Monday night on PBS, a brand-new, three-part National Geographic series titled Guns, Germs, and Steel premieres. Based on Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the lecture explores the reasons why some civilizations have advanced more quickly than others.
The lecture starts in Papua New Guinea and then follows University of California, Los Angeles geography professor Diamond on his journey to the Fertile Crescent and throughout the world to find the source of political and economic inequality.
His response? Geographical. Certain civilizations were able to surpass others in the development of technology and social structures because they flourished in areas that were conducive to agriculture.
In the past, germs also caused the extinction of some populations by spreading illnesses to which others were resistant. According to Diamond, this is how Eurasians got to rule the planet.
Diamond released a book this year that examines the fall of civilizations. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed looks at a number of lost societies, including the Anasazi, the Mayans, Easter Island, and the Greenland Vikings. He starts this historical investigation on a Montana farm, a location considerably less exotic than New Guinea.
This passage is taken from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed's prologue.
A Story of Two Farms: Two farms; historical and current collapses
I visited two dairy farms a few summers ago, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, and although though they were hundreds of miles away, their strengths and weaknesses were very similar. Both farms were the biggest, wealthiest, and most technologically sophisticated in their respective areas. Specifically, the focal point of each was an opulent, cutting-edge barn used for housing and milking cows. Those buildings dwarfed all the other barns in the region, neatly organized into rows of cow stalls facing each other. Both farms generated their own hay to harvest in late summer to feed the cows through the winter, and by irrigating their fields, they enhanced their output of summer fodder and winter hay. During the summer, they let their cows graze outside in lush meadows. The two farms were comparable in size (a few square miles) and had somewhat larger barns (200 vs. 165 cows, respectively) at Huls Barn. Both farms' proprietors were regarded as influential figures in their communities. The owners were devout Christians. With backgrounds of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teeming with fish and descending down to a renowned river (below Huls Farm) or 3ord (below Gardar Farm), both farms are situated in breathtaking natural settings that draw travelers from far and wide.
These were the areas where the two farms were similar. Regarding their common weaknesses, they were both located in regions that were economically marginal for dairy farming due to their high northern latitudes, which resulted in a short summer growing season for pasture grass and hay production. Both farms were vulnerable to the effects of climate change since their climates were therefore less ideal, even in good years, than dairy farms at lower latitudes; in the regions of Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, respectively, the major problems were drought and cold. Due to their far locations from population centers where they might promote their goods, both districts were at a competitive disadvantage when compared to more centrally situated districts due to the high cost of transportation and associated risks. The shifting wealth and preferences of their neighbors and patrons, for example, were beyond the owners' control and held the economics of both farms in contempt. Larger-scale fluctuations in the danger level from distant adversary cultures affected the growth and decline of the economy of the nations where both farms were located.
The present state of Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is the primary distinction between the two. Located in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana's western U.S. state, Huls Farm is a family-run business owned by five brothers and their spouses. The county where Huls Farm is located, Ravalli, has one of the fastest rates of population development in the country. The proprietors of Huls Farm, Dan, Trudy, and Tim Huls, gave me a tour of their state-of-the-art new barn and carefully described to me the highs and lows of dairy farming in Montana. That Huls Farm in particular and the United States as a whole would collapse in the near future is unthinkable. However, more than 500 years ago, the Norse bishop of southwest Greenland abandoned Gardar property, their manor property. The Norse civilization of Greenland came to an end when many of its people starved to death, were slain in battle or in civil strife, or fled, leaving no trace of their existence. There's no owner here to tell me about the ups and downs of Gardar's past, but the sturdy stone walls of the barn and the surrounding Gardar Cathedral remain intact, allowing me to count the individual cow stalls. However, during the height of Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, their collapse seemed as unbelievable as that of Huls Farm and the United States of America today.
To be clear, I'm not saying that American society and Huls Farm are destined to fail by drawing these comparisons between Huls and Gardar Farms. In actuality, the situation is completely reversed: Huls Farm is now growing, its cutting-edge new technology is being examined for possible adoption by other farmers, and the United States is currently the most powerful nation in the world. Furthermore, I'm not saying that farms or communities in general are prone to failing; in fact, some have persevered for thousands of years, while others, like Gardar, have fallen apart. Rather, my visits to Huls and Gardar Farms, which are thousands of miles away but were made in the same summer, strongly reinforced for me the idea that contemporary civilizations, even the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated, are confronted with mounting environmental and economic challenges that are not to be taken lightly. Many of our issues are essentially the same as those that threatened Norse Greenland and Gardar Farm, and that many other historical organizations likewise found difficult to resolve. Certain historical groups, like the Greenland Norse, perished, while others, like the Japanese and Tikopians, flourished. We have access to a wealth of knowledge from the past that will help us continue to prosper.
Norse Greenland is merely one of many historical societies that either completely collapsed or disappeared, leaving behind colossal ruins akin to those that Shelley conjured up in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a sharp decline in the number of people on Earth and/or in the complexity of their political, economic, and social systems, over a sizable region, over a prolonged period of time. Collapses are thus an extreme version of multiple lesser forms of decline, and the degree to which a society's fall must be severe in order for it to be classified as a collapse becomes arbitrary. A few of those milder forms of decline are the typical ups and downs in a society's fortunes, as well as small-scale changes to its political, economic, and social structures; the conquest of a nearby society by another, or the decline of one society correlated with the rise of the neighbor, without affecting the region's overall population size or complexity; and the replacement or overthrow of one ruling elite by another. The Anasazi and Cahokia within the borders of the modern United States, the Maya cities in Central America, the Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean would all be regarded by most as famous victims of full-fledged collapses by those standards, rather than of just minor declines.
