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 appears 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 environmental 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 international 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 societies have sometimes collapsed because they failed to deal with environmental problems, and that this historical record should serve as a cautionary tale today, alerting states and societies to the possible perilous political consequences of their ecological vulnerabilities. The ªrst book was about how societies 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.

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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 advantage by his willingness to consider broad patterns in human affairs, something historians in particular (but most political scientists as well) are normally reluctant 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 something similar in most of these contexts. But on the theory that one man’s collapse 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 succeed, 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.

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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 serious 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 problems. 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 collapses 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.

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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. Once the forest was gone, Easter Islanders lost the ability to build canoes and ªsh at sea, lost their fuelwood supply and some of their food (e.g., palm nuts), and lost much of their soil. They also lost additional food sources when eventually all their land birds and most of their seabirds went extinct. After about 1400, Easter Islanders increasingly experienced a brutal fraying of the social fabric and a sharp population decline, down to 2,000 or so. This unhappy saga has struck many people as a useful microcosmic parable for planet Earth.4 The Easter Islanders suffered a miserable decline, but they did not quite go extinct. The Greenland Norse, to whom Diamond devotes two lengthy (and very good) chapters, disappeared altogether. A settler group arrived from Iceland around a.d. 980 and, like the Easter Islanders, brought their own do- mesticated plants and animals with them. They attempted, with initial success to re-create the farms and meadows of medieval Norway, with cattle, sheep, goats and, at the outset, pigs and horses. They grew ºax and probably tried to grow barley, beets, cabbage, and a few other hardy vegetables. But despite their arrival during a warm period (the Medieval Optimum to climate histori-

4. Scholarship on Easter Island is remarkably extensive, and efforts to use its history as a cautionary tale are numerous. The best in this genre is Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Is- land: A Message from Our Past for the Future of Our Planet (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), updated as Flenley and Bahn, The Enigmas of Easter Island: Island on the Edge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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ans), Greenland was too chilly for growing much besides hay for the animals. Nonetheless, on milk, cheese, and meat (poor people ate seal meat), the Green- land Norse ºourished for a while, reaching perhaps 5,000 as their maximum population. But they damaged the few patches of land that could produce good hay and, more important, did not recognize that climate change was working against them. Greenland got colder (the Little Ice Age to climate historians), and the Norse could not adapt. The last of them died probably in the 1430s. These two histories are well told in Diamond’s pages, with careful attention to the uncertainties in the archaeological records. His reason for rehearsing them is for the lessons they bear. But the differences between Easter Island or Norse Greenland (or the Anasazi) and today’s states and societies are legion. Diamond’s critics have leaped on this point, claiming that contemporary ca- pacities to collect, assess, and distribute information, to effect technological change, and to substitute ingenuity for raw materials are now so great that what environmental problems we might face are either well within our ability to solve, or are so different from those of earlier centuries, that Diamond’s ar- gument fails.5 Naturally Diamond foresaw this obvious objection. He acknowledges that conditions are different today from the past, and nowhere suggests that our problems are beyond our capacity to solve. But he argues that the key differences (e.g., greater population, and globalization) make today’s societies still more vulnerable to ecologically abetted collapse (pp. 515–517). Indeed he says, “In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. That question is set- tled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently, and others appear to be imminent. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them” (p. 517). The question, however, is open to debate. It may be helpful here to distin- guish between two related problems. One is whether or not past collapses have contemporary relevance. The other is whether Diamond’s chosen examples, mainly small-scale island cases generally involving only a few thousand

5. Most of the reviews of Diamond’s book in major publications have been favorable, some glow- ing. See, for example, the environmental scientist Donald Kennedy, “The Choice,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 2 (March/April 2005), pp. 134–138; and Robert Kaplan, “The Crash of Civilizations,” Washington Post, January 9, 2005. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz took exception, more to Dia- mond’s synoptic methods than to his conclusions, in “Very Bad News,” New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005. Gregg Easterbrook, a science journalist, speciªcally objected to Diamond’s scaling up from small, “pretechnology” societies in “There Goes the Neighborhood,” New York Times, Jan- uary 30, 2005.

