September 29
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond (2005)

Yes, 8. I'm reporting them out of order since this one is now way overdue at the library. The overdue fee has already maxed out at $3, but until I return it they won't let me renew any of the other books I've also got out. [When I originally posted this it was "6", but I had neglected to count the two I already reported earlier this year.]

Collapse is the latest from Jared Diamond, the guy who wrote the deservedly acclaimed Guns, Germs and Steel. Like many others who loved GGS, I was ready to read it based on the author's name alone.

Guns, Germs and Steel is a book with a clear structure. It starts with a specific question: If it is true, as evidence suggests, that Europeans are not simply more intelligent or more capable as a race, what accounts for the fact that they were able to so thoroughly dominate the other continents? The entire book stays on the course of answering that question.

On first glance (and second and third, too) Collapse seems nothing like that. The theme, an examination of various great societies throughout history which collapsed, is overbroad and not particularly compelling. Compounding the problem, Diamond doesn't even stick to his declared theme. After the introduction, the first 50 pages of the book are about modern Montana, of all places, not a society that anyone thinks of a great or prone to collapse. When he moves on to romantic stories of exotic lost societies (Easter Island! Anasazi! Maya!) it gets more interesting, but here he runs off on tangents about prehistory or archaeology. The tangents are interesting, and I like them, but they contribute to the impression that the book is meandering to and fro following nothing more than the author's fancy.

Eventually, as in a good Russian novel, all the sprawling threads really do finally come together. Somewhere beyond page 400 one can finally see what the true theme of the book was all along.

Jared Diamond is many things: a professor of geography, an author, a historian, an anthropologist, an ornithologist, an environmentalist. (A confirmed dilettante myself, I refuse to distinguish between those he practices professionally and those fields in which he is a mere amateur.) Now he is one more thing: a celebrity. Coming off of the resounding success of Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond found himself in a position where his next book would be widely read and taken seriously. Rather than squander this opportunity, he set out to use it to make a difference in public opinion — and perhaps policy — on the issue which is most dear to him. That issue is an environmentalist one: sustainable resource use.

The essence of Collapse is not the vague theme stated in the subtitle; it is Diamond's 500-page argument in favor of sustainable resource use. That the reader doesn't realize this right away is part of the strategy. Unlike so many environmentalists and other political activists, Diamond is not content with writing a polemic that will be warmly received by those who already agree with him and dismissed by those who don't; he wants to reach people. The target audience, I think, is people whose views are not unlike my own — friendly toward the simple feel-good ideas of nature, recycling, conservation, etc; skeptical of the dire warnings of major environmental calamity, so many of which have proven false in the past; and hostile to the idea that human progress is bad because it is contrary to the needs of "Nature".

Environmentalists don't like to hear it, since so many of them are anti-Christian, but environmentalist literature reads like religion. To me, the idea that there is a way to live in harmony with the Earth and man's material desires are contrary to that sounds nearly identical to the Catholic notion of original sin. It appeals to its adherents in the same way: by providing rituals by which the deep-seated feelings of personal guilt can be absolved. The perpetual warnings of environmental calamity are the age-old jeremiads about natural disasters as punishment for daring to defy God's (Nature's) will. The rationalization when they fail to come to pass is also the same: "Yes, but it could have happened if we hadn't reformed our ways and prevented it."

I tend to associate this brand of environmentalism with renowned eco-jeremiah Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich gets a brief mention in Collapse. In what is perhaps the weakest link in Diamond's whole argument, he is forced to address the question of why we should believe him when so many in the past with messages like his have been profoundly wrong. He makes a feeble excuse for Ehrlich's errant prediction about the price of five metals; breezes past Ehrlich's much larger boners, such as the ice age of the 1970s and planetwide starvation in both the 1970s and 1980s; then rushes ahead to point out flaws of Julian Simon, Ehrlich's perennial antagonist and an equally fallible extremist on the other end of the enviro-spectrum. In the acknowledgments we find that Ehrlich is a personal friend of Diamond, so perhaps that excuses his unwillingness to address his writings in too much detail.

