Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  Second, the Norse did not enter Greenland with their minds a blank slate, open to considering any solution to Greenland’s problems. Instead, like all colonizing peoples throughout history, they arrived with their own knowledge, cultural values, and preferred lifestyle, based on generations of Norse experience in Norway and Iceland. They thought of themselves as dairy farmers, Christians, Europeans, and specifically Norse. Their Norwegian forebears had successfully practiced dairy farming for 3,000 years. Shared language, religion, and culture bound them to Norway, just as those shared attributes bound Americans and Australians to Britain for centuries. All of Greenland’s bishops were Norwegians sent out to Greenland, rather than Norse who had grown up in Greenland. Without those shared Norwegian values, the Norse could not have cooperated to survive in Greenland. In that light their investments in cows, the Nordrseta hunt, and churches are understandable, even though on purely economic grounds those may not have been the best use of Norse energy. The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties. That proves to be a common theme throughout history and also in the modern world, as we already saw in connection with Montana (Chapter 1): the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity. We shall return to this dilemma in Chapters 14 and 16, when we consider societies that succeeded by figuring out which of their core values they could hold on to.

  Third, the Norse, like other medieval European Christians, scorned pagan non-European peoples and lacked experience of how best to deal with them. Only after the age of exploration that began with Columbus’s voyage in 1492 did Europeans learn Machiavellian ways of exploiting native peoples to their own advantage, even while continuing to despise them. Hence the Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and probably behaved towards them in ways ensuring their enmity. Many later groups of Europeans in the Arctic similarly perished as a result of ignoring or antagonizing the Inuit, most notably the 138 British members of the well-financed 1845 Franklin Expedition, every single one of whom died while trying to cross areas of the Canadian Arctic populated by Inuit. The European explorers and settlers who succeeded best in the Arctic were those most extensively adopting Inuit ways, like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.

  Finally, power in Norse Greenland was concentrated at the top, in the hands of the chiefs and clergy. They owned most of the land (including all the best farms), owned the boats, and controlled the trade with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade to importing goods that brought prestige to them: luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments and jewelry for the clergy, and bells and stained glass for the churches. Among the uses to which they allocated their few boats were the Nordrseta hunt, in order to acquire the luxury exports (such as ivory and polar bear hides) with which to pay for those imports. Chiefs had two motives for running large sheep herds that could damage the land by overgrazing: wool was Greenland’s other principal export with which to pay for imports; and independent farmers on overgrazed land were more likely to be forced into tenancy, and thereby to become a chief’s followers in his competition with other chiefs. There were many innovations that might have improved the material conditions of the Norse, such as importing more iron and fewer luxuries, allocating more boat time to Markland journeys for obtaining iron and timber, and copying (from the Inuit) or inventing different boats and different hunting techniques. But those innovations could have threatened the power, prestige, and narrow interests of the chiefs. In the tightly controlled, interdependent society of Norse Greenland, the chiefs were in a position to prevent others from trying out such innovations.

  Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America. Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve.

  CHAPTER 9

  Opposite Paths to Success

  Bottom up, top down ■ New Guinea highlands ■ Tikopia ■ Tokugawa problems ■ Tokugawa solutions ■ Why Japan succeeded ■ Other successes ■

  The preceding chapters have described six past societies whose failure to solve the environmental problems that they created or encountered contributed to their eventual collapse: Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island, the Anasazi, the Classic Lowland Maya, and the Greenland Norse. I dwelt on their failures because they offer us many lessons. However, it’s certainly not the case that all past societies were doomed to environmental disaster: the Icelanders have survived in a difficult environment for over 1,100 years, and many other societies have persisted for thousands of years. Those success stories also hold lessons for us, as well as hope and inspiration. They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the bottom-up and the top-down approach.

  This recognition stems especially from the work of archaeologist Patrick Kirch on Pacific islands of different sizes, with different societal outcomes. The occupation of tiny Tikopia Island (1.8 square miles) was still sustainable after 3,000 years; medium-size Mangaia (27 square miles) underwent a deforestation-triggered collapse, similar to that of Easter Island; and the largest of the three islands, Tonga (288 square miles), has been operating more or less sustainably for 3,200 years. Why did the small island and the large island ultimately succeed in mastering their environmental problems, while the medium-sized island failed? Kirch argues that the small island and the large island adopted opposite approaches to success, and that neither approach was feasible on the medium-sized island.

  Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that they are affected by developments throughout the island, and share a sense of identity and common interests with other inhabitants. Hence everybody realizes that they will benefit from sound environmental measures that they and their neighbors adopt. That’s bottom-up management, in which people work together to solve their own problems.