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rather isolated people, can make the point. Interestingly, Diamond did not try to make his case on the basis of the Roman Empire, or the city-states of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, or any of a number of states of ancient Mesopota- mia.6 These were large, complex societies with state structures, elaborate social hierarchies and divisions of labor, international trade, and so forth: in short, much more like contemporary states than were the Greenland Norse or the Easter Islanders. In emphasizing the particular relevance of the Maya example, to which he devotes a ªne chapter, Diamond recognizes that it is his only case of a large-scale, complex society. So it could well be that Diamond’s general point about the utility of considering prior collapses is valid, even if his chosen examples do not support the point to everyone’s satisfaction. And even if one is left unconvinced by Diamond’s contentions on this matter, there is still much that can be gleaned from the small-scale case studies. As one example, consider the persistence of social elites in pursuing business as usual to and beyond the point where they put at risk the general interests of society. The Norse elite in Greenland insisted on maintaining a Norway-style economy, with cattle, sheep, and fodder crops, despite the inap- propriateness of this to Greenland’s conditions and its increasing impractical- ity as climate cooled and scarce soil eroded away rapidly. They might have changed their ways, adapted to circumstances, and lived more like the Inuit; they resisted, however, because they believed it was more important to be Christian and Norse. Similarly, the clan chiefs on Easter Island wanted to erect great statues along the shoreline, for reasons that are not clear but perhaps associated with religious obligations and chieftainly prestige. This was contrary to the material interests of most Easter Islanders, for whom wood and palm nuts were scarce resources. But what was in the long-term interest of Easter Is- landers was not in the immediate interest of their leaders. This behavior, dog- ged self-interested attachment to the status quo on the part of its beneªciaries, transcends time and space. Diamond’s cases bear considerable relevance in

6. The case for these as partly environmental collapses is made by historian J. Donald Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), especially pp. 181–199; and J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life (London: Routledge, 2001). For a thoughtful discussion of these issues, see Joachim Radkau, Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt [Nature and power: A world history] (Munich, Germany: Beck, 2000), chaps. 2, 3; and Sing C. Chew, World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization, and Defores- tation, 3000 B C –A D 2000 (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2001), chap. 2. A careful study that is skeptical of environmental elements in collapses—and a book Diamond explicitly takes issue with—is Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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this respect and might help us think about the Soviet Politburo or perhaps (time will tell) the fossil fuel lobby in the United States. As another example, consider the difªculties societies have had in organiz- ing responses to slow-moving crises. The deforestation of Easter Island and the soil erosion problems in Mayan agriculture were incremental over many generations. Each generation left it to the future to deal with either because they could not see a problem or because they preferred not to face it. They were hopeful, perhaps, that some deus ex machina would step in to rescue them. But in any event, they were not prepared to incur costs in the present for the sake of the future. This habit of mind is very familiar today and occasionally very costly, in political as well as in ecological matters. Machiavelli captured the essence of it nearly ªve centuries ago in The Prince:

For the Romans did in these cases what all wise princes should do, who consider not only present but also future discords and diligently guard against them; for being foreseen they can easily be remedied, but if one waits till they are at hand, the medicine is no longer in time as the malady has become incur- able; it happening with this as with those hectic fevers, as doctors say, which at their beginning are easy to cure but difªcult to recognize, but in course of time when they have not at ªrst been recognized and treated, become easy to recognize and difªcult to cure. Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given to a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow so that every one can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.7

Recent examples of want of foresight in affairs of state are legion, whether arising from an inability to sense a problem or an unwillingness to face it. Slow- moving crises, whether ecological in nature or not, regularly overwhelm the wisdom and prudence of presidents and prime ministers, as well as princes. Thus, even if one resists Diamond’s broad claims in general about the contemporary relevance of his island examples, there is proªt in pondering his stories about them.

