Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  The problem of habitat management of which we are most conscious is the fire risk in Southern California’s two predominant habitats, chaparral (a scrub woodland similar to the macchia of the Mediterranean) and oak woodland. Under natural conditions both habitats experienced occasional fires from lightning strikes, like the situation in Montana forests that I discussed in Chapter 1. Now that people are living in and next to those highly flammable habitats, Angelenos demand that fires be suppressed immediately. Each year, the late summer and early fall, which are the hottest and driest and windiest time of year in Southern California, are the fire season, when somewhere or other hundreds of homes will go up in flames. The canyon in which I live has not had a fire get out of control since 1961, when there was a big fire that burned 600 houses. A theoretical solution to this problem, as in Montana forests, might be frequent controlled small-scale fires to reduce the fuel load, but such fires would be absurdly dangerous in this densely populated urban area, and the public would not stand for it.

  Introduced alien species are a big threat and economic burden to California agriculture, the current leading threat being the Mediterranean fruit fly. Non-agricultural threats are introduced pathogens threatening to kill our oak trees and pine trees. Because one of my two sons became interested as a child in amphibians (frogs and salamanders), I have learned that most species of native amphibians have been exterminated from two-thirds of the streams in Los Angeles County, as the result of the spread of three alien predators on amphibians (a crayfish, bullfrog, and mosquitofish) against which Southern California amphibians are helpless because they never evolved to avoid those threats.

  The major soil problem affecting California agriculture is salinization as a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanses of agricultural land in California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.

  Because rainfall is low in Southern California, Los Angeles depends for its water on long aqueducts, principally from the Sierra Nevada mountain range and adjacent valleys of Northern California, and from the Colorado River on the eastern border of our state. With the growth of California’s population, there has been increasing competition for those water supplies among farmers and cities. With global warming, the Sierra snowpack that provides most of our water will decrease, just as in Montana, increasing the likelihood of water shortages in Los Angeles.

  As for collapses of fisheries, the sardine fishery of Northern California collapsed early in the 20th century, the abalone industry of Southern California collapsed a few decades ago soon after my arrival, and the rockfish fishery of Southern California is now collapsing and has become subject to severe restrictions or closure within the last year. Fish prices in Los Angeles supermarkets have increased by a factor of 4 since I moved here.

  Finally, losses of biodiversity have affected Southern California’s most distinctive species. The symbol of the state of California, and of my university (the University of California), is the California Golden Bear, but it is now extinct. (What dreadful symbolism for one’s state and university!) Southern California’s population of sea otters was exterminated in the last century, and the outcome of recent attempts at reintroduction is uncertain. Within the time that I’ve lived in Los Angeles, populations of two of our most characteristic bird species, the Roadrunner and the California Quail, have crashed. Southern California amphibians whose numbers have plummeted are the California Newt and the California Tree Frog.

  Thus, environmental and population problems have been undermining the economy and the quality of life in Southern California. They are in large measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages, garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises, and traffic congestion. In most of these respects except for our especially bad traffic jams and air quality, we are no worse off than many other areas of the United States.

  Most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainties that are legitimate subjects for debate. In addition, however, there are many reasons that are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental problems, and that are in my opinion not well informed. These objections are often posed in the form of simplistic “one-liners.” Here are a dozen of the commonest ones:

  “The environment has to be balanced against the economy.” This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mussels, the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks, and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization. It adds up to a few hundred million dollars per year here, tens of billions of dollars there, another billion dollars over here, and so on for hundreds of different problems. For instance, the value of “one statistical life” in the U.S.—i.e., the cost to the U.S. economy resulting from the death of an average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national economy—is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even if one takes the conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000, then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion per year. That illustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess of costs) of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health costs.

  “Technology will solve our problems.” This is an expression of faith about the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that the new technologies now under discussion will succeed, and that they will do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon. In extended conversations that I had with two of America’s most successful and best-known businessmen and financiers, both of them eloquently described to me emerging technologies and financial instruments that differ fundamentally from those of the past and that, they confidently predicted, would solve our environmental problems.

  But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don’t. Those that do succeed typically take a few decades to develop and phase in widely: think of gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television, computers, and so on. New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the problem that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely far more expensive than preventive measures to avoid creating the problem in the first place: for example, the billions of dollars of damages and cleanup costs associated with major oil spills, compared to the modest cost of safety measures effective at minimizing the risks of a major oil spill.

  Most of all, advances in technology just increase our ability to do things, which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating
difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that’s why we’re in the situation in which we now find ourselves. 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?

  From thousands of examples of unforeseen harmful side effects of new technological solutions, two must suffice: CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and motor vehicles. The coolant gases formerly used in refrigerators and air conditioners were toxic ones (like ammonia) that could prove fatal if those appliances leaked while the homeowner was asleep at night. Hence it was hailed as a great advance when CFCs (alias freons) were developed as synthetic refrigerant gases. They are odorless, non-toxic, and highly stable under ordinary conditions at the Earth’s surface, so that initially no bad side effects were observed or expected. Within a short time they became viewed as miracle substances and adopted throughout the world as refrigerator and air-conditioner coolants, foam-blowing agents, solvents, and propellants in aerosol cans. But in 1974 it was discovered that in the stratosphere they are broken down by intense ultraviolet radiation to yield highly reactive chlorine atoms that destroy a significant fraction of the ozone layer protecting us and all other living things against lethal ultraviolet effects. That discovery provoked vigorous denial by some corporate interests, fueled not only by the $200 billion value of CFC-based industrial efforts but also by genuine doubts because of scientific complications involved. Hence the phasing-out of CFCs has taken a long time: not until 1988 did the DuPont Company (the largest manufacturer of CFCs) decide to stop manufacturing them, in 1992 industrialized countries agreed to cease CFC production by 1995, and China and some other developing countries are still producing them. Unfortunately, the amounts of CFCs already in the atmosphere are sufficiently large, and their breakdown sufficiently slow, that they will continue to be present for many decades after the eventual end of all CFC production.

