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Review: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (2005)
I'd read Guns, Germs, and Steel a while back and enjoyed it for how it attempted to look at history on such a high level. I was looking for something to read and found Jared Diamond's book Collapse.
While Guns, Germs, and Steel was largely about how civilizations rose to power, Collapse was about how civilizations waned and fell.
Spoilers, I guess?
My reviews for non-fiction books are usually less robust because they don't necessarily follow a story or a narrative, so I apologize in advance. For my reviews of non-fiction media, I tend to just focus on the points that I found interesting.
I can't help but compare the writing of this book to Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS), seeing as that was my introduction to Diamond's writing. The structure of GGS was much different from the structure of Collapse. In particular, I felt that GGS had a lot more range when analyzing traits, habits, and systems implemented in civilizations.
Focus on environment
For almost all of the examples brought up in Collapse, their collapses boiled down to a lack of environmental awareness. The importance of trees was emphasized again and again, which makes sense considering the versatility of wood for the average person (i.e. it was probably easier for the average human to make tools out of wood than metals).
I was personally hoping for more social analysis, with regards to behaviours of people from certain cultures, or governing structures. Diamond did cover the political structures. For instance, he brought up the governing structures of Tikopia. However, he still tied it back to environmental effects, such as Tikopia's zero population growth policy.
In the Greenland example, Diamond brought up the Norse's mindset and inabilitiy to adapt to living in the cold weather like the Inuit, but I think that was the only example that stood out in my mind.
Most of Diamond's examples boiled down to "take care of the environment and your society will prosper too." I thought that this was Diamond's conclusion, but then he went on to write about various industries and their conservation and environmental practices. This structure was a little surprising, but I did see the value in communicating what he'd found out about business practices because I did find that my perspective on these industries changed a bit.
I felt that the last few chapters were more interesting to me, because they analyzed human and group behaviour in the context of environmental awareness, and how humans tried or didn't try to protect their environments, which would ultimately lead to the success or demise of their societies as a whole.
I personally am trying to be more environmentally conscious, and so I recognize the importance of what Diamond is trying to do. By connecting all of his points back to the environment, he is emphasizing the importance of the environment to societies and everybody living in them. However, I would've liked to see more analysis relating to governance structures, as well as how human habits (consumption habits, working habits, etc.) led to collapses.
Handling of problems
As I mentioned above, I was far more interested by the analyses of human behaviour. The "map" that Diamond drew in chapter 14 was especially interesting to me. Diamond outlined a few of the main events in how humans could "let" collapses happen.
(1) The first was a failure to anticipate a problem. This is probably the easiest to understand. It's difficult for us to see a problem especially when we're experiencing something for the first time. For instance, social media was supposed to be this new cool communication tool. However, it was less obvious to the masses that it would lead to increases in bullying, poor mental health, etc.
(2) The second step was that people fail to notice that a problem has already arrived.
(2a) The first reason is that some problems are imperceptible. What Diamond describes is when a problem occurs, but the cause of it is not apparent. The example he uses is relating to poor farmland. The poor quality of the farmland was due to human farming habits exhausting the nutrients, and so later farmers had much more trouble farming on the same land. So the problem is that the farmland is infertile, but it wasn't apparent to the farmers that this was caused by humans.
(2b) The second reason is due to distant managers. Basically if a manager has a hands-off approach to managing, sometimes they may not notice a problem until it's already too late. The manager themselves may have the expertise to detect a problem in its early stages, but the same cannot necessarily be said for their "sub-managers," those who are closer to the actual event.
(2c) The third reason is the more obvious one, which is that it's difficult to perceive a problem when it happens over time, and is "concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." The biggest example of this is global warming. It's hard to recognize a problem when change is very gradual. A good example that Diamond brought up was related to the Pacific Islanders who cut down too many trees. To the youngster who cut down the last tree, a landscape with few trees might've already been something they were used to. Only the elders would have known what the land was like when it was filled with trees. We fail to realize that memories are lost as the generations go by, and we only recognize that there's a change when we take into account a grander length of time.