Diamond, Collapse, and the Contemporary World

Diamond tried to drive home his point by explaining some of the environmental troubles that face the world today. His chapters on Australia, China, and the two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (which share the island

7. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Random House, 1950), pp. 10–11.

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of Hispaniola) are competent if unexceptional accounts of what are often serious problems. Diamond wants to convince us that environmental degradation leads to political trouble. Here is how he puts it: Leaving out of this discussion for the moment the question of environmental problems within the First World itself, let’s just ask whether the lessons from past collapses might apply anywhere in the Third World today. First ask some ivory-tower academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads the newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpop- ulation, or both. The ecologist would answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Mad- agascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Is- lands, and Somalia, plus others.” Then go ask a First World politician, who knows nothing and cares less about the environment and population problems, to name the world’s worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been over- whelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those problems of their own, are also creating problems for us rich First World countries, which may end up having to provide foreign aid for them, or may face illegal immigrants from them, or may decide to provide them with military assis- tance to deal with rebellions or terrorists, or may even have to send in our own troops. The politician would answer, “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your list of political trouble spots should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others.” Surprise, surprise: the two lists are very similar. The connection between the two lists is transparent: it’s the problems of the ancient Maya, Anasazi, and Easter Islanders playing out in the modern world. (pp. 515–516) Diamond includes a pair of maps that dispenses with the cautions in his prose and shows the same fourteen countries as appear in the lists above, all identiªed as both political trouble spots and environmental ones. A quick look at the maps raises some doubts. North Korea does not appear as a trouble spot at all. Nor do Iran, Syria, Albania, Kosovo, Congo, Liberia, or Zimbabwe. Yet Mongolia does, and Bangladesh too. Iraq, certainly a political trouble spot, is identiªed also as an environmental one. Now Iraq surely has its environmental problems, and has had some of them for more than 2,000 years.8 But can

8. R.M. Adams, Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1965); and Peter Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environ- ments in the History of the Middle East, 500 B C to A D 1500 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1993).

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one really connect those problems to Iraq’s political travails? Of all the contrib- uting factors to Iraq’s status as a political trouble spot, I should think environmental degradation must rank well down the list. Diamond’s two lists are highly selective: the category “plus others” would hold many countries that would appear only on one list or one map. There are certainly instances where environmental degradation contributes to hardship and to political trouble, and Diamond has noted several of them. But in general, the intersection between environmental degradation and political troubles is much weaker than Diamond suggests in these maps, and in the explanations accompanying them.

Environmental Collapse: Past and Present

Diamond’s ideas, whether one likes them or not, raise questions about the rela- tionships between environmental variables and political ones. That alone is a considerable service to the intellectual community and the public at large. Both need a reminder of fundamental issues these days, transªxed as they are by the preoccupations of the moment. In the latter two sections of this essay I address, brieºy, two main questions arising from Diamond’s work. First, are today’s societies really at risk of environmental collapse? Or, to im- itate Diamond in his more cautious moments, are they at risk of collapse in which environmental degradation plays a signiªcant role? Despite the cer- tainty with which views on this subject are often expressed, it is frustratingly hard to know. That is mainly because in environmental matters, as in political ones, there are many opportunities for discontinuities and nonlinear effects. For example, it is possible for the Earth’s tectonic plates to grind against one another for years on end with no signiªcant consequences. But suddenly, and quite unpredictably even with today’s sophisticated geophysics, one plate can buckle under or over another, causing an earthquake, and in cases such as that in December 2004, a deadly tsunami. That is a nonlinear effect, familiar to geo- physicists. Ecologists, for their part, speak of “lability,” the property of ecological systems to switch suddenly from one state to another. Climatologists see this in their ªeld as well, and now think that on some past occasions climate “switches” have ºipped and quickly (within a decade or two) brought on an ice age or a warm spell. Moreover, in environmental matters (as in political ones), there is the com- plicating possibility of positive feedback loops, or self-reinforcing trends. For example, a warming climate in the Arctic melts snow and ice, which dimin- ishes the amount of sunlight reºected back to space, further warming Arctic

