, introduced pests, salinity and largely unsustainable agriculture.
Diamond, a self-described 'cautious optimist', concludes, 'The world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today... in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways... such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.'
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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