(3) The third step on the map was that people don't even try to solve a problem when they realize that there is one. Diamond argued that the biggest reason of this was "tragedy of the commons," nimbyism, or whatever you want to call it. People only worry for their own well-being, even if it is to the detriment of everyone around them. I'm not going to say too much about this because I could go on all day about it. There is no doubt that this mindset (arguably one of the pillars of the modern capitalist society) is the most prevalent in today's world, and is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get everyone on board with respecting the environment.
Diamond also included a very interesting analysis of how people deal with problems. An example he brought up was of a unstable dam. The further people lived from the dam (i.e. downstream), the less they worried about it. Those who lived closer to the dam were probably more likely to see how unsteady the dam was. This makes sense. However, those who lived directly under the dam didn't seem to show any worry at all. If the dam were to fall apart, those people would undoubtedly be hit the hardest. They had to adopt an attitude of denial in order to deal with this danger. I had never considered that those closest to a problem would adopt denial to cope, but it does make sense.
Resource industries
Diamond used examples from history to highlight to the reader how important the environment was to the well-being of a society. After presenting his examples and coming to a soft conclusion, Diamond went on to discuss his research on various resource industries. In particular, he studied mining, coal, oil, fishing, and lumber industries.
I was rather surprised by this part of the book. I had always associated coal, mining, and oil industries with murky-looking sites, and no chance of any greenery ever sprouting again in those locations. However, it seems that Diamond was trying to argue that it is very possible, with sufficient financial resources, for companies to restore the lands they have used. Not necessarily back to perfection, but to a better level than what we're seeing right now.
Diamond's discussion raised an interesting point. Right now, the regulations with regards to cleanup costs are far too lax. Companies are not held accountable when they don't do the necessary work to clean up after they've extracted resources from the environment. In addition, the actual cleanup costs are much higher than what companies often pledge, which leads to poor cleanup efforts all around. Therefore, Diamond implies that regulatory bodies need to be more strict in this regard, ensuring companies clean up, and raising the benchmark for what's usually recorded as a financial obligation for clean up.
Spending capital vs. earnings
Diamond stated that "spending capital should not be misrepresented as making money." This sentence makes sense in a financial sense, of course. Selling things that your factory creates is making money, but selling the equipment in the factory is not making money.
This also makes sense in an environmental context. For example, if we take the fishing business, catching all of the fish to extinction earns you money, but you have no more fish that will breed with each other and create more fish to catch in the future.
Decline of societies
Diamond noticed that the decline of societies tended to follow soon after those societies had reached their peaks. To me, this meant that those peaks were actually unsustainable. So I think when people, businesses, etc. are doing very well, we should step back and consider whether what we're doing is sustainable in the long run.
In recent years, I think we've seen more business models that are very short-lived. For example, a start up will gain traction, become very successful, and then soon be bought out by a mega-corporation. It seems that a lot of things nowadays from organizations to consumer products, are designed for short lives. That is why becoming a sustainable society is currently so difficult. So much of what is inside our societies are just not designed for that life.
First alarm
Diamond argued that some crises don't seem so bad because after an initial alarm, measures are already taken to stop the problem from becoming worse. He argues that that's why some people claim that a problem isn't as bad as it seems.
While this stance is rather defensive, I do see where he's coming from, and I think this helped me better understand the mindset of some people who live in denial of certain issues.
Trading
Developed and developing nations trade with one another all the time. One intangible thing that is traded is environmental effects. Developed nations may be misled to believe that their environments are very well protected, but are actually inflicting damage upon other environments. One such example were Japanese forests. Japan had implemented measures to maintain their forests. However, they are a huge importer of wood from other nations whose forests are at risk of irreparable damage. In this way, people from developed countries are led to believe that everything is fine for them, because their environmental impact is not caused in their local vicinity.
Taking bold action
Unlike GGS, Collapse ends with a very apparent call to action. Diamond is on the fence between feeling pessimistic and optimistic. This entire book was rather pessimistic, since Diamond was specifically looking at the cases of failed societies. I felt that Diamond's call to action was rather bold. He praised some of the bold but possibly controversial actions that world leaders had taken in an attempt to solve some environmental problems.