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climate. (The reverse also happens: a cold trend means more snow and ice, more reºection, still colder climate.) Given the mineªeld of nonlinear effects, and the further possibility of positive feedback loops lurking unforeseen, it is impossible to be conªdent that no ecological collapse looms. But it is equally impossible to say that one does. A hefty dose of intellectual humility is appropriate in addressing questions involving environmental change. How to han- dle them poses a vexing challenge for even the most prudent of princes. Some undeniable trends seem to augur poorly and suggest some sort of a collapse is a genuine possibility. The fossil fuel use of the past 200 years is con- spicuously unsustainable. And to a remarkable degree, our contemporary politics, economy, culture, institutions, and expectations are built around cheap and abundant energy, a generous subsidy from the geological past. If we should ever lack for it, the necessary adjustments would be wrenching indeed, and almost certain to bring on political chaos and violence. Modern agriculture could not function without it; fossil fuels power the machines needed on the farm and go into the fertilizers and pesticides required to maintain yields. Getting irrigation water to the right places at the right times is also energy intensive. Without cheap energy, food would become far more expensive, and almost everyone would be far poorer. It is not for nothing that the United States since the 1940s has taken pains to ensure a reliable ºow of cheap oil for itself and, frequently, for its friends. Sooner or later—some recent authors suggest very soon, although I doubt it—good oil will become hard to ªnd, and its price will go up and stay up.9 Perhaps a suitable substitute will by then be at hand. Perhaps not. If not, considerable turmoil will surely result, perhaps qualifying, in some parts of the world, as a collapse. If recent trends were to continue long into the future, fossil fuel use would be unsustainable for reasons connected to climate change. At the beginning of the twenty-ªrst century, the human population uses roughly ªfteen times as much energy as our ancestors did a century ago, most of it now (as then) in the form of fossil fuels. Another century like the last one would almost certainly heat up the Earth so much and so rapidly as to bring on suffering and turmoil as well, again in some parts of the world sufªcient to qualify as a collapse. Happily, some form of energy transition is likely to intervene before another

9. The most persuasive of recent works in this vein is Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Im- pending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Deffeyes, a petro- leum geologist, predicted that oil demand would outstrip supply beginning around 2004–2008, driving crude prices ever upward. So far it is hard to say he is wrong, but my guess is that it will take longer.

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century of fossil fuel dependency and burgeoning carbon dioxide emissions can run their course. Beyond the vulnerabilities associated with modern society’s thoroughgoing dependence on cheap fossil fuels, we also have grown accustomed to cheap and reasonably clean water. It is easily imaginable, if impossible to foresee the details, that a new energy regime might liberate us from fossil fuel addiction, but fresh water is not something for which we can ªnd a substitute. At the beginning of the twenty-ªrst century, humankind uses nine or ten times as much fresh water as we did a century ago. That trend is completely unsustainable too. (These issues are related: with very cheap energy, it would be practical to desalinize seawater cheaply, sidestepping the problem.) Lastly (in this incomplete litany of possible woes), the biosphere’s buffers have been signiªcantly pared away and seem set to shrink further. The world has about 20 percent less forest area than it had a century ago, and (despite the countertrend in the United States) has still less with each passing year. The world’s enclosed seas, inshore waters, and estuaries are far more polluted than a century ago, and in most cases (there are happy exceptions) worse each year. There are no more open prairies or steppe grasslands left with rich, uneroded soils now; 150 years ago such lands abounded in North and South America, in Russia, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere, and when broken to the plow yielded rivers of grain for an urbanizing world. But humanity has played that card and cannot do so again.10 The capacity of the natural world to absorb shocks, to re- cover from them, and to shield us from ill effects of environmental change is impaired as a consequence of these long-term trends. As a result, we are, as never before, left to our own devices, our ingenuity and prudence serving as our only safety net. With all this in mind, it seems hard to dispute that the current ecological regime with its existing trends is radically unsustainable. Yet does this necessarily imply collapse, either generally or for this state or that society? I think not. First of all, the trends will change. It is nearly impossible that the next hundred years will see, for example, a fourfold expansion of human population as did the last century. No one forecasts a world with 25 billion people in the year 2100. Economists normally expect the price mechanism to intervene in deci- sive ways, bringing us, for example, new energy sources when oil gets more expensive, as they brought alternative construction materials when and where timber ran short. This will indeed surely happen, on some (unknowable) scale