We are all romantically fascinated by the colossal remnants of those ancient cultures. When we first learn about them as youngsters via photographs, we are in awe of them. Many of us arrange trips when we're older to visit them as tourists and get personal experience. We are captivated to both their secrets and their sometimes breathtaking and eerie beauty. The scales of the ruins, in Shelley's words, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" attest to the past riches and might of their creators. However, the builders disappeared, leaving behind the magnificent constructions they had worked so hard to make. How did such a powerful civilization come to an end? What happened to each of its residents individually? Did they leave, and if so, why, or did they pass away in a terrible manner there? Beneath this picturesque enigma is the persistent question: may our affluent culture ultimately suffer from the same fate? Will visitors look in disbelief at the rusty remains of New York's skyscrapers in the same way as they do at the remnants of Maya civilizations covered in jungles someday?
Many of those enigmatic abandonments have long been considered to have been caused, at least in part, by ecological issues—people unintentionally depleting the natural resources that their society relied on. Archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists) have all unearthed findings in recent decades that support the theory that this unintentional ecological suicide, or ecocide, occurred. Eight categories—whose relative importance varies depending on the circumstances—describe the ways in which past societies have damaged their environments and thus undermined themselves: habitat destruction and deforestation; soil issues (erosion, salinization, and loss of soil fertility); water management issues; excessive hunting and fishing; effects of introduced species on native species; growing human population; and increased per-capita impact of people.
The previous collapses had a tendency to take fairly similar paths, essentially acting as variants on a theme. In order to feed the expanding number of hungry mouths, population increase led people to use enhanced ways of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing) and to extend farming beyond the prime areas initially selected onto more marginal territory. Unsustainable practices forced the abandonment of agriculturally marginal areas once again because they caused environmental harm of one or more of the eight categories already mentioned. Food shortages, famine, conflicts between too many people vying for too little resources, and the overthrow of the ruling class by disgruntled masses were among the social consequences. Eventually, famine, sickness, or conflict caused a decline in population, and society lost part of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that had grown during its height. It is tempting for writers to make comparisons between the trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives. They may discuss the birth, growth, peak, senescence, and death of a society and assume that it experiences the same protracted period of senescence that most people do between their peak years and death. However, that image turns out to be inaccurate for many historical civilizations (including the Soviet Union of today) since these nations experienced fast falls after reaching their peaks in terms of population and power, which must have shocked and surprised their residents. In the darkest scenarios of total collapse, all members of the civilization either perished or fled. It is evident, however, that not all previous civilizations followed this bleak path to the end: many societies disintegrated without any signs of failure, while others failed to differing degrees and in slightly diverse ways.
Concern about the possibility of such collapses is growing these days; in fact, breakdowns have already occurred in Rwanda, Somalia, and a few other Third World nations. Many believe that the danger to world civilization posed by ecocide has surpassed that of nuclear war and developing illnesses. The eight environmental issues that have historically brought down civilizations are still present now, along with four additional ones: climate change brought on by humans, the accumulation of hazardous substances in the environment, energy scarcity, and the complete human exploitation of the Earth's photosynthetic potential. It's said that during the next several decades, the most of these 12 challenges will become critically important on a global scale; if we don't find solutions by then, the issues would not just threaten Somalia but also First World countries. It is much more plausible that "just" a future of markedly reduced living standards, persistently increasing hazards, and the weakening of what we currently consider some of our core values would occur than a doomsday scenario including the extinction of humans or the catastrophic collapse of industrial society. A collapse of this kind might take many different forms, such the global spread of illnesses or the eventual outbreak of conflicts brought on by a lack of natural resources. If this logic holds true, the world in which the present generation of kids and young people spends their middle and later years will be shaped by the work we do now. However, there is a lot of disagreement about how severe these present environmental issues are. Are the hazards significantly overstated or, on the other hand, understated? Does it make sense that, compared to the few million people who used stone and wooden tools to make the environment collapse locally in the past, our planet's environment is collapsing worldwide at a far faster pace due to the almost seven billion people on the planet now and our powerful modern technology? Will the technology of today be able to solve our issues, or is it creating new ones more quickly than it can address the old ones? Can we rely on being able to replace a depleted resource (like wood, oil, or ocean fish) with a new one (like plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)?
Isn't the pace of increase in the human population diminishing, meaning that we are already headed toward a sustainable population peak?
These inquiries all point to the reason behind the significance that these well-known historical civilization collapses have acquired beyond that of a charming enigma. From all those previous collapses, maybe we may draw some useful conclusions. It is known that certain historical civilizations fell apart while others survived. What factors made some cultures particularly vulnerable? What precise mechanisms did earlier cultures use to conduct ecocide? Why, one would believe in hindsight, were some earlier cultures unable to see the disaster they were putting themselves into? Which were the previous successful solutions? Without having to wait for future collapses like to Somalia, we may be able to determine which cultures are now most vulnerable and what steps should be taken to support them.
However, there are significant distinctions between the issues facing those earlier cultures and those facing the present world. We must not be so naive as to believe that studying the past would provide us with easy fixes that we can apply immediately to our own cultures. Our strong technology (i.e., its good impacts), globalization, modern medicine, and more understanding of former cultures and distant contemporary countries are some of the ways that we vary from prior societies and put us at lesser danger than them. In addition, there are other ways in which we are different from earlier societies and therefore more vulnerable than they were. These include the fact that we are a much larger population, that modern medicine is vital to the survival of millions, if not billions, of us, that globalization has made it such that even a collapse in remote Somalia now affects the United States and Europe, and that our potent technology can have unintended destructive effects. Maybe there is still something we can learn from the past, but only if we consider its teachings properly.
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