Jared Diamond: Collapse

[sparkchaser]

Finished reading this last night. Took me long enough though! Jared Diamond has a knack for condensing the facts while not affecting the readability too terribly.

Diamond looks at five historic societies and examines why they failed:

Easter Island - deforestation led to irreversible environmental damage

Pitcairn and Henderson Islands - deforestation led to environmental damage and loss of trading partners

Anasazi - deforestation and climate change

Maya - unsustainable farming practices and climate change

Greenland Norse - deforestation, unsustainable farming practices, climate change, and interestingly enough a fanatical devotion to cultural self-identity.

Fast forward to modern times and Diamond illustrates very briefly some societies that are succeeding and how they are doing it. Then we look at some societies that are, according to Diamond, either on the verge of collapse or well on their way: Rwanda, Haiti and Dominican Republic, China, and Australia. yes, China and Australia. I have to admit that he takes on a "glass is half-empty" view of the state of the world today but the facts he presented about China and Australia were quite sobering.

For example, on China:

Sandstorms inflict damage of about $540 million per year, and losses of crops and forests due to acid rain amount to about $730 million per year. More serious are the $6 billion costs of the "green wall" of trees being built to shield Beijing against sand and dust, and the $7 billion per year of losses created by pest species. We enter the zone of impressive numbers when we consider the onetime cost of the 1996 floods ($27 billion, but still cheaper than the 1998 floods), the annual direct losses due to desertification ($42 billion), and the annual losses due to water and air pollution ($54 billion). The combination of the latter two items alone costs China the equivalent of 14% of its GDP each year.

A question for those that have read it: has this done anything to raise your awareness of resource harvesting?

 

[angerball]

Interesting. I have this one somewhere towards the top of my TBR pile, and will post back when I finish (which could be months ). I've only read one Jared Diamond book, but my goodness, doesn't he cover so much material?

 

[sparkchaser]

I've only read one Jared Diamond book, but my goodness, doesn't he cover so much material?

I have no idea how he manages to fit so much into 500-odd pages and not manage to make readability suffer. It's a gift he has.

 

[PsychZero]

You're absolutely right, Diamond somehow manages textbook amount of details into a novel type of read.

I read The Third Chimpanzee by him over the summer and it was the same way, highly educational and very enjoyable. I definetly recommend it.

 

[silverseason]

I loved both books, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. In Collapse I was particularly struck by the accounts of Easter Island and the Vikings in Greenland. Sometimes you read about the "mystery" of Easter Island, but their disaster is not so mysterious. Same with Greenland, about which I knew very little before reading the book.

It was sobering, especially the realization of how cultural goals (building large stone statues, raising cattle) can damage a society in the long term.

 

[sparkchaser]

Interesting to see how many of the countries that Jared Diamond said were in danger of collapse made the list of most unstable countries.

Most unstable:

Central African Republic

Democratic Congo

Chad

Zimbabwe

Haiti

Ivory Coast

Afghanistan

Sudan

Somalia

Gaza and West Bank

Iraq

 

[angerball]

Then we look at some societies that are, according to Diamond, either on the verge of collapse or well on their way: Rwanda, Haiti and Dominican Republic, China, and Australia. yes, China and Australia. I have to admit that he takes on a "glass is half-empty" view of the state of the world today but the facts he presented about China and Australia were quite sobering.

I'll be interested to hear what he has to say about Australia. I take it from your last sentence that he feels Oz is on the verge of collapse?

 

[sparkchaser]

I'll be interested to hear what he has to say about Australia. I take it from your last sentence that he feels Oz is on the verge of collapse?

That's the impression I got too but I don't know how accurate that perception is.

I meant to grab the book last night and glance over the Australia section again but totally forgot.

Off the top of my head:

-the (up until recently) government sponsored deforestation
-Australia has overall extremely poor soil (the reasons why he goes into detail explaining) and flora growth is very slow
-sheep farming in its current state is unsustainable compared to the regrowth rate of plants
-rabbits that were intentionally(!) imported compete with sheep and native herbivores for grazing thereby reducing the available food for sheep
-desertification and salination of soil
-limited supplies of water
-the wheat crops grow in sandy soil that is so nutrient poor that practically 100% of the fertilizers come from the farmers who also use state subsidized water. Cotton is a water intensive crop and also grow with the help of state subsidized water. Diamond asks why do farmers stick to these two crops when so much of their growth is dependent on state subsidies.

There's more but the ol' memory ain't what it used to be.

 

[beer good]

Sounds interesting. 2 questions:

I've heard "limited supply of water" being raised as a potentially huge problem in the US as well, in particular the Western states... does he comment on that?

Does it only deal with countries collapsing due to environmental factors?

 

[sparkchaser]

I've heard "limited supply of water" being raised as a potentially huge problem in the US as well, in particular the Western states... does he comment on that?

He does make a passing reference to it but I do wish he spent more time talking about the foolishness of lush, green yards and golf courses in arid environments. That's been a pet peeve of mine for years.

Does it only deal with countries collapsing due to environmental factors?