10. A recent book on a neglected chapter in that story is James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pio- neers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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and at some (unknowable) pace. It is of course faith-based economics to as- sume that substitutions will happen soon enough and broadly enough to avoid immiseration and political turbulence. But it is equally unwise to as- sume they will not. Second, as optimists expect, science and technology will resolve some of our ecological vulnerabilities. This has already happened in some cases and will surely happen again. The hole in the ozone shield, for example, grew very rapidly from the 1960s to the 1990s. It implied various forms of peril for many life forms on Earth, including us. But in the 1970s atmospheric scientists detected the hole, explained it, recognized its dangers, and made a compelling public case about them. This provoked effective political action, which in turn spurred technical change in the industries that used chloroºuorocarbons (the agents that, when released into the atmosphere and after drifting to the strato- sphere, rupture ozone molecules). In this case it turned out to be an easy nut to crack, both politically and technically. Others, such as climate change, have proven much tougher. Some of our ecological vulnerabilities will surely be re- solved in happy ways on account of scientiªc understanding and technological change, presumably the easiest cases ªrst. There are encouraging trends in postindustrial economies, in which less ore, less fuel, less timber, and so on are required to generate a given dollar of gross national product. In the United States, Japan, and most of Europe, a fairly rapid “dematerialization” of the economy is under way, and a “decarbonization” too, partly as a result of technological change and partly owing to sectoral shifts toward services and a knowledge economy. But there will surely be some ecological vulnerabilities that resist technological solution. Yet the current unsustainable ecological regime need not necessarily imply ecological collapse. It may be possible to supplant our current unsustainable format with another one, equally unsustainable but in other ways. This is in effect the ecological history of the Chinese empire over the last three millennia. In an illuminating essay, Mark Elvin shows how China managed to survive as a society despite ecological crises that forced serious adjustment.11 China cre- ated new technologies and applied them on larger scales over new territories, creating new ecological systems that, although themselves unsustainable, bought time. Chinese society may have had collapses by Diamond’s liberal standard, and at times the state did fail, although not at the times of greatest ecological pressure. Political collapses and dynastic change in Chinese history

11. Mark Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth: China’s Environment from Ar- chaic Times to the Present,” East Asian History, Vol. 6 (December 1993), pp. 7–46.

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came for reasons only modestly connected to environmental pressures. In any event, both society and state quickly reconstituted themselves after moments of crisis.12 One of the reasons that the Chinese state and society enjoyed resilience and could cope with ecological pressures is that China could, to some extent, shunt pressures off onto its neighbors. It could, and did, extend its borders at the expense of less numerous and less well organized societies, a long process that both resulted in the modern borders of China and helped blunt the potentially destabilizing effects of environmental problems. In the modern world such ex- pansionist solutions are disagreeable to contemplate. Instead, some countries manage to sidestep ecological pressures today through international trade. They obtain needed materials from afar and can, in the process, shield themselves from some of the environmental effects of, say, logging and mining. The Netherlands provides a useful contemporary illustration of this. Dia- mond mentions the Netherlands as an example of an environmentally aware society in which people have come together to address their problems because the Dutch, mostly living below sea level, all share a strong mutual interest in keeping the Netherlands safe from the sea (pp. 519–520). This may (or may not) be the best explanation for the apparent harmony with which the Dutch conduct their environmental business, but there is more to it. The Dutch do not have to use land for timber production because they are among the world’s largest per capita importers of timber, most of it tropical hardwoods from Southeast Asia. The Dutch are the world’s biggest cocoa importers, and biggest exporters of cocoa products, and maintain 13 million pigs and 100 million chickens with imported fodder, such as soya from Brazil. They can survive handsomely and harmoniously in part because the deforestation, soil erosion, and degradation associated with cutting timber, growing cocoa, and soya happen in Indonesia, West Africa, and Brazilian Amazonia, not in the Netherlands.13 The Dutch are far from unique in casting a long ecological shadow. Japan has one that extends over much of Southeast Asia and the Western Paciªc, including Australia, which logs and mines its landscape in part to export to Japan (and lately, to China). In ecological terms, the Japanese in recent decades have constructed a giant equivalent of the Co-prosperity Sphere of the 1930s,

