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Finally, there is the failure to succeed in solving a problem that a society actually tries to solve. The problems may be too large, too difficult or require more resources than a society can allocate. Often, though, we fail to solve a problem because our efforts are too little and begun too late.
Australia is a case in point: it has suffered tens of billions of dollars in agricultural losses, as well as the extinction or endangerment of most of its native small mammal species, because of the introduction of European rabbits and foxes for which there was no close native counterpart in the local environment.
Foxes have been widespread over the Australian mainland for more than a century, but until recently they were absent from the island state of Tasmania, because foxes could not swim across the wide, rough seas between the mainland and Tasmania.
Unfortunately, a few years ago someone surreptitiously and illegally released 32 foxes on the island – perhaps for their foxhunting pleasure or to spite environmentalists. Those foxes now represent a large threat to Tasmania's lamb and chicken farmers, as well as the island's native wildlife.
When local environmentalists became aware of the fox problem about March 2002, they urged the state government to exterminate the creatures quickly, before the fox-breeding season began in July. Once those 32 foxes had produced litters and those litters had dispersed, the interlopers would be far more difficult to eradicate.
Unfortunately, the state government debated and delayed. In June, it finally committed funds to eliminating the foxes. A golden opportunity was missed, and now the foxes are in danger of displacing the Tasmanian devil, found exclusively on the island and the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world.
Meanwhile, the devil population is now being ravaged by a mysterious facial-tumour disease, which has triggered a dramatic collapse of the animal's population – and created an ecological niche for the foxes. The combination raises the real possibility that the Tasmanian devil may become extinct.
HUMAN SOCIETIES and even smaller groups – cities, corporations, governments – all can make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.
It may sound pessimistic, as if failure is the rule in human decision-making. That is not always the case, and many human societies have survived and prospered against huge odds because they have anticipated, perceived, tried to solve, or succeeded in solving their environmental problems.
The Inca Empire, 18th-century Japan, 19th-century Germany, the New Guinea Highlanders, and the paramount chiefdom of Tonga – all of these groups and societies recognised the risks that they faced from deforestation, and all adopted successful reforestation or forest-management policies.
Understanding the reasons for the failure and collapse of different societies is essential to making successful decisions for our own. If we understand the reasons why societies make bad decisions, we can use that knowledge as a check list to help make good decisions. We may also become more conscious of how others have failed, and of what we need to do in order to get it right.
Jared Diamond is a renowned evolutionary biologist and a professor of geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, his most recent book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, published by Penguin. This is an extract of his Lewis Thomas Prize Lecture delivered at New York's Rockefeller Institute in March 2003.
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