Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  The effectiveness of the Forest Stewardship Council has received the ultimate compliment from logging companies opposed to it: they have set up their own competing certification organizations with weaker standards. These include the Sustainable Forestry Initiative in the U.S., set up by the American Forest and Paper Association; the Canadian Standards Association; and the Pan-European Forest Council. The effect (and presumably the purpose) is to confuse the public with competing claims: for instance, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative initially proposed six different labels making six different claims. All of these “knockoffs” differ from the FSC in that they do not require independent third-party certification, but they permit companies to certify themselves (I’m not joking). They do not ask companies to judge themselves by uniform standards and quantifiable results (e.g., “width of the strips of riparian vegetation flanking streams”), but instead by unquantifiable processes (“we have a policy,” “our managers participate in discussions”). They lack chain-of-custody certification, so that any product of a sawmill that receives both certified and uncertified timber becomes certified. The Pan-European Forest Council practices regional automatic certification, by which for instance the entire country of Austria became certified quickly. It remains to be seen whether, in the future, these competing industry attempts at self-certification will be outcompeted by the FSC through losing credibility in the eyes of consumers, or will instead converge on FSC standards in order to gain credibility.

  The last industry that I shall discuss is the seafood industry (marine fisheries), which faces the same fundamental problem as do the oil, mining, and timber industries: rising world population and affluence leading to increasing demand for decreasing supplies. While seafood consumption is high and rising in the First World, it is even higher and rising faster elsewhere, e.g., having doubled in China within the last decade. Fish now account for 40% of all protein (of both plant and animal origin) consumed in the Third World and are the main animal protein source for over a billion Asians. Worldwide population shifts from the interior towards the coast within countries will increase the demand for seafood, because three-quarters of the world’s population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by the year 2010. As a result of our dependence on seafood, the sea provides jobs and income for 200,000,000 people around the world, and fishing is the most important basis of the economies of Iceland, Chile, and some other countries.

  While any renewable biological resource poses difficult management problems, marine fisheries are especially hard to manage. Even fisheries confined to waters controlled by a single nation pose difficulties, but fisheries extending over water controlled by multiple nations pose greater problems and have tended to be the earliest to collapse, because no single nation can impose its will. Fisheries in the open ocean outside the 200-mile marine limit lie beyond the control of any national government. Studies suggest that, with proper management, the world’s seafood catch could be sustained at a level even higher than its present level. Sadly, though, the majority of the world’s commercially important marine fisheries have already either collapsed to the point of being commercially extinct, have been severely depleted, are currently overfished or fished to the limit, are recovering only slowly from past overfishing, or are otherwise in urgent need of management. Among the most important fisheries that have already collapsed are Atlantic halibut, Atlantic bluefin tuna, Atlantic swordfish, North Sea herring, Grand Banks cod, Argentinian hake, and Australian Murray River cod. In overfished areas of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, peak catches were attained in the year 1989 and have declined since then. The main reasons behind all these failures are the tragedy of the commons, discussed in the preceding chapter, which makes it difficult for consumers exploiting a shared renewable resource to reach agreement despite their shared interest in doing so; the widespread lack of effective management and regulation; and so-called perverse subsidies, i.e., the economically senseless subsidies that many governments pay for political reasons to support fishing fleets that are too large in relation to their fish stocks, that lead almost inevitably to overfishing, and that yield too low profits to survive without the subsidies.

  The damage caused by overfishing extends beyond the future prospects of all of us to eat seafood, and beyond the survival of the particular fish or seafood stocks that we harvest. Most seafood is captured by netting and other methods that result in our hauling in unwanted animals besides those actually sought. Those other animals, referred to as by-catch, constitute a proportion varying between one-quarter and two-thirds of the total catch. In most cases the by-catch dies and is thrown back overboard. Included in the by-catch are unwanted fish species, juveniles of the targeted fish species, seals, dolphins and whales, sharks, and sea turtles. Yet by-catch mortality is not inevitable: for example, recent changes in fishing gear and practices reduced dolphin mortality in the eastern Pacific tuna fishery by a factor of 50. There is also heavy damage to marine habitats, notably to the seabed by trawlers and to coral reefs by dynamite and cyanide fishing. Finally, overfishing damages fishermen, by ultimately eliminating the basis of their livelihood and costing them their jobs.

