Collapse

"Though Guns, Germs, and Steel has been a best-seller for many years, and is one of my favourites, I found Jared Diamond’s book Collapse more valuable in influencing my own thinking, because it shows the importance of culture in determining how humans deal with environmental threats. In Guns, Germs, and Steel he argued that human affairs were essentially influenced by natural forces – geography, nature and diseases – that were not of human making. He was criticised for being a geographical determinist, which I think he took to heart. When he wrote Collapse he investigated the successes and failures of a number of civilisations which had reached a crisis point, and he looked at why some had succeeded and others hadn’t. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What he sees as the cause of success or failure investigated the successes and failures of a number of civilisations which had reached a crisis point, and he looked at why some had succeeded and others hadn’t.is human culture. For example he talks about the Norse Vikings that settled in Greenland. When the climate turned colder, instead of changing their way of life and adapting to the climate in the way the Inuit or Eskimos did they carried on with their way of life based on farming and raising cattle – which spelt their doom because the climate didn’t allow it. Diamond shows that it is all about whether people are willing to be nimble in their approach to the natural world and to adapt. Although he doesn’t say this, I think it is pretty clear that he thinks humans today are facing an ecological crisis, and we either will be able to adapt and surmount it or we will collapse like other civilisations before us."

"Sure. One of the accounts that sticks in my mind is of Easter Island. Easter Island was a very sophisticated society whose physical and spiritual livelihoods depended on the island’s forests. Famously, trees were used to transport the big god heads – these big stone heavy god heads – from the interior, where the stonepits were, to the coasts where they were displayed. Trees were also used for firewood and they protected the land from soil erosion. And yet, as Diamond puts it, the last man of the island had chopped down the last tree, presumably thinking he was adding to the island’s GDP – remember GDP is a measure of a flow of income. I’m not saying this is a measurement issue, this is just a human nature matter of how societies can make catastrophic mistakes. In pursuing something or other, the islanders clearly had not looked after the natural assets that they needed to survive. In striving for something, they drove themselves off the end of a cliff. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a warning that societies can do this. We, as a human society, could do this if we’re not careful. If we stretch the earth beyond its planetary limits, we could ruin the soil, we could ruin the ocean, we could ruin the air, and we could drain the ocean of fish. He sees evidence all around that we’re doing precisely that. He sees a limit to technology to solve our problems. Clearly, that is a kind of Malthusian vision and if you’re an anti-Malthusian you would say “hang on, Malthus was saying we were all going to drive ourselves to extinction hundreds of years ago, and technology has always come to rescue”. I put this to Diamond when I interviewed him and he said that you can use energy, for example, to desalinate the ocean so that you get some drinking water in the absence of naturally available drinking water. So, you could do that – technology can come to the rescue – but you need energy to do that. Where will the energy come from? You might say the sun, but then you need to make the solar panels. He basically says that this isn’t an infinitely available solution. There are planetary boundaries. Technology is a wonderful thing, but humans need to think further and harder about how presumably very sensible and sophisticated people in the past thought they could push and push and push, and how actually their societies went from flourishing great societies to total and utter collapse, like Ozymandias. When westerners arrived in this once great and flourishing Easter Island, the insult of choice was “may your grandmother’s flesh stick in my teeth” because they had been reduced to cannibalism. This was a society that had collapsed. So basically, his message is that it happened to them and it could happen to us. So, we need to think about this. That’s right, yes. There are a lot of what I would call “experiments” going on. Remember that I spoke about gross domestic product, and there’s quite of lot of experiments to develop measures of net domestic product where you decided to take off undesirables or adjust for them. In Maryland, for example, they take off money spent on crime prevention. If you destroy a wetland then you adjust your GDP. Sure, you’ve got a shopping mall which is producing income and that counts, but now you don’t have a wetland. So, you make those adjustments. Now, these adjustments are difficult to make and I talk about all the methodologies in the book. But, yes, I think it has escaped from academia. I make my own suggestions in the end of the book. If you go back ten years, Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a report on how we might measure our world differently, how we might add to GDP at the very least, and he hired people like Stiglitz and Amartya Sen – both of whom are Nobel Prize winners – and also Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a very distinguished French economist, to go away and look at this. A book came out about this study and in the foreword of that book, Sarkozy wrote something that I thought was very interesting. He says that when people don’t see their own lives reflected in the official numbers as told to them by experts, they become angry and nothing is more dangerous to democracy than this. I think that’s very prescient. In the age of Brexit, in the age of Trump, and in the age of all sorts of things that we may struggle to understand, this provides not the whole explanation but a certain part of the explanation. We don’t see parts of our lives reflected in the official data, in the official picture as told to us by experts, so there’s a certain kind of rejection of that. Just finally, some people will say “GDP is such a good number, you will never replace it. It’s lasted this long and that’s because it’s a really good number.” I actually don’t argue that we should replace it. I argue that we should take it down a notch or two. I think that adding to it is actually not that difficult. We can add to it numbers that we already have, to which we need to give more political clout. Let’s take a number as simple as median household income which would look at the typical person. It would look at what the economy is doing for the typical household, not what the typical household can do for the economy. To me, if you were looking at median household income rather than GDP, which tells you at the very best about the average – and we know how dangerous averages are – then public policy might look very different. It might focus on those people who are now said to be so angry and felt so left out by globalisation and all these other forces like technology. So, I think that could change how we make policy. Another very simple number is healthy life expectancy. I think healthy life expectancy is better than life expectancy because, clearly, you can keep people alive a long time if you really intervene aggressively towards the end of their life. But much, much better is to intervene from early on along the life spectrum and keep people healthier for longer. This is something that the Japanese have done much better than many other societies. So, that would be a good measure. I would also argue for CO2 or some kind of proxy of what we do to the environment. It doesn’t mean we have to knit our own clothes and go back to living in caves. You could still progress as a society and you can still, I think, grow very fast but within the parameters of a finite planetary boundary. That’s absolutely true. If you have a hundred, do we want to tax twenty? Thirty? Forty? Or fifty? Do we want to be Hong Kong, America, France, or Sweden? So, it gives you the parameters. That’s absolutely true. That’s one of the ways in which it is a useful tool. I have no dispute with that whatsoever."