  Most of us have experience of such bottom-up management in our neighborhoods where we live or work. For instance, all homeowners on the Los Angeles street where I live belong to a neighborhood homeowners’ association, whose purpose is to keep the neighborhood safe, harmonious, and attractive for our own benefit. All of us elect the association’s directors each year, discuss policy at an annual meeting, and provide the association’s budget by means of an annual dues payment. With that money, the association maintains flower gardens at road intersections, requires homeowners not to cut down trees without good cause, reviews building plans to ensure that ugly or oversized houses aren’t built, resolves disputes between neighbors, and lobbies city officials on matters affecting the whole neighborhood. As another example, I mentioned in Chapter 1 that landowners living near Hamilton in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley have banded together to operate the Teller Wildlife Refuge, and have thereby contributed to improving their own land values, lifestyle, and fishing and hunting opportunities, even though that in itself does not solve the problems of the United States or of the world.

  The opposite approach is the top-down approach suited to a large society with centralized political organization, like Polynesian Tonga. Tonga is much too large for any individual peasant farmer to be familiar with the whole archipelago or even ju
st with any single one of its large islands. Some problem might be going on in a distant part of the archipelago that could ultimately prove fatal to the farmer’s lifestyle, but of which he initially has no knowledge. Even if he did know about it, he might dismiss it with the standard ISEP excuse (“It’s someone else’s problem”), because he might think that it made no difference to him or else its effects would just lie far off in the future. Conversely, a farmer might be inclined to gloss over problems in his own area (e.g., deforestation) because he assumes that there are plenty of trees somewhere else, but in fact he doesn’t know.

  Yet Tonga is still large enough for a centralized government under a paramount chief or king to have arisen. That king does have an overview over the whole archipelago, unlike local farmers. Also unlike the farmers, the king may be motivated to attend to the long-term interests of the whole archipelago, because the king derives his wealth from the whole archipelago, he is the latest in a line of rulers that has been there for a long time, and he expects his descendants to rule Tonga forever. Thus, the king or central authority may practice top-down management of environmental resources, and may give all of his subjects orders that are good for them in the long run but that they don’t know enough to have formulated themselves.

  This top-down approach is as familiar to citizens of modern First World countries as is the bottom-up approach. We’re accustomed to the fact that governmental entities, especially (in the U.S.) state and federal governments, pursue environmental and other policies affecting the whole state or country, supposedly because the government leaders can have an overview of the state or country beyond the capacity of most individual citizens. For example, while the citizens of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley do have their own Teller Wildlife Refuge, half of the valley’s acreage is owned or managed by the federal government, as national forest or under the Bureau of Land Management.

  Traditional middle-sized societies, occupying medium-sized islands or homelands, may not be well suited for either of these two approaches. The island is too large for a local farmer to have an overview of, or stake in, all parts of the island. Hostility between chiefs in neighboring valleys prevents agreement or coordinated action, and even contributes to environmental destruction: each chief leads raids to cut down trees and wreak havoc on rivals’ land. The island may be too small for a central government to have arisen, capable of controlling the entire island. That appears to have been the fate of Mangaia, and may have affected other middle-sized societies in the past. Today, when the whole world is organized into states, fewer middle-sized societies may be facing this dilemma, but it may still arise in countries where state control is weak.

  To illustrate these contrasting approaches to success, I shall now relate briefly the story of two small-scale societies where bottom-up approaches worked (the New Guinea highlands and Tikopia Island), and one large-scale society where top-down measures worked (Japan of the Tokugawa era, now the eighth most populous country in the world). In all three cases the environmental problems addressed were deforestation, erosion, and soil fertility. However, many other past societies have adopted similar approaches for solving problems of water resources, fishing, and hunting. It should also be understood that bottom-up and top-down approaches can coexist within a large-scale society that is organized as a pyramidal hierarchy of units. For example, in the United States and other democracies we have bottom-up management by local neighborhood and citizens’ groups coexisting with top-down management by many levels of government (city, county, state, and national).

  The first example is the highlands of New Guinea, one of the world’s great success stories of bottom-up management. People have been living self-sustainably in New Guinea for about 46,000 years, until recent times without economically significant inputs from societies outside the highlands, and without inputs of any sort except trade items prized just for status (such as cowry shells and bird-of-paradise plumes). New Guinea is the large island just north of Australia (map, p. 84), lying almost on the equator and hence with hot tropical rainforest in the lowlands, but whose rugged interior consists of alternating ridges and valleys culminating in glacier-covered mountains up to 16,500 feet high. The terrain ruggedness confined European explorers to the coast and lowland rivers for 400 years, during which it became assumed that the interior was forest-covered and uninhabited.