  All of these problems troubled not only economists and environmentalists but also some leaders of the seafood industry itself. Among the latter were executives of Unilever, one of the world’s largest buyers of frozen fish, whose products were familiar to consumers under the brand names of Gorton in the U.S. (subsequently sold by Unilever), Birdseye Walls and Iglo in Britain, and Findus and Frudsa in Europe. The executives became concerned that fish, the commodities that they bought and sold, were in steep decline throughout the world, just as the timber company executives who launched the Forest Stewardship Council became concerned about the steep decline of forest. Hence in 1997, four years after the establishment of the FSC, Unilever teamed up with World Wildlife Fund to found a similar organization termed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Its goal was to offer credible eco-labeling to consumers, and to encourage fishermen to solve their own tragedies of the commons by the positive incentive of market appeal rather than the negative incentive of threatened boycotts. Other companies and foundations, plus international agencies, have now joined Unilever and World Wildlife Fund in funding the MSC.

  In Britain the companies besides Unilever that support the MSC or buy its certified seafood products include Young’s Bluecrest Seafood Company, Britain’s largest seafood company; Sainsbury’s, Britain’s largest fresh food supplier; the supermarket chains Marks and Spencer, and Safeway; and the Boyd Line, which operates a fleet of fishing trawlers. U.S. supporters include Whole Foods, the world’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods, plus Shaw’s supermarkets and Trader Joe’s markets. Among supporters elsewhere are Migros, which is Switzerland’s largest food retailer, and Kailis and France Foods, a large operator of fishing boats, factories, markets, and exports in Australia.

  The criteria that the MSC applies to fisheries were developed in consultation between fishermen, fisheries managers, seafood processors, retailers, fishery scientists, and environmental groups. The principal criteria are that the fishery should maintain its fish stock’s health (including the stock’s sex and age distribution and genetic diversity) for the indefinite future, should yield a sustainable harvest, should maintain ecosystem integrity, should minimize impacts on marine habitats and on non-targeted species (the by-catch), should have rules and procedures for managing stocks and minimizing impacts, and should comply with prevailing laws.

  Seafood companies bombard the consuming public with widely differing claims, some of them deceptive or confusing, about the supposed environmental benignness of their fishing practices. Hence the essence of the MSC, as of the FSC, is independent third-party certification. Again as with the FSC, the MSC accredits several certifying organizations, rather than carrying out certifying audits itself. Application for certification is completely voluntary: it’s up to a company to decide if it thinks that the benefits of certification would w
arrant the cost. For the smaller fisheries seeking assessment, a foundation called the David and Lucille Packard Foundation now contributes to paying those costs through the Sustainable Fisheries Fund. The process begins with a confidential pre-assessment of the applying company by the certifying organization, then (if the company still wants to be audited) comes a full assessment typically requiring one or two years (up to three years for big complicated fisheries) and specifying issues that must be addressed. If the audit is favorable and the specified issues are resolved, the company receives certification for five years but is subject each year to an audit without prior notification. Those annual audit results are posted on a public website and get scrutinized and often challenged by interested parties. Experience shows that most companies, once they have received MSC certification, are anxious not to lose it and want to do whatever is required to pass the annual audit. As with the FSC, there are also chain-of-custody audits to trace fish caught by a certified fishery from the fishing boat to the dock where the catch is landed, then to wholesale markets, processors (freezers and canners), wholesale dealers, and distributors, to the retail market. Only products of a certified fishery that can be traced through this whole chain are permitted to carry the MSC logo when offered for sale to a consumer in a shop or restaurant.

  What gets certified is a fishery or a fish stock, and the fishing method, practice, or gear used to harvest that stock. The entities seeking certification are collectives of fishermen, government fisheries departments acting on behalf of a national or local fishery, and intermediate processors and distributors. Applications are considered from “fisheries” not only of fish, but also of molluscs and crustacea. Of the seven fisheries certified to date, the largest is the wild salmon fishery of the U.S. state of Alaska, represented by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The next largest are Western Australian rock lobster (Australia’s most valuable single-species fishery, accounting for 20% of the value of all Australian fisheries) and New Zealand hoki (New Zealand’s most valuable export fishery). The other four fisheries already certified are smaller ones in Britain: Thames herring, Cornwall mackerel caught by handline, Burry Inlet cockles, and Loch Torridon Nephrops. Pending accreditation are Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in the U.S., accounting for half of the U.S. catch; U.S. West Coast halibut, Dungeness crab, and spotted prawn; U.S. East Coast striped bass; and Baja California lobster. Plans are also under way to extend certification from wild-caught fish to aquaculture operations (which pose their own big problems mentioned in the next chapter), beginning with shrimp and proceeding to 10 other species, including perhaps salmon. It appears at present that the most difficult problems of certification for the world’s major fisheries will arise with wild-caught shrimp (because it is caught mostly by bottom-trawling producing a large by-catch), and with fisheries extending beyond the jurisdiction of a single nation.