Whatever Diamond may feel about his friend's brand of environmental religiosity, he most emphatically does not copy it. Instead, he provides the humanist argument for environmentalism generally, and sustainable resource use specifically. Whether Diamond himself believes it or not — and I like to think that he does — the argument he presents in Collapse is that the reason to embrace environmentalism is not out of respect for the Planet or because we love Nature, but simply because we love our way of life and we want to keep it going. A couple of times in the book, Diamond states this explicitly. (This is where I ought to have a quote, but my notes aren't that good, and I'm determined to return the book to the library tomorrow morning.) Even more to the point, the entire book is oriented to show how environmental problems are a danger not to the Planet or the ecosystem or the spotted owl, but to human civilization. The message is clear, saving "the environment" means saving us, not them.

The vivid stories of past societies which prospered then collapsed are illustrations of this point. "Look," they say, "These people had a prosperous society, just like we do, but they destroyed their forests (depleted their soil, poisoned their water supply, etc.), and as a result their society collapsed." And now the real structure of the book becomes clear. The off-topic tangents and discussions of societies that didn't collapse are not off-topic at all. They are all in the way of building up a body of evidence for the main argument, and addressing the various auxiliary questions that it invites: How do you know that's how it really happened? Why did it play out that way? Why is such ancient history relevant to us today?

As a work of literature, Collapse is nothing to write home about. It's a bit sloppy, and although it's a fairly pleasant read, it's not really engaging (like, say, Guns, Germs and Steel). As a vehicle for political persuasion, it's effective, I think. If the goal is to change the thinking of a middle-of-the-road semi-environmentalist like me, it worked. REG and I discussed this a bit in our recent dialogue (a rare point where he and I were in substantial agreement!) and I had more to say about Collapse's themes there. Perhaps I'll have to dig out those emails and reprint them here.

Hmm. Here's a paragraph I flagged that's almost (but not quite) the sort of quote I was looking for above:

Religious environmentalists like to portray the planet as being in danger. In fact, the planet will do just fine. Even if the global temperature rises 10 degrees (that's a lot, by the way), the planet will adapt by just raising the oceans, killing off several thousand species, preserving a few others, and starting the next grand epoch of life in which who-knows-what will dominate. The planet's not the one in danger; it's us.

The mention of genocide there alludes to one of the book's more interesting subthemes. One clever illustration shows two maps. The first is captioned "political trouble spots of the modern world", and the other is "environmental trouble spots of the modern world". The 14 countries highlighted on one map are the exact same ones highlighted on the other.

Diamond's point here is that disasters which manifest themselves in political violence often have resource depletion as an ultimate cause. Several of the historic examples fit this description. In the modern world, he demonstrates the case thoroughly and persuasively with regard to Rwanda ... and rather less thoroughly with Haiti. I would have liked to hear more about some of the other cases. Yugoslavia, for example, is highlighted on the map. I wasn't aware of environmental problems in Yugoslavia that might help explain the outbreak of genocide there. Likewise for Somalia and most of the others on the map. It's not that I doubt him; I just want to know more about it.

Stray comments on the few notes I did take, with little effort to make a continuous narrative out of them. A few typographical bits first.

The Viking chapters had several mention of fjords, offering me an opportunity to admire the book's typeface's lovely fj ligature. Most modern serifs have ligatures for several f combinations. Sometimes I see that there's an fj and I wonder how often that actually occurs. But here it is.

In a discussion of consumer pressure for better forestry habits, there is a mention of the furniture store Ikea. But in the book it appears in all caps, as "IKEA". Why? Is it an acronym? Not that I know of.