Pretty much. He maintains that the political unrest that comes when a society collapses is brought on by the environmental factors. He points to Rwanda as his modern day example and the Anasazi as the historic example.

 

[angerball]

Ta for posting that.

rabbits that were intentionally(!) imported compete with sheep and native herbivores for grazing thereby reducing the available food for sheep

Yup, and from what I know they then introduced Myxomatosis and Calicivirus to combat the problem. I just read on Wikipedia that "One eighth of all mammalian species in Australia are now extinct", with rabbits being the leading cause.

limited supplies of water

Yup, especially considering that upwards of 95% of the country is in drought. There has been talk for years of building a de-salination plant to combat this problem, but that would take years - and there are probably disadvantages.

There's more but the ol' memory ain't what it used to be.

It's better than mine! I struggle to remember things like this, regardless of how interesting they are. Do you make notes while you read? I've started doing that, and it does help a bit.

 

[sparkchaser]

It's better than mine! I struggle to remember things like this, regardless of how interesting they are. Do you make notes while you read? I've started doing that, and it does help a bit.

If I kept a book blog or made it a habit of posting reviews, I would do take notes. Maybe I should anyway. Someone here made notes about the book they were reading on a bookmark. That's a really good idea.

One thing I forgot until after I was unable to edit my post was that he refers to the "Mining of Australia" in terms of it's renewable resources (such as timber, seafood, and grass). It is currently being harvested at a rate that cannot be sustained.

And speaking of seafood, the bit about the orange roughy I found particularly sobering. Orange roughy are very slow growing (they mate at about 40 years of age and the ones that end up on our dinner plate are about 100 years old he says) and are easily caught. This has led to the overfishing of them. Will they recover? I don't know.

 

[silverseason]

One thing I forgot until after I was unable to edit my post was that he refers to the "Mining of Australia" in terms of it's renewable resources (such as timber, seafood, and grass). It is currently being harvested at a rate that cannot be sustained.

This was much of the story in Greenland also. You land on an unfamiliar shore, and you see trees. So you cut the trees for your use. After all, trees will grow again. Yes, but if you don't understand the local ecology you do not realize that the tree that might take 30 years to reach that size in your native land may need 100-300 years here where the environment is different (less rainfall, shorter growing season).

Diamond is very readable about these issues. He assumes it is human nature to make use of nature and doesn't rail against that. But he makes it clear with example and example how the consequences may be unexpected.

 

[sparkchaser]

You're right silverseason. In fact he points out that they could not have known about the fragility of the land at Easter Island or Greenland. Or even Australia for that matter. When the settlers first landed, they saw similar climates and land so naturally assumed it worked the same and began to use agricultural techniques that worked in their old homes and that became their undoing.

 

[The Doogster]

That's the impression I got too but I don't know how accurate that perception is.

I meant to grab the book last night and glance over the Australia section again but totally forgot.

Off the top of my head:

-the (up until recently) government sponsored deforestation
-Australia has overall extremely poor soil (the reasons why he goes into detail explaining) and flora growth is very slow
-sheep farming in its current state is unsustainable compared to the regrowth rate of plants
-rabbits that were intentionally(!) imported compete with sheep and native herbivores for grazing thereby reducing the available food for sheep
-desertification and salination of soil
-limited supplies of water
-the wheat crops grow in sandy soil that is so nutrient poor that practically 100% of the fertilizers come from the farmers who also use state subsidized water. Cotton is a water intensive crop and also grow with the help of state subsidized water. Diamond asks why do farmers stick to these two crops when so much of their growth is dependent on state subsidies.

There's more but the ol' memory ain't what it used to be.

Diamond makes some interesting points, and here in Oz we are addressing some of them already. The east coast (where most people live) has been in deep drought for about 7 years. This year was an El Nina (the opposite of an El Nino) which meant we actually got some rain. Even still, just about everyone on the whole East coast has had water restrictions for several years (no use of hoses outside, no watering of lawns or topping up swimming pools, no washing cars, etc). Last year my state's water reservoirs were at less than 30%. Now they are up to 48%. It remains to be seen what the rest of this year brings. Last year the Murray-Darling basin (Australia's "bread basket") was in danger of running out of water. This was unprecedented. It wasn't caused solely by the drought; over-allocation took its toll. The El Nino (ELSO) governs our whole lives. Diamond writes about this with the clarity and certainty of someone who has lived here and experienced it first-hand.

Global warming has seen an alarming spread of the dreaded cane toad. It is now roaming south and westwards into areas which it has never been. Other species are also a problem, but the rabbits seem to be under control (for now). Believe it or not, Kangaroos are also a problem as they breed like mad when conditions are good, then cause major damage trying to find food when the good times end.

Salinity is a huge problem also. When I drive to work I see it all around me. you can't miss it. Luckily we are now keenly atuned to its causes.

In the last year the federal government has been buying out fishing licences in certain states, as over-fishing was a problem which could not be ignored.

On of the farming practices which I find bizarre is our extensive rice industry. Rice is an incredibly water-intensive crop, and it boggles the mind that the world's dryest continent should devote so much of its water to rice production. That's just my pet peeve.

