Collapse

by Diamond, Jared

  The switch from deforestation to reforestation in Denmark, Switzerland, and France is explained by Alexander Mather, “The transition from deforestation to reforestation in Europe” pp. 35-52 in A. Angelsen and D. Kaimowitz, eds., Agriculture Technologies and Tropical Deforestation (New York: CABI Publishing, 2001). For an account of reforestation in the Andes under the Incas, see Alex Chepstow-Lusty and Mark Winfield, “Inca agroforestry: lessons from the past” (Ambio 29:322-328 (1998)).

  Accounts of self-sustaining small-scale modern rural societies include: for the Swiss Alps, Robert Netting, “Of men and meadows: strategies of alpine land use” (Anthropological Quarterly 45:132-144 (1972)); “What alpine peasants have in common: observations on communal tenure in a Swiss village” (Human Ecology 4:135-146 (1976)), and Balancing on an Alp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); for Spanish irrigation systems, T. F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and A. Maass and R. L. Anderson, And the Desert Shall Rejoice: Conflict, Growth and Justice in Arid Environments (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1986); and, for Philippine irrigation systems, R. Y. Siy, Jr., Community Resource Management: Lessons from the Zanjera (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 1982). Those Swiss, Spanish, and Philippine studies are compared in Chapter 3 of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  Accounts of ecological specialization within the Indian caste system include Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Two papers that may serve as examples of prudent resource management by ecologically specialized Indian castes include Madhav Gadgil and K. C. Malhotra, “Adaptive significance of the Indian castes system: an ecological perspective” (Annals of Human Biology 10:465-478 (1983)), and Madhav Gadgil and Prema Iyer, “On the diversification of common-property resource use by Indian society,” pp. 240-255 in F. Berkes, ed., Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-based Sustainable Development (London: Belhaven, 1989).

  Before leaving these examples of success or failure in the past, let us mention some more examples of failure. I have discussed five failures in detail, because they seem to me to be the best understood cases. However, there are many other past societies, some of them well known, that may also have overexploited their resources, sometimes to the point of decline or collapse. I do not discuss them at length in this book, because they are subject to more uncertainties and debate than the cases that I do discuss in detail. However, just to make the record more complete, I shall now briefly mention nine of them, proceeding geographically through the New and then the Old World:

  Native Americans of the California Channel Islands off Los Angeles overexploited different species of shellfish in succession, as shown by shells in their middens. The oldest middens contain mostly the shells of the largest species that lives closest to shore and would have been easiest to bring up by diving. With time in the archaeological record, the middens show that the individuals harvested of that species became smaller and smaller, until people switched to harvesting the next-smaller species that lived farther offshore in deeper water. Again, the individuals harvested of that species decreased in size with time. Thus, each species in turn was overharvested until it became uneconomic to exploit, whereupon people fell back upon the next species, which was less desirable and more difficult to harvest. See Terry Jones, ed., Essays on the Prehistory of Maritime California (Davis, Calif.: Center for Archaeological Research, 1992); and L. Mark Raab, “An optimal foraging analysis of prehistoric shellfish collecting on San Clemente Island, California” (Journal of Ethnobiology 12:63-80 (1992)). Another food source presumably overharvested by Native Americans on the same islands was a flightless species of sea duck called Chendytes lawesi, which must have been easy to kill because it was flightless, and which was eventually exterminated after human settlement of the Channel Islands. The abalone industry in modern Southern California met a similar fate: when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1966, one could still buy abalone in the supermarkets and harvest it on the coast, but abalone disappeared from Los Angeles menus during my lifetime here because of overharvesting.

  The largest Native American city in North America was Cahokia, which arose outside St. Louis and some of whose enormous mounds have survived as tourist attractions. With the arrival in the Mississippi Valley of a productive new variety of corn, the Mississippian Mound Builder culture arose there and in the U.S. Southeast. Cahokia reached its peak in the 1200s and then collapsed long before the arrival of Europeans. The cause of Cahokia’s collapse is debated, but deforestation, resulting in erosion and the filling up of oxbow lakes with sediment, may have played a role. See Neal Lopinot and William Woods, “Wood exploitation and the collapse of Cahokia,” pp. 206-231 in C. Margaret Scarry, ed., Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993); Timothy Pauketat and Thomas Emerson, eds., Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and George Milner, The Cahokia Chiefdom: The Archaeology of a Mississippian Society (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998). In the remainder of the U.S. Southeast, chiefdoms of Mound Builder societies rose and fell; exhaustion of soil nutrients may have played a role.