  It was therefore a shock, when airplanes chartered by biologists and miners first flew over the interior in the 1930s, for the pilots to see below them a landscape transformed by millions of people previously unknown to the outside world. The scene looked like the most densely populated areas of Holland (Plate 19): broad open valleys with few clumps of trees, divided as far as the eye could see into neatly laid-out gardens separated by ditches for irrigation and drainage, terraced steep hillsides reminiscent of Java or Japan, and villages surrounded by defensive stockades. When more Europeans followed up the pilots’ discoveries overland, they found that the inhabitants were farmers who grew taro, bananas, yams, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, pigs, and chickens. We now know that the first four of those major crops (plus other minor ones) were domesticated in New Guinea itself, that the New Guinea highlands were one of only nine independent centers of plant domestication in the world, and that agriculture has been going on there for about 7,000 years—one of the world’s longest-running experiments in sustainable food production.

  To European explorers and colonizers, New Guinea highlanders seemed “primitive.” They lived in thatched huts, were chronically at war with each other, had no kings or even chiefs, lacked writing, and wore little or no clothing even under cold conditions with heavy rain. They lacked metal and made their tools instead of stone, wood, and bone. For instance, they felled trees with stone axes, dug gardens and ditches with wooden sticks, and fought each other with wooden spears and arrows and bamboo knives.

  That “primitive” appearance proved deceptive, because their farming methods are sophisticated, so much so that European agronomists still don’t understand today in some cases the reasons why New Guineans’ methods work and why well-intentioned European farming innovations failed there. For instance, one European agricultural advisor was horrified to notice that a New Guinean sweet potato garden on a steep slope in a wet area had vertical drainage ditches running straight down the slope. He convinced the villagers to correct their awful mistake, and instead to put in drains running horizontally along contours, according to good European practices. Awed by him, the villagers reoriented their drains, with the result that water built up behind the drains, and in the next heavy rains a landslide carried the entire garden down the slope into the river below. To avoid exactly that outcome, New Guinea farmers long before the arrival of Europeans learned the virtues of vertical drains under highland rain and soil conditions.

  That’s only one of the techniques that New Guineans worked out by trial and error, over the course of thousands of years, for growing crops in areas receiving up to 400 inches of rain per year, with frequent earthquakes, landslides, and (at higher elevations) frost. To maintain soil fertility, especially in areas of high population density where short fallow periods or even continuous growing of crops were essential to produce enough food, they resorted to a whole suite of techniques besides the silviculture that I’ll explain in a moment. They added weeds, grass, old vines, and other organic matter to the soil as compost at up to 16 tons per acre. They applied garbage, ash from fires, vegetation cut from fields resting in fallow, rotten logs, and chicken manure as mulches and fertilizers to the soil surface. They dug ditches around fields to lower the watertable and prevent waterlogging, and transferred the organic muck dug out of those ditches onto the soil surface. Legume food crops that fix atmospheric nitrogen, such as beans, were rotated with other crops—in effect, an independent New Guinean invention of a crop rotation principle now widespread in First World agriculture for maintaining soil nitrogen levels. On steep slopes New Guineans constructed terraces, erected soil retention barriers, and of course
removed excess water by the vertical drains that aroused the agronomist’s ire. A consequence of their relying on all these specialized methods is that it takes years of growing up in a village to learn how to farm successfully in the New Guinea highlands. My highland friends who spent their childhood years away from their village to pursue an education found, on returning to the village, that they were incompetent at farming their family gardens because they had missed out on mastering a large body of complex knowledge.

  Sustainable agriculture in the New Guinea highlands poses difficult problems not only of soil fertility but also of wood supplies, as a result of forests having to be cleared for gardens and villages. The traditional highland lifestyle relied on trees for many purposes, such as for timber to build houses and fences, wood for making tools and utensils and weapons, and fuel for cooking and for heating the hut during the cold nights. Originally, the highlands were covered with oak and beech forests, but thousands of years of gardening have left the most densely populated areas (especially the Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea and the Baliem Valley of Indonesian New Guinea) completely deforested up to an elevation of 8,000 feet. Where do highlanders obtain all the wood that they need?

  Already on the first day of my visit to the highlands in 1964, I saw groves of a species of casuarina tree in villages and gardens. Also known as she-oaks or ironwood, casuarinas are a group of several dozen tree species with leaves resembling pine needles, native to Pacific islands, Australia, Southeast Asia, and tropical East Africa, but now widely introduced elsewhere because of their easily split but very hard wood (hence that name “ironwood”). A species native to the New Guinea highlands, Casuarina oligodon, is the one that several million highlanders grow on a massive scale by transplanting seedlings that have sprouted naturally along stream banks. Highlanders similarly plant several other tree species, but casuarina is the most prevalent. So extensive is the scale of transplanting casuarinas in the highlands that the practice is now referred to as “silviculture,” the growing of trees instead of field crops as in conventional agriculture (silva, ager, and cultura are the Latin words for woodland, field, and cultivation, respectively).