12. See Mark Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). 13. Netherlands data are taken from the Netherlands Committee for IUCN, http://www .nciucn.nl.

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with the notable variation that the Persian Gulf is a big part of the equation now, because that is where Japan gets most of its oil. Even a resource-rich, spa- cious country well endowed with ecological buffers such as the United States has in the past hundred years or so moderated its domestic ecological pressures by exporting some of them to other lands.14 These current patterns are the latest manifestations of a long-standing propensity for population centers to shunt ecological pressures to thinly populated peripheries. For most of human history, most of the world was thinly populated, and so this propensity only sporadically produced ecological dis- tress, although it was often hard on peoples involved. From, roughly speaking, 1600 to 1900 the world’s densely populated centers eased their troubles by sustaining frontier movements and mobilizing, purchasing (or stealing), and consuming the resources of frontier zones, whether in Siberia, Manchuria, Hokkaido, Bengal, South Africa, the Pampas, the North American prairies, New South Wales, or New Zealand. These lands and their resources were normally accessible because they were only thinly populated by peoples who were generally highly susceptible to epidemics, and therefore militarily more vulnerable with each passing year. These frontier processes helped China ac- quire the timber it needed even though mainland China was, by 1700, much deforested. In addition, they helped Britain ªnd timber and grain when it had too many people and too little fuel and food on too small an island in 1800.15 With continued economic and population growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the quests for more fuel, food, and ªber soon extended to the tropical latitudes. For most of human history, tropical latitudes had been sparsely inhabited, partly because they usually featured difªcult disease re- gimes, and partly because ecological conditions normally made agriculture more challenging. But in the twentieth century it was possible, and today it remains possible, for richer countries to import tremendous quantities of raw materials from farms, plantations, and mines in the tropical world, and thereby spare their own forests and landscapes. In a sense, just as they enjoy a gigantic energy subsidy from the geological past in the form of coal and oil,

14. See Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 15. India, China, and Japan prior to 1900 had resource frontiers just as the United States, Britain, and Russia did. See, for example, Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); James Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnic- ity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2005); Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers; and Brett Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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they enjoy an environmental subsidy from historically underpopulated and underdeveloped regions. Those regions, in effect, not only provide virtual land in the form of food, timber, and so on, but also a sink for the pollution that comes with mining, smelting, and many other industrial operations.16 All this suggests that the continued smooth functioning of the industrial world’s economy is not immediately imperiled by ongoing ecological degradation. Most of the poorer parts of the world have no better deal in prospect than selling minerals, ªbers, and timber and absorbing the environmental costs of doing so. And in many cases, even though these patterns are generally unsustainable, they still have a long way to go before the environmental costs of such a role in the world economy become genuinely unsupportable. Smooth functioning would be imperiled if energy supplies were interrupted or became notably more expensive, or if the modern-day resource frontiers for some reason declined to take part in these exchanges. Until such time, it will be feasible for a while longer for industrial societies to export some of the environmental pressures deriving from their economies and societies to the economically and politically weaker parts of the world. While admittedly unsustainable, this ar- rangement has a ways yet to run before it too must change and become another defunct ecological regime consigned to the dustbin of environmental history.