  The first state-level society on the coast of Peru was that of the Moche, famous for their realistic pottery, especially their portrait vessels. Moche society collapsed by around A.D. 800, apparently because of some combination of El Niño events, destruction of irrigation works by flooding, and drought (see Brian Fagan’s 1999 book, cited under Further Readings for the Prologue, for discussion and references).

  One of the empires or cultural horizons of the Andean Highlands that preceded the Incas was the Tiwanaku Empire, in whose collapse drought may have played a role. See Alan Kolata, Tiwanaku (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Alan Kolata, ed., Tiwanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996); and Michael Binford et al., “Climate variation and the rise and fall of an Andean civilization” (Quaternary Research 47:235-248 (1997)).

  Ancient Greece went through cycles of environmental problems and recovery, at intervals of about 400 years. In each cycle, human population built up, forests were cut down, hillsides were terraced to reduce erosion, and dams were built to minimize siltation in the valley bottoms. Eventually in each cycle, the terraces and dams became overwhelmed, and the region had to be abandoned or suffered a drastic decrease in population and in societal complexity, until the landscape had recovered sufficiently to permit a further population buildup. One of those collapses coincided with the fall of Mycenean Greece, the Greek society that was celebrated by Homer and that fought the Trojan War. Mycenean Greece possessed writing (the Linear B script), but with the collapse of Mycenean society that writing disappeared, and Greece became non-literate until the return of literacy (now based on the alphabet) around 800 B.C. (see Charles Redman’s 1999 book, cited under Further Readings for the Prologue, for discussion and references).

  What we think of as civilization began around 10,000 years ago in the part of Southwest Asia known as the Fertile Crescent, and encompassing parts of modern Iran, Iraq, Syria, southeastern Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine. The Fertile Crescent was where the world’s oldest agriculture arose, and where metallurgy, writing, and state societies first developed. Thus, peoples of the Fertile Crescent enjoyed their head start of thousands of years over the rest of the world. Why, after leading the world for so long, did the Fertile Crescent decline, to the point where today it is poor except for its oil reserves and the name “Fertile Crescent” is a cruel joke? Iraq is now anything but the leader in world agriculture. Much of the explanation has to do with deforestation in the low-rainfall environment of the Fertile Crescent, and salinization that permanently ruined some of the world’s oldest farmlands (see the two books written or edited by Charles Re
dman, and cited under Further Readings for the Prologue, for discussion and references).

  The most famous monumental ruins in Africa south of the equator are those of Great Zimbabwe, consisting of a center with large stone structures in what is now the country of Zimbabwe. Great Zimbabwe thrived in the 11th to 15th centuries, controlling trade between Africa’s interior and its east coast. Its decline may have involved a combination of deforestation and a shift of trade routes. See David Phillipson, African Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002).

  The earliest cities and large states of the Indian subcontinent arose in the third millennium B.C. in the Indus Valley of what is now Pakistan. Those Indus Valley cities belong to what is known as Harappan civilization, whose writing remains un-deciphered. It used to be thought that Harappan civilization was terminated by invasions of Indo-European-speaking Aryans from the northwest, but it now appears that the cities were in decline before those invasions (Plate 41). Droughts, and shifts of the course of the Indus River, may have played a role. See Gregory Possehl, Harappan Civilization (Warminster, England: Aris and Phillips, 1982); Michael Jansen, Maire Mulloy, and Günter Urban, eds., Forgotten Cities of the Indus (Mainz, Germany: Philipp von Zabern, 1991); and Jonathan Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  Finally, the enormous temple complexes and reservoirs of Angkor Wat, former capital of the Khmer Empire, constitute the most famous ruins and archaeological “mystery” of Southeast Asia, within modern Cambodia (Plate 42). The Khmer decline may have involved the silting up of reservoirs that supplied water for intensive irrigated rice agriculture. As the Khmer Empire grew weak, it proved unable to hold off its chronic enemies the Thais, whom the Khmer Empire had been able to resist while at full strength. See Michael Coe, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), and the papers and books by Bernard-Philippe Groslier cited by Coe.

  Chapter 10

  If you decide to consult these primary sources on the Rwandan genocide and its antecedents, brace yourself for some painful reading.

  Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) describes how Rwandan society became transformed, and how the roles of the Hutu and the Tutsi became polarized, from precolonial times to the eve of independence.

  Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999) presents in mind-numbing detail the immediate background to the events of 1994, then a 414-page account of the killings themselves, and finally their aftermath.

  Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) is an account of the genocide by a journalist who interviewed many survivors, and who depicts as well the failure of other countries and of the United Nations to prevent the killings.

