Credit: iStockphoto
WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES COLLAPSE while others survive? History is replete with examples of complex civilisations that have nevertheless fallen: the Anasazi of the U.S. south-west, the Maya in Mexico's Yucatan, Easter Island in the Pacific, Angkor Wat in Southeast Asia, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, the Fertile Crescent societies of the Middle East, and the Harappan in the Indus Valley.
These are all societies that destroyed their environments and ultimately themselves, in part by undermining the natural resources on which they depended.
Take the Easter Islanders, a Polynesian people who settled an island that was originally forested, and whose forests included the world's largest palm tree. Over centuries, they gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues and carving, and also to protect against soil erosion.
Eventually they chopped down all the forests, which meant they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 per cent of the islanders dead.
When I tell this story to my students at the University of California in Los Angeles, where I teach, the question that most intrigues them is one that hadn't registered to me: how could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which they depend?
What did Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, "Think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees?" Were they saying, "Respect my private property rights?" Surely Easter Islanders must have realised the consequences of destroying their forest. One wonders whether people of the next century – if there are still people alive – will be equally astonished about our blindness today.
It's a question that astonishes historians too. The most cited book about the collapse of societies is by Joseph Tainter, entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies. In discussing ancient collapses, Tainter rejected the possibility that they might be due to environmental mismanagement because it seemed so unlikely to him.
He argued it was "reasonable to assume" that as resources dwindled, the leadership caste of a complex society would take rational steps to resolve the problem, saying "…Dealing with adverse environmental conditions may be one of the things that complex societies do best". Tainter concluded that the collapses of ancient societies couldn't be due to environmental mismanagement, because they would never make such bad mistakes.
Yet, it's now clear that these societies did make woeful mistakes. Both Tainter and my undergraduates have identified an intriguing phenomenon: the failure of group decision-making by whole societies, or governments, or smaller groups, or businesses.
It's similar to failures in individual decision-making: people make bad decisions – they enter bad marriages, make bad investments, and their businesses fail. But societies are more complex than individuals, and there's no easy answer to why they fail. However, I think there's a road map of factors that can identify when a society, or a group, is staring failure in the face.
First, a group may fail to anticipate the arrival of a problem. Second, the group may fail to perceive it when it arrives. Third, having recognised it, they fail even to try to find a solution. Finally, they may try to solve the problem but ultimately fail.
Societies may do disastrous things because they didn't anticipate a problem before it arrives. They may have no prior experience of such problems, and are therefore ignorant of the potential threat. Consider forest fires in the U.S. west: my family and I spend part of our summers in Montana, and each year when we fly in, I look out of the window to see how many forest fires I can see.
Forest fires are large and widespread in the mountainous U.S. west; such large fires are unknown in the eastern U.S. and Europe. When settlers from the east and Europe arrived in Montana and a fire arose, their reaction was, of course, to try and put it out. They had had no previous experience of fires in a dry environment, where trees that fall into the understorey don't rot away as they do in wet Europe and the eastern U.S., but accumulate on the forest floor as 'fuel'.
Australians live in a similar dry environment. They've known for years that frequent small fires burn off the fuel load; if you suppress those small fires, when a fire eventually starts, it may burn disastrously out of control. The best way to deal with fires in dry forests is to let them burn, and burn out; that way there's no build-up of fuel to feed a wildfire.
But the new arrivals had no prior experience with huge forest fires, and the idea of allowing a fire to burn was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service 100 years to realise the problem and change strategy. A society has to recognise the problem before it can deal with it.
great article sir
Mr. Diamond,
Thank you for such a great article. I believe you are very accurate in your conclusion that since we became a civilized society (or so the records show) we have had a ruling elite that has used the land and the common people as a resource and they have extracted every molecule of wealth and power from those resources and not cared about the consequences.
I hope that someday our species will evolve to a level where we don't live like this.
kmichaels
Loggers in the USA continue to plant more trees than they chop down. I guess we learned. Liberals however are running short of illegal drugs, and have to import them.
Failure of society
Although all of Jarod's reasons for failure of society are valid - of particular importance in todays society is the rich elite who manage to insulate themselves from the rest of society and make some very selfish and short sighted decisions (viz American oil politics) instead of instigating long term plans for an electricity based sustainable solar-thermal/geo-thermal future.
One particular area that he did not mention, and is of major significance with respect to the failure of society, is natural catastrophic events. Ice cores and tree ring analysis are showing some major interruptions in solar radiation and precipitation throughout the history of man. Volcanic ash mixed with iridium in ice cores shows that meteors appear to have precipitated volcanic eruptions, blackening the atmosphere and causing some major earth dimming events, causing drought and famine. This along with meteor strikes in the ocean producing tsunamis, (such meteor strikes are now being found to be far more common than previously thought), would also have caused some major interruptions in the development of society - especially amongst the seafaring nations of the world. Our ignorance of the seafaring capability of previous civilizations over the last 20,000 years is testimony to such societies being repeatedly erased from the history books by such events.
Peter Marsh
www.polynesian-prehistory.com
Natural disaster possibility
A friend who specialises in Oceanography, particularly the study of under sea volcanoes,has an alternative hypothesis for the demise of the people of Rapa Nui, more in line with Peter Marsh's comments.
His idea is that the sudden disappearance of dolphin bones and other evidence of seafood in middens is not due to the islanders running out of wood by cutting the last tree and being unable to fish. Instead, the sudden interruption of an undersea fumarole close to the island could have stopped the churning of water layers with a sudden drop in ocean fertility near the island. This would cause a sudden drop in available seafood and require fishing trips to be made farther from the island, an inefficient and more hazardous endeavour.
It is the collapse of fish stocks that led to a break down in society in which destructive acts like cutting the last tree makes more sense. This still fits with Jared's ideas of a combination of man made and natural events that diminished the environment and lead to societal collapse. Perhaps in the case of Easter Islanders, they were less foolhardy and more victim of natural events than is hinted at in this article and in Collapse.
Michael G
When planting new trees
When planting new trees after clearcutting it doesn't mean to preserve the forest or to exploit it in a healthy and sustainable way.
Civilisations: why they fail
No spell check? try civili"Z"ations
Both ways are correct.
There's a difference between British and American English. We use British.