Sketching out the geography of a certain Polynesian island under discussion, he mentions nearbly islands to the north-northwest and to the west-northwest. Except the hyphen in "north-northwest" and "west-northwest" appears as an en-dash. Why? There are several good reason to use an en-dash, but none of them apply here. I suspect this is the same sort of thing that leads to the erroneous tilde that often appears in "habanera". Someone figures out that there's this new and interesting symbol that often gets omitted, and then in his enthusiasm he uses it in extra places where it doesn't belong.

Moving on to vocabulary. Discussing the sharp volcanic rock on another Polynesian island,

The meaning is clear enough in the context, but macerate was new to me. When I look it up, I find that the word doesn't make sense here at all. To macerate something is to make it waste away due to lack of nourishment or to fall apart from being soaked in a fluid too long. I think this one was supposed to be lacerate.

From the same chapter,

I see from the dictionary that relict can be a noun or an adjective. It's not much different from relic: something that remains, but with a slightly different connotation.

Missed opportunity, in Montana now:

No, no, no. It's not a euphemism. It's a dysphemism, one of my favorite words.

I'm still not sure if this next one is right or wrong, but it made me stop and say "huh?"

This is one of those things like distinguishing the national debt from the budget deficit. A rate is a measure of some quantity against time, so the rate of destruction is the amount of destruction per year. (Any time unit will do.) If we destroy more next year than we did last year, then the rate is increasing, but it isn't actually accelerating unless the rate at which that rate is increasing is also increasing. Or to put it another way, it may be getting worse, but if it's not getting worse as quickly as it was getting worse before then the rate of destruction is decelerating even though it's still increasing. So what's the deal? Does Diamond really mean to tell us that the rate is accelerating, or is he just being sloppy with his language?

It gets worse. A few pages later, Diamond tells us that "California's population growth is accelerating". Ack! Now we're on to the third derivative. The word "growth" already implies increase. If there's more people this year than last year, that's growth. If there was an increase both last year and the year before, but this year's increase is bigger than last year's, then the growth itself is also increasing, but it's still not accelerating. That would be the case only if the increase of the increase is also increasing. I don't have figures to cite, but I'm fairly sure that California's population growth is not accelerating. I think Diamond meant to say that the growth is increasing (which is sort of like saying the population is accelerating), but not that it is accelerating.

The final one just makes me laugh. This time Diamond is citing possible objections to his arguments. The hypothetical skeptic asserts that, "The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase of the world's population is decreasing, such that world population will level off at less than double its present level." Aha, so the rate of increase is decreasing. What does that mean?

With this one, I start to sense that "rate of" should never be interpreted literally in Diamond's writing. It's simply a tautology, so that the "rate of increase" is really just the increase, the "rate of growth" is really just the growth, and the "rate of destruction" is just the destruction. Now it makes more sense, though I find it telling that Diamond vigorously rebuts this last one by saying, essentially, "Yeah, but even if the increase is decreasing, it's still increasing, so that's still bad." This leaves me with the uncomfortable feeling that he doesn't care so much about the precision of his language than just making bad sound bad — just as journalists do when talking about economics.

Or maybe he's just not a numbers guy.

Channeling Douglas R Hofstadter (and St Exupery?), possibly the most unattractive paragraph in the entire book:

Ugh. I wonder if Diamond had to fight his editor to keep this clunker in. The Bach metaphor fails desperately. Is this Diamond's homage to Hofstadter's masterpiece, Goedel Escher Bach? Even there the Bach thread is the most precarious of the three and it only works because Hofstadter painstakingly crafts his entire book around the idea. Diamond takes one quick lunge at the Bach metaphor and falls flat on his face.

If I were kind I'd have stopped the quote at "quintuple fugure", but the book itself goes right on, without even breaking a paragraph, to remind us of a feeble metaphor from the introduction. Describing what the structure of the book will be (Collapse has way too much of that: talking about what he's going to say, instead of just saying it), Diamond tells us that the book's plan "resembles a boa constrictor that has swallowed two very large sheep". Oy vey.

Lest I be caught ending this post with complaints, I'm happy to add that Diamond's use of Shelley's Ozymandias is lovely.

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