  My chapter includes several quotations from Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), a book by a French specialist on East Africa who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, and who vividly reconstructs the motives of participants and of the French government’s intervention. My account of the Hutu-versus-Hutu killings in Kanama commune is based on the analysis in Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau’s paper “Land relations under unbearable stress: Rwanda caught in the Malthusian trap” (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 34:1-47 (1998)).

  Chapter 11

  Two books comparing the histories of the two countries sharing the island of Hispaniola are a lively account in English by Michele Wecker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), and a geographic and social comparison in Spanish by Rafael Emilio Yunén Z., La Isla Como Es (Santiago, República Dominicana: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1985).

  Three books by Mats Lundahl will serve as an introduction into the literature on Haiti: Peasants and Poverty: A Study of Haiti (London: Croom Helm, 1979); The Haitian Economy: Man, Land, and Markets (London: Croom Helm, 1983); and Politics or Markets? Essays on Haitian Undervelopment (London: Routledge, 1992). The classic study of the Haitian revolution of 1781-1803 is C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 1963).

  The standard English-language history of the Dominican Republic is Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998). The same author wrote a different text in Spanish: Manual de Historia Dominicana, 9th ed. (Santiago, República Dominicana, 1999). Also in Spanish is a two-volume history by Roberto Cassá, Historia Social y Económica de la República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1998 and 2001). Marlin Clausner’s history focuses on rural areas: Rural Santo Domingo: Settled, Unsettled, Resettled (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973). Harry Hoetink, The Dominican People, 1850-1900: Notes for a Historical Sociology (Baltimore: Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1982) deals with the late 19th century. Claudio Vedovato, Politics, Foreign Trade and Economic Development: A Study of the Dominican Republic (London: Croom Helm, 1986) focuses on the Trujillo and post-Trujillo era. Two books providing an entry into the Trujillo era are Howard Wiarda, Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1968) and the more recent Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002).

  A manuscript tracing the history of environmental policies in the Dominican Republic, hence especially relevant to this chapter, is Walter Cordero, “Introducción: bibliografía sobre medio ambiente y recursos naturales en la República Dominicana” (2003).

  Chapter 12

  Most of the up-to-date primary literature on China’s environmental and population issues is in Chinese, or on the Web, or both. References will be found in an article by Jianguo Liu and me, “China’s environment in a globalizing world” (in preparation). As for English-language sources in books or journals, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (e-mail address chinaenv@erols.com), publishes a series of annual volumes entitled the China Environment Series. World Bank publications include China: Air, Land, and Water (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2001), available either as a book or as a CD-ROM. Some other books are L. R. Brown, Who Will Feed China? (New York: Norton, 1995); M. B. McElroy, C. P. Nielson, and P. Lydon, eds., Energizing China: Reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); J. Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); D. Zweig, Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). For an English-language translation of a book originally published in Chinese, see Qu Geping and Li Jinchang, Population and Environment in China (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1994).

  Chapter 13

  A deservedly acclaimed account of the early history of the British colonies in Australia from their origins in 1788 into the 19th century is Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Knopf, 1987). Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Chatsworth, New South Wales: Reed, 1994) begins instead with the arrival of Aborigines over 40,000 years ago and traces their impact and that of Europeans on the Australian environment. David Horton, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000) offers a perspective different from Flannery’s.

  Three government sources provide encyclopedic accounts of Australia’s environment, economy, and soc
iety: Australian State of the Environment Committee 2001, Australia: State of the Environment 2001 (Canberra: Department of Environment and Heritage, 2001), supplemented by reports on the website http://www.ea.gov.au/soe/; its predecessor State of the Environment Advisory Committee 1996, Australia: State of the Environment 1996 (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 1996); and Dennis Trewin, 2001 Year Book Australia (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001), a Centenary of Australia’s Federation celebratory edition of a yearbook published annually since 1908.

  Two well-illustrated books by Mary E. White provide overviews of Australian environmental problems: Listen . . . Our Land Is Crying (East Roseville, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1997) and Running Down: Water in a Changing Land (East Roseville, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 2000). Tim Flannery’s “Beautiful lies: population and environment in Australia” (Quarterly Essay no. 9, 2003) is a provocative shorter overview. Salinization’s history and impacts in Australia are covered by Quentin Beresford, Hugo Bekle, Harry Phillips, and Jane Mulcock, The Salinity Crisis: Landscapes, Communities and Politics (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2001). Andrew Campbell, Landcare: Communities Shaping the Land and the Future (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1994) describes an important grassroots movement to improve land management in rural Australia.