His call to action especially struck me because I had never heard anybody recognizing the Chinese one-child policy for what it tried to do, which was to curb the population growth to maintain a managable balance between population and resources. In most cases, I've only ever seen the one-child policy being discussed for its negative side effects. I'm not saying that I support the side effects AT ALL. I'm just acknowledging that family planning is an important issue that should be addressed. No one knew whether the one-child policy would work. Now that it's been tested, we have data to work from, and it's important to use this data to continue developing effective family planning strategies for various societies.
Speaking of bold action, I was reminded by the situation in Iceland that Diamond had presented. Iceland had run into environmental issues of its own. As a result, Iceland has developed a very conservative stance when it comes to environmental issues. Over the years, it had understood that sometimes it had to forgo some things (even human lives) if it meant a 100% chance that at least some of them would continue living. This is also in line with the Tikopian zero population growth policy, in which some people have resorted to suicide or other cruel means in order to keep the population steady. While these may be considered bold by our standards, I wonder if they'd be considered normal by their own cultures, or in another time in the future.
Standards of living
Diamond acknowledge that it would be extremely difficult to get people to lower their standard of living, especially people who currently live in the most advanced socities. I was very glad that Diamond brought this up.
Actually, this reminded me a bit of Thanos from Endgame. Thanos realized that as long as people knew what they'd lost, they'd never be happy. In a similar vein (sort of), it's going to be hard to get people to give up conveniences en masse. In fact, I think many societies are now structured in a way that it's very difficult to give up these conveniences. For example, I live a 45 minute drive from my workplace. If I took public transit or biked, it would take me a lot more time.
Diamond insists that this standard of living can be kept if industries were better managed. I'm a bit skeptical of this statement seeing as how Diamond spent the entire book convincing us that things weren't well managed. I think we'd have to live in a radically overhauled society in order to have this utopia of high standard of living and sustainable resources that Diamond claims is possible.
Overall
This book went in a different direction than what I'd expected, but I think it's still an interesting take on the subject matter. I might not necessarily recommend it for history fans (as I would Guns, Germs, and Steel), but I think I'd recommend it to people who are interested in environmentalism.
While Guns, Germs, and Steel was largely about how civilizations rose to power, Collapse was about how civilizations waned and fell.
Spoilers, I guess?
My reviews for non-fiction books are usually less robust because they don't necessarily follow a story or a narrative, so I apologize in advance. For my reviews of non-fiction media, I tend to just focus on the points that I found interesting.
I can't help but compare the writing of this book to Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS), seeing as that was my introduction to Diamond's writing. The structure of GGS was much different from the structure of Collapse. In particular, I felt that GGS had a lot more range when analyzing traits, habits, and systems implemented in civilizations.
Focus on environment
For almost all of the examples brought up in Collapse, their collapses boiled down to a lack of environmental awareness. The importance of trees was emphasized again and again, which makes sense considering the versatility of wood for the average person (i.e. it was probably easier for the average human to make tools out of wood than metals).
I was personally hoping for more social analysis, with regards to behaviours of people from certain cultures, or governing structures. Diamond did cover the political structures. For instance, he brought up the governing structures of Tikopia. However, he still tied it back to environmental effects, such as Tikopia's zero population growth policy.
In the Greenland example, Diamond brought up the Norse's mindset and inabilitiy to adapt to living in the cold weather like the Inuit, but I think that was the only example that stood out in my mind.
Most of Diamond's examples boiled down to "take care of the environment and your society will prosper too." I thought that this was Diamond's conclusion, but then he went on to write about various industries and their conservation and environmental practices. This structure was a little surprising, but I did see the value in communicating what he'd found out about business practices because I did find that my perspective on these industries changed a bit.
I felt that the last few chapters were more interesting to me, because they analyzed human and group behaviour in the context of environmental awareness, and how humans tried or didn't try to protect their environments, which would ultimately lead to the success or demise of their societies as a whole.
I personally am trying to be more environmentally conscious, and so I recognize the importance of what Diamond is trying to do. By connecting all of his points back to the environment, he is emphasizing the importance of the environment to societies and everybody living in them. However, I would've liked to see more analysis relating to governance structures, as well as how human habits (consumption habits, working habits, etc.) led to collapses.
