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Diamond in the Rough: Is There a Genuine Environmental Threat To Diamond in the Rough Diamond in the Rough: J.R. McNeill Is There a Genuine Environmental Threat to Security? A Review Essay Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2004) Jared Diamond ap- pears to have done it again. Seven years ago he published Guns, Germs, and Steel, a best seller and Pulitzer Prize winner that provided a novel explanation of the historical fact that geopolitical power for millennia has been unevenly distributed around the world.1 Diamond argued that ultimately environmen- tal differences, especially in biogeography and the availability of potentially domesticable species, set societies on different paths, explaining why those in Eurasia (or inhabited by the cultural heirs of Eurasians) have dominated inter- national politics for at least the last several thousand years. Now Diamond has produced an even heftier best seller, cheerfully entitled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in which he argues that past so- cieties have sometimes collapsed because they failed to deal with environmen- tal problems, and that this historical record should serve as a cautionary tale today, alerting states and societies to the possible perilous political conse- quences of their ecological vulnerabilities. The ªrst book was about how soci- eties accumulated power and wealth; the second one is about how in some cases societies dissipated power and wealth—yet in others managed to avoid that fate and survive satisfactorily. But has Diamond got his history right, and if so, is it indeed relevant to contemporary concerns? In the following pages, I try to answer these questions and reºect upon the seriousness and urgency of environmental problems and stresses for states and societies today and in days to come. Diamond turns out to be sure-footed on his historical terrain, but taking the extra step to get from historical examples to insights about the contemporary world is always tricky. Many a statesman and not a few scholars have slipped up when attempting this step, and Diamond teeters precariously too. J.R. McNeill is Professor of History at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown Uni- versity, where he holds the Cinco Hermanos Chair of Environmental and International Affairs. 1. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Further references to this volume appear parenthetically in the text. International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 178–195 © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 178 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162288054894643 by guest on 23 September 2021 Diamond in the Rough 179 Diamond, Collapse, and History At ªrst glance, Diamond would seem an unlikely candidate as a major voice holding forth in debates about environment, history, states, and power. He is by training a natural scientist with a background in physiology, ornithology, and evolutionary biology. In addition to a lengthy catalogue of professional papers in these ªelds, he has written popular science books on human and pri- mate sexuality. Diamond, however, has turned this background into an advan- tage by his willingness to consider broad patterns in human affairs, something historians in particular (but most political scientists as well) are normally re- luctant to do. It runs counter to their training. So Diamond is ªlling a niche that historians and political scientists have left only thinly occupied. His life- long fondness for history, combined with his scientiªc training and an agree- able prose style, has made him far more inºuential and widely read than almost any historian or political scientist. Collapse is not about sudden collapses. Among the book’s many case studies, several are intended as examples of collapse—Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi (of the American Southwest), the Maya, and the medieval Norse. They are instances in which societies somehow gradually lost wealth, power, population, and degrees of social complexity, or at least some of the above. In a pair of dramatic cases, the Greenland Norse and the Easter Islanders, societies withered away to, or to the brink of, extinction, but not in sudden collapses. Most people would use the term “decline,” or some- thing similar in most of these contexts. But on the theory that one man’s col- lapse is another man’s decline, and for simplicity’s sake, I use Diamond’s term here, even though I ªnd it inaccurate in most cases. Moreover, it is not, in Diamond’s account, societies that choose to fail or suc- ceed, despite his book’s subtitle. Rather, it is elite strata that choose to protect their own interests and position, and thereby unintentionally bring down— gradually—the societies that support them and of which they are privileged members. Collapse’s contents may not match perfectly with the title, but do they at least mesh together well? The answer is no. The book lacks the crisp cohesion and focus that helped make Guns, Germs, and, Steel a success.2 Collapse is arranged 2. Although even it was not an unqualiªed success. My own reservations appear in J.R. McNeill, “The World According to Jared Diamond,” History Teacher, Vol. 34, No. 2 (February 2001), pp. 165– 174. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162288054894643 by guest on 23 September 2021 International Security 30:1 180 in four parts, the ªrst of which is a single chapter devoted to Montana, where Diamond apparently spends his summers. Montana has its environmental problems, many of them related to its mining boom. It is now poor, as Ameri- can states go. But there is no collapse on the horizon here, nor even any seri- ous decline other than in the viability of family farms. Part 2 is the heart of the book, seven chapters on cases of collapse, and one chapter dedicated to societies that, in Diamond’s view, overcame environmental problems (New Guinea highlanders, the islanders of Tikopia in the southwestern Paciªc, and Tokugawa Japan). Part 3 concerns contemporary societies—Rwanda, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, China, and Australia—and their environmental prob- lems. Part 4, devoted to “practical lessons,” consists of a lengthy chapter on the environmental behavior of big corporations involved in extractive industries (a mixed record says Diamond), bracketed by two thinner ones ruminating on reasons why bad decisions are sometimes made, and on the world’s leading environmental problems, ending with reasons why one should not despair. All this ªts together rather roughly, despite the highly readable prose style, in- fused with recollected conversations with friends, travelogue, and entertaining tangents. Rough or not, the book contains some ideas to be reckoned with. In the ªrst place, Diamond offers what he calls a “ªve-point framework” with which one can consider the likelihood of a given society suffering collapse or surmount- ing its environmental problems. The framework consists of (1) the nature and extent of environmental damage in any given society, (2) the nature and extent of climate change, (3) the extent to which neighboring societies are hostile and formidable, (4) the degree of dependence on trade with friendly neighbors, and (5) the nature of a society’s responses to its environmental problems. To- gether these determine collapse or survival.3 This is a systematic and useful ru- bric with which to consider the issue and an improvement over the rather casual ease with which historians (and others, not least political scientists working in the environmental security genre) have attributed declines and col- lapses to environmental causes in cases such as Bronze Age Mycenae, the Indus valley civilization of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, and the Khmer Empire 3. Diamond separates environmental damage from climate change because in the past climate change arose from entirely natural causes, whereas his category of environmental damage consists of self-inºicted wounds such as deforestation and accelerated soil erosion. Climate change today is probably chieºy a result of human endeavors. A novel idea, according to which climate change in the early Holocene was also anthropogenic, a result of carbon emissions from forest burning and methane emissions from rice cultivation, appears in William F. Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change, Vol. 61, No. 3 (December 2003), pp. 261–293. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162288054894643 by guest on 23 September 2021 Diamond in the Rough 181 centered on Angkor Wat. Indeed, the tendency to locate the causes for declines and collapses in environmental degradation is usually inversely proportional to how much is known about a given decline or collapse. Diamond has done much better here by bringing some system to consideration of the question, as well as by researching his case studies properly. By and large, Diamond has got this history right and has provided a helpful way to think about it. In the second place, Diamond argues that the various collapses of the distant past bear lessons for today. This proposition is not new. Others have seized on the unhappy saga of Easter Island as a microcosm with a salutary lesson. Sometime between about a.d. 400 and 900, a group of Polynesian colonists dis- covered Easter Island, which was previously uninhabited. They learned how to make its unfamiliar environment yield sustenance, and their population grew to somewhere (estimates are all controversial) between 6,000 and 30,000. Diamond prefers 15,000. Gradually, Easter Islanders completely deforested their small island, which on their arrival had featured twenty-one species of trees. They used wood for all the ordinary purposes, but also for building slip- ways on which to slide giant statues several miles from quarries to the island’s coast.
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