Another peeve is that we have just built a huge wood-chipping plant in Tasmania, where the last remnants of old-growth cold-climate rain forest are located. The reason, of course, is jobs, jobs, jobs. Once it's gone, it's gone. And we sell it for peanuts to Japan, then buy it back from them (as paper) at an inflated price......

Overall Oz is still a great place to live. If the water runs out that might not be the case!

The Doogster

 

[sparkchaser]

Doogster,

I forgot about the rice. I don't understand why they grow it.

As an Aussie, how was his book received by the public? How accurate do you think his perception is?

 

[text_maniac]

Apologies for the double post, I put this on another thread before I realised this one is more appropriate! (Why won't this forum allow retrospective editing, like most do?)

Anyhow, Doogster quoted this from Diamond/Collapse:

Of course, though, people with long-term stakes don't always act wisely. Often they still prefer short-term goals, and often again they do things that are foolish in both the short term and the long term.

....and (with further additions/edits here) I replied:

For anyone who's interested in reading why this is, you could do worse than read Luxury Fever by Robert Frank.
Frank is Professor of Economics at Cornell, but more importantly, he's an economist who's taken the trouble to do his psychology homework, and understands why the orthodox economics of Adam Smith don't work.

In short (very short), Smith's economics assume that people are motivated by absolute wealth, and that what's good for the individual is neccessarily good for society. Neither of these is the case. In particular, people are motivated by relative wealth: the Smiths are only happy when they have more than the Joneses, and the Joneses are only happy when they have more than the Smiths. Hence they're both locked into an environment-wrecking competition to consume more and more, when no amount of wealth can ever make them both happy at the same time. A zero sum game.

There's been some fascinating research into wealth, happiness and status seeking, eg:

Scientific literature provides no support for the theory that wealth brings happiness at high levels of wealth. At low income, there is clear evidence of a correlation between wealth and happiness.

As mean income grows, the minimum reported income that people say they can survive on is always 50% of mean income.

Wives are alot more likely to work if their sister's hubby earns more than their own.

Happiness is 80% genetic.

Working hours went down until the 1960's, then started going up again.

People would prefer a lower income that's above that of their colleagues, than a high one that's below.

People will PAY to see the income of others reduced.

The pain of a loss is felt more acutely than the pleasure of a gain, and sign is felt more acutely than magnitude. Thus if you win £1m, then lose £300k you will be less happy than if you just win £700k, but more happy than winning £1m then losing £100k three times. Best of all is winning £350k twice....

Consumption whose value is measured relative to others is termed conspicuous, whereas that whose value is absolute is inconspicuous.
Eg:
Conspicuous: Houses, Cars, etc.
Inconspicuous: Leisure time, Pensions, Clean environment, more autonomy at work etc.
More conspicuous consumption always trumps less conspicuous because it leads to higher personal status and because acquisition of resources rather than leisure was adaptive in the environment in which we evolved, even though it lowers the welfare of society as a whole (The Prisoner's Dilemma). This is no trivial matter, it's been shown that personal status affects both morbidity and mortality! What's needed is a policy to reduce conspicuous consumption across the board for all society. Frank proposes one.

A psychologist called Daniel Kahneman has done much work on this, and won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics for it. Nassim Taleb covers a fair bit of similar ground in Fooled by Randomness, there's also relevant snippets in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and Intuition by David G Myers, and some related stuff in Why Therapy Doesn't Work by David Smail. (Adaptation Level Theory by Helson deals with habituation, but I haven't read that yet.)

Finally, don't be put off Frank by chapter two! It's a litany of examples of prices of luxury goods. A couple of paragraphs would have sufficed, but he goes on and on! The rest of the book is NOT the same though, so if your eyes glaze over just skip to chapter three, you won't miss anything!

 

[The Doogster]

Doogster,

I forgot about the rice. I don't understand why they grow it.

As an Aussie, how was his book received by the public? How accurate do you think his perception is?

Hi

His book provoked some public discussion a couple of years ago, but seems to have faded. We have our own home-grown Jared Diamond, Tim Flannery (former Australian of the year), who has carried the torch. It is generally accepted that Diamond is on the money (in fact, much of what he says is blindingly obvious to us in Oz).

 

[The Doogster]

A psychologist called Daniel Kahneman has done much work on this, and won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics for it. Nassim Taleb covers a fair bit of similar ground in Fooled by Randomness, there's also relevant snippets in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and Intuition by David G Myers, and some related stuff in Why Therapy Doesn't Work by David Smail. (Adaptation Level Theory by Helson deals with habituation, but I haven't read that yet.

Hi

Thanks for these suggestions. I will definitely check them out as I am currently fascinated by economics and sociology.

 

[text_maniac]

Doogster, do you know anything about an Oz politician called Colin Mason?
I've just ordered his book The 2030 Spike from the library thinking it was about population growth, but it looks more general than that. I was rather disappointed to see that the author's a politician/journalist rather than an academic....