  The other example involves the introduction of the motor vehicle. When I was a child in the 1940s, some of my teachers were old enough to remember the first decades of the 20th century, when motor vehicles were in the process of replacing horse-drawn carriages and trams on city streets of the United States. The two biggest immediate consequences experienced by urban Americans, my teachers recall, were that American cities became wonderfully cleaner and quieter. No longer were streets constantly polluted with horse manure and urine, and no longer was there the constant din of horse hoofs clicking on the pavement. Today, after a century’s experience of cars and buses, it strikes us as ludicrous or inconceivable that anyone could praise them for being non-polluting and quiet. While no one is advocating a return to the horse as a solution to smog from engine emissions, the example does serve to illustrate the unanticipated negative side effects even of technologies that (unlike CFCs) we choose to retain.

  “If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need.” Optimists who make such claims ignore the unforeseen difficulties and long transition times regularly involved. For instance, one area in which switching based on not-yet-perfected new technologies has repeatedly been touted as promising to solve a major environmental problem is automobiles. The current hope for breakthrough involves hydrogen cars and fuel cells, which are technologically in their infancy as applied to motor transport. Thus, there is not a track record justifying faith in the hydrogen-car solution to our fossil fuel problem. However, we do have a track record of a long series of other proposed new car technologies touted as breakthroughs, such as rotary engines and (most recently) electric cars, that aroused much discussion and even sales of production models, only to decline or disappear because of unforeseen problems.

  Equally instructive is the automobile industry’s recent development of fuel-efficient hybrid gas/electric cars, which have been enjoying increasing sales. However, it would be unfair for a believer in switching to mention hybrid cars without also mentioning the automobile industry’s simultaneous development of SUVs, which have been outselling hybrids by a big margin and more than offsetting their fuel savings. The net result of these two technological breakthroughs has been that the fuel consumption and exhaust production of our national car fleet has been going up rather than down. Nobody has figured out a method to ensure that technology will yield only increasingly environment-friendly effects and products (e.g., hybrid cars), without also yielding environment-unfriendly effects and products (e.g., SUVs).

  Another example of faith in switching and substitution is the hope that renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, may solve the energy crisis. These technologies do indeed exist; many Californians now use solar energy to heat their swimming pools, and wind generators are already supplying about one-sixth of Denmark’s energy needs. However, wind and solar energy have limited applicability because they can be used only at locations with reliable winds or sunlight. In addition, the recent history of technology shows that conversion times for adoption of major switches—e.g., from candles to oil lamps to gas lamps to electric lights for lighting, or from wood to coal to petroleum for energy—require several decades, because so many institutions and secondary technologies associated with the former technology have to be changed. It is indeed likely that energy sources other than fossil fuels will make increasing contributions to our motor transport and energy generation, but this is a long-term prospect. We’ll also need to solve our fuel and energy problems for the next several decades, before new technologies become widespread. 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.

  “There really isn’t a world food problem; there is already enough food; we only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places that need it.” (The same thing could be said for energy.) Or else: “The world’s food problem is already being solved by the Green Revolution, with its new high-yield varieties of rice and other crops, or else it will be solved by genetically modified crops.” This argument notes two things: that First World citizens enjoy on the average greater per-capita food consumption than do Third World citizens; and that some First World countries, such as the United States, do or can produce more food than their citizens consume. If food consumption could be equalized over the world, or if surplus First World food could be exported to the Third World, might that alleviate Third World starvation?

  The obvious flaw in the first half of this argument is that First World citizens show no interest in eating less, in order that Third World citizens could eat more. The flaw in the second half of the argument is that, while First World countries are willing occasionally to export food to mitigate starvation occasioned by some crisis (such as a drought or war) in certain Third World countries, First World citizens have shown no interest in paying on a regular basis (via their tax dollars that support foreign aid and subsidies to farmers) to feed billions of Third World citizens on a chronic basis. If that did happen but without effective overseas family planning programs, which the U.S. government currently opposes on principle, the result would just be Malthus’s dilemma, i.e., an increase in population proportional to an increase in available food. Population increase and Malthus’s dilemma also contribute to explaining why, after decades of hope and money invested in the Green Revolution and high-yield varieties, starvation is still widespread in the world. All of these considerations mean that genetically modified (GM) food varieties by themselves are equally unlikely to solve the world’s food problems (while world population supposedly remains stationary?). In addition, virtually all GM crop production at present is of just four crops (soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton) not eaten directly by humans but used for animal fodder, oil, or clothing, and grown in six temperate-zone countrie
s or regions. Reasons are the strong consumer resistance to eating GM foods; and the cruel fact that companies developing GM crops can make money by selling their products to rich farmers in mostly affluent temperate-zone countries, but not by selling to poor farmers in developing tropical countries. Hence the companies have no interest in investing heavily to develop GM cassava, millet, or sorghum for Third World farmers.

  “As measured by commonsense indicators such as human lifespan, health, and wealth (in economists’ terms, per-capita gross national product or GNP), conditions have actually been getting better for many decades.” Or: “Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets, clean water still flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse.” For affluent First World citizens, conditions have indeed been getting better, and public health measures have on the average lengthened lifespans in the Third World as well. But lifespan alone is not a sufficient indicator: billions of Third World citizens, constituting about 80% of the world’s population, still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level. Even in the United States, an increasing fraction of the population is at the poverty level and lacks affordable medical care, and all proposals to change this situation (e.g., “Just provide everyone with health insurance paid by the government”) have been politically unacceptable.