  Overall, certification has been proving more difficult and slower for fisheries than for forests. Nevertheless, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the progress in fisheries certification achieved in the last five years: I had expected it to be even more difficult and slower than it actually has been.

  In brief, environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that for many of us offends our sense of justice. Depending on the circumstances, a business really may maximize its profits, at least in the short term, by damaging the environment and hurting people. That is still the case today for fishermen in an unmanaged fishery without quotas, and for international logging companies with short-term leases on tropical rainforest land in countries with corrupt government officials and unsophisticated landowners. It was also the case for oil companies before the Santa Barbara Channel oil spill disaster of 1969, and for Montana mining companies before recent cleanup laws. When government regulation is effective, and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn’t care.

  It is easy and cheap for the rest of us to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But that blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not non-profit charities but profit-making companies, and that publicly owned companies with shareholders are under obligation to those shareholders to maximize profits, provided that they do so by legal means. Our laws make a company’s directors legally liable for something termed “breach of fiduciary responsibility” if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. The car manufacturer Henry Ford was in fact successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day: the courts declared that, while Ford’s humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders.

  Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through hurting the public: e.g., for not requiring mining companies to clean up, or for continuing to buy wood products from non-sustainable logging operations. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make destructive environmental policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable. The public can do that by suing businesses for harming them, as happened after the Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal disasters; by preferring to buy sustainably harvested products, a preference that caught the attention of Home Depot and Unilever; by making employees of companies with poor track records feel ashamed of their company and complain to their own management; by preferring their governments to award valuable contracts to businesses with a good environmental track record, as the Norwegian government did to Chevron; and by pressing their governments to pass and enforce laws and regulations requiring good environmental practices, such as the U.S. government’s new regulations for the coal industry in the 1970s and 1980s. In turn, big businesses can exert powerful pressure on their suppliers that might ignore public or government pressure. For instance, after the U.S. public became concerned about the spread of mad cow disease, and after the U.S. government’s Food and Drug Administration introduced rules demanding that the meat industry abandon practices associated with the risk of spread, meat packers resisted for five years, claiming that the rules would be too expensive to obey. But when McDonald’s Corporation then made the same demands after customer purchases of its hamburgers plummeted, the meat industry complied within weeks: “because we have the world’s biggest shopping cart,” as a McDonald’s representative explained. The public’s task is to identify which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure: for instance, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and Tiffany, but not meat packers, loggers, or gold miners.

  Some readers may be disappointed or outraged that I place the ultimate responsibility, for business practices harming the public, on the public itself. I also assign to the public the added costs, if any, of sound environmental practices, which I regard as normal costs of doing business, like any others. My views may seem to ignore a moral imperative that businesses should follow virtuous principles, whether or not it is most profitable for them to do so. I instead prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, in all politically complex human societies in which people encounter other individuals with whom they have no ties of family or clan relationship, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is not a sufficient step.

  To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Bu
sinesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn’t want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses’ environmental practices.

  CHAPTER 16

  The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?

  Introduction ■ The most serious problems ■ If we don’t solve them . . . ■ Life in Los Angeles ■ One-liner objections ■ The past and the present ■ Reasons for hope ■

  The chapters of this book have discussed why past or present societies succeed or fail at solving their environmental problems. Now, this final chapter considers the book’s practical relevance: what does it all mean to us today?

  I shall begin by explaining the major sets of environmental problems facing modern societies, and the time scale on which they pose threats. As a specific example of how these problems play out, I examine the area where I have spent most of the last 39 years of my life, Southern California. I then consider the objections most often raised to dismiss the significance of environmental problems today. Since half of this book was devoted to ancient societies because of the lessons that they might hold for modern societies, I look at differences between the ancient and the modern worlds that affect what lessons we can draw from the past. Finally, for anyone who asks, “What can I do as an individual?” I offer suggestions in the Further Readings section.