Handling of problems
As I mentioned above, I was far more interested by the analyses of human behaviour. The "map" that Diamond drew in chapter 14 was especially interesting to me. Diamond outlined a few of the main events in how humans could "let" collapses happen.
(1) The first was a failure to anticipate a problem. This is probably the easiest to understand. It's difficult for us to see a problem especially when we're experiencing something for the first time. For instance, social media was supposed to be this new cool communication tool. However, it was less obvious to the masses that it would lead to increases in bullying, poor mental health, etc.
(2) The second step was that people fail to notice that a problem has already arrived.
(2a) The first reason is that some problems are imperceptible. What Diamond describes is when a problem occurs, but the cause of it is not apparent. The example he uses is relating to poor farmland. The poor quality of the farmland was due to human farming habits exhausting the nutrients, and so later farmers had much more trouble farming on the same land. So the problem is that the farmland is infertile, but it wasn't apparent to the farmers that this was caused by humans.
(2b) The second reason is due to distant managers. Basically if a manager has a hands-off approach to managing, sometimes they may not notice a problem until it's already too late. The manager themselves may have the expertise to detect a problem in its early stages, but the same cannot necessarily be said for their "sub-managers," those who are closer to the actual event.
(2c) The third reason is the more obvious one, which is that it's difficult to perceive a problem when it happens over time, and is "concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." The biggest example of this is global warming. It's hard to recognize a problem when change is very gradual. A good example that Diamond brought up was related to the Pacific Islanders who cut down too many trees. To the youngster who cut down the last tree, a landscape with few trees might've already been something they were used to. Only the elders would have known what the land was like when it was filled with trees. We fail to realize that memories are lost as the generations go by, and we only recognize that there's a change when we take into account a grander length of time.
(3) The third step on the map was that people don't even try to solve a problem when they realize that there is one. Diamond argued that the biggest reason of this was "tragedy of the commons," nimbyism, or whatever you want to call it. People only worry for their own well-being, even if it is to the detriment of everyone around them. I'm not going to say too much about this because I could go on all day about it. There is no doubt that this mindset (arguably one of the pillars of the modern capitalist society) is the most prevalent in today's world, and is one of the reasons it is so difficult to get everyone on board with respecting the environment.
Diamond also included a very interesting analysis of how people deal with problems. An example he brought up was of a unstable dam. The further people lived from the dam (i.e. downstream), the less they worried about it. Those who lived closer to the dam were probably more likely to see how unsteady the dam was. This makes sense. However, those who lived directly under the dam didn't seem to show any worry at all. If the dam were to fall apart, those people would undoubtedly be hit the hardest. They had to adopt an attitude of denial in order to deal with this danger. I had never considered that those closest to a problem would adopt denial to cope, but it does make sense.
Resource industries
Diamond used examples from history to highlight to the reader how important the environment was to the well-being of a society. After presenting his examples and coming to a soft conclusion, Diamond went on to discuss his research on various resource industries. In particular, he studied mining, coal, oil, fishing, and lumber industries.
I was rather surprised by this part of the book. I had always associated coal, mining, and oil industries with murky-looking sites, and no chance of any greenery ever sprouting again in those locations. However, it seems that Diamond was trying to argue that it is very possible, with sufficient financial resources, for companies to restore the lands they have used. Not necessarily back to perfection, but to a better level than what we're seeing right now.
Diamond's discussion raised an interesting point. Right now, the regulations with regards to cleanup costs are far too lax. Companies are not held accountable when they don't do the necessary work to clean up after they've extracted resources from the environment. In addition, the actual cleanup costs are much higher than what companies often pledge, which leads to poor cleanup efforts all around. Therefore, Diamond implies that regulatory bodies need to be more strict in this regard, ensuring companies clean up, and raising the benchmark for what's usually recorded as a financial obligation for clean up.
Spending capital vs. earnings
Diamond stated that "spending capital should not be misrepresented as making money." This sentence makes sense in a financial sense, of course. Selling things that your factory creates is making money, but selling the equipment in the factory is not making money.