"I wanted to get a book on my list that is actually enjoyable to read, so not everything is quite so dry and dull as a narrative. I also wanted to include something that reflects the growing importance of environmental and ecological concerns to progressive politics in America. This is relatively new to the agenda – it’s only been in the last 30 to 35 years. But going forward, one of the most important things for progressives in the US, and all around the world, will be to prevent industrial economics from killing itself. Broadly construed, capitalism and development has been a great thing for the world. It’s inspiring to look at people in China, India and Brazil and see how much wealthier those countries are becoming. These are rays of good news in times which are pretty bleak for the US. But if you have more than six billion people living the lifestyles of contemporary Americans, that’s clearly not going to be sustainable. What Diamond shows us is that the idea of a society creating an ecological disaster that kills itself is not as crazy as it sounds. People don’t realise it, but there are many, many historical examples of this taking place. For example he tells the story of the Viking colony in Greenland, and he points out that it lasted for 400 years, which is longer than we’ve had a United States of America. The mere fact that we’ve gotten on OK for a while shouldn’t give us undue confidence that we’re not vulnerable. He’s a bit of an alarmist. Some people dispute some of the details of that, which is fine. But the historical facts he points to are striking. There are many, many examples of advanced societies moving backwards, and the reason is almost always that the political system could not manage the natural resource base correctly, which leads to different kinds of calamities. This is not exactly a risk for next year, but it’s a real and growing problem. Yes. He also shows how these things can work for a long time and then stop working. People don’t want to make major changes, which is very understandable. In particular, people don’t think they should stop doing things that they’ve been doing for a long time without there being any problem. But he shows that these things can really accumulate, that institutions can be quite bad. [Whether societies collapse or survive] is tied into how intelligent the political system and the political process is. I wish people – both as individuals and as political actors in the political system – could take the world in all its bigness more seriously. The US is a very large country in the scheme of things, but we let our people – our politicians, our citizens and our media – become very parochial at times. We don’t think about the international dimensions of our economics, or our environmental policies, or even of historical and social change. To me, that is always frustrating. Yes – and also things being bad abroad can be bad for us. It’s not just that Americans sometimes have an arrogant sense of superiority, it’s that we have a false sense of invulnerability. It matters to us what happens elsewhere in the world, as well as there being things we can learn from it."

"Well that’s what Jared Diamond explores so brilliantly in Collapse . He builds on many of the ideas that Harris explores, looking at the historical and evolutionary results of surplus: it frees people from producing food, giving rise to social hierarchies including chiefs, priests, artisans and, of course, soldiers. You can argue that producing too much has been the root of our success as a race today. But can we continue like this? Ethically, no: agricultural expansion is one of the chief reasons we’re in the middle of a period of mass species extinction. Furthermore, the way we feed ourselves is unsustainable in terms of our own future: desertification is a huge problem, up to 38 per cent of agricultural land is degraded, the UN predicts that climate change will limit productivity by mid-century, and we’re running dry, literally – in many drier countries, water now has to be mined up to 1km deep. But these aquifers will eventually run out. Diamond does show that some societies have managed to overcome such difficulties in the past, however. He cites the history of the Pacific island of Tikopia, where islanders collectively decided to slaughter all their pigs in about 1600. Why? Because there were too many people and not enough food. The point is we can learn from our mistakes, from our history."