Environmental Collapse: Present and Future

Diamond’s book, which is as much about the present as it is about the past, raises a second fundamental question about ecology and politics: How might some of today’s social and political trends affect the likelihood of some sort of environmentally driven collapse? Consider just a few: the economic rise of China, the prospect of a new energy regime, and the slowing of global population growth. Historically the international system has a poor record in accommodating rising powers. China’s meteoric economic rise since 1978 will continue to be translated into political and military power, and will surely pose a stern threat to international stability, even if, as now seems the case, the Chinese leadership aims to avoid giving direct challenge. That much is clear enough. But China’s

16. The idea of virtual land as an advantage in the historical economic development of Europe is used in E.L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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economic growth also means that it will increasingly resemble the Netherlands and Japan in casting an ecological shadow beyond its borders, as indeed it did on a modest scale in prior centuries. It will need more food and fuel than it can produce.17 Similar problems in prior centuries routinely inspired drives for territorial expansion by China, and more recently by Germany and Japan. Three or four generations ago, Germany and Japan were rising powers within the international system and economic tigers posting year after year of rapid growth (although no one measured it back then). They sought to safe- guard their future growth and to secure ºows of raw materials—which World War I had shown could be catastrophically interrupted—through territorial expansion and autarkic economic systems. This brought them to ruin in 1945, after which they prospered mightily by joining the U.S.-led international economy, premised not on territory and autarky but on liberal international trade. Most indications are that China will prefer the post-1945 approach taken by Germany and Japan, rather than the earlier one. But even so, because of its size, provided growth continues, it will raise global demand for food and fuel (and other resources as well), boosting prices and pushing resource extraction industries into new landscapes. The rise of China by itself is very unlikely to bring on any sort of environmentally driven collapse either within China or in the lands that supply it. But it will speed up the process by which the Earth’s ecological buffers are further pared away. It will be, in short, an additional source of environmental stress upon the world at large, especially in the realm of climate change because of China’s burgeoning demand for fossil fuels. China’s energy thirst may bring the day closer when a new energy regime emerges. Today’s is thoroughly based on fossil fuels. The seventeenth-century Dutch were the ªrst to depend heavily on fossil fuels, in their case peat, which provided perhaps 40 percent of their total energy expenditure.18 This allowed the Dutch to build a precocious modern economy with energy-intensive industries (e.g., brewing, sugar-reªning, and salt-making) producing goods the Dutch could trade abroad for food, timber, and other necessities. It also helped underpin the geopolitical assertion of the Dutch on the world stage. After 1800 Great Britain turned to coal with which it achieved similar results on a larger scale, as did the United States after 1900 with oil. But sooner or later, with a bang or a whimper, there will be a new energy regime, with a different set of geopolitical implications. That new regime could take a variety of shapes; but

17. Vaclav Smil, China’s Past, China’s Future (New York: Routledge, 2004). 18. M.A.W. Gerding, Vier eeuwen turfwinning: De verveningen in Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe, en Overijssel tussen 1550 en 1950 [Four centuries of peat production: Peat formation in Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe, and Overijssel from 1550 to 1950] (Utrecht, Netherlands: HES, 1995), p. 365.

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in all likelihood, it will reshufºe wealth and power around the world, and could in the process help bring on more than a few collapses. It is entirely plausible that the United States, which has been the greatest beneªciary of the oil regime, will be among the most reluctant to take part in the coming shift, thereby raising the chance it will suffer additional transition pains. The new energy regime is presumably decades away. Past energy transitions were gradual affairs. In the meantime, fossil fuels will continue to reign su- preme with their attendant environmental effects. These effects are mainly lo- cal urban air pollution, especially from coal, which kills at least half a million people a year nowadays; and carbon dioxide emissions, which apparently (one cannot be completely sure) are the main driving force behind global warming. The waning decades of the fossil fuel regime will coincide with the waning years of rapid population growth, making