This also makes sense in an environmental context. For example, if we take the fishing business, catching all of the fish to extinction earns you money, but you have no more fish that will breed with each other and create more fish to catch in the future.
Decline of societies
Diamond noticed that the decline of societies tended to follow soon after those societies had reached their peaks. To me, this meant that those peaks were actually unsustainable. So I think when people, businesses, etc. are doing very well, we should step back and consider whether what we're doing is sustainable in the long run.
In recent years, I think we've seen more business models that are very short-lived. For example, a start up will gain traction, become very successful, and then soon be bought out by a mega-corporation. It seems that a lot of things nowadays from organizations to consumer products, are designed for short lives. That is why becoming a sustainable society is currently so difficult. So much of what is inside our societies are just not designed for that life.
First alarm
Diamond argued that some crises don't seem so bad because after an initial alarm, measures are already taken to stop the problem from becoming worse. He argues that that's why some people claim that a problem isn't as bad as it seems.
While this stance is rather defensive, I do see where he's coming from, and I think this helped me better understand the mindset of some people who live in denial of certain issues.
Trading
Developed and developing nations trade with one another all the time. One intangible thing that is traded is environmental effects. Developed nations may be misled to believe that their environments are very well protected, but are actually inflicting damage upon other environments. One such example were Japanese forests. Japan had implemented measures to maintain their forests. However, they are a huge importer of wood from other nations whose forests are at risk of irreparable damage. In this way, people from developed countries are led to believe that everything is fine for them, because their environmental impact is not caused in their local vicinity.
Taking bold action
Unlike GGS, Collapse ends with a very apparent call to action. Diamond is on the fence between feeling pessimistic and optimistic. This entire book was rather pessimistic, since Diamond was specifically looking at the cases of failed societies. I felt that Diamond's call to action was rather bold. He praised some of the bold but possibly controversial actions that world leaders had taken in an attempt to solve some environmental problems.
His call to action especially struck me because I had never heard anybody recognizing the Chinese one-child policy for what it tried to do, which was to curb the population growth to maintain a managable balance between population and resources. In most cases, I've only ever seen the one-child policy being discussed for its negative side effects. I'm not saying that I support the side effects AT ALL. I'm just acknowledging that family planning is an important issue that should be addressed. No one knew whether the one-child policy would work. Now that it's been tested, we have data to work from, and it's important to use this data to continue developing effective family planning strategies for various societies.
Speaking of bold action, I was reminded by the situation in Iceland that Diamond had presented. Iceland had run into environmental issues of its own. As a result, Iceland has developed a very conservative stance when it comes to environmental issues. Over the years, it had understood that sometimes it had to forgo some things (even human lives) if it meant a 100% chance that at least some of them would continue living. This is also in line with the Tikopian zero population growth policy, in which some people have resorted to suicide or other cruel means in order to keep the population steady. While these may be considered bold by our standards, I wonder if they'd be considered normal by their own cultures, or in another time in the future.
Standards of living
Diamond acknowledge that it would be extremely difficult to get people to lower their standard of living, especially people who currently live in the most advanced socities. I was very glad that Diamond brought this up.
Actually, this reminded me a bit of Thanos from Endgame. Thanos realized that as long as people knew what they'd lost, they'd never be happy. In a similar vein (sort of), it's going to be hard to get people to give up conveniences en masse. In fact, I think many societies are now structured in a way that it's very difficult to give up these conveniences. For example, I live a 45 minute drive from my workplace. If I took public transit or biked, it would take me a lot more time.
Diamond insists that this standard of living can be kept if industries were better managed. I'm a bit skeptical of this statement seeing as how Diamond spent the entire book convincing us that things weren't well managed. I think we'd have to live in a radically overhauled society in order to have this utopia of high standard of living and sustainable resources that Diamond claims is possible.
Overall
This book went in a different direction than what I'd expected, but I think it's still an interesting take on the subject matter. I might not necessarily recommend it for history fans (as I would Guns, Germs, and Steel), but I think I'd recommend it to people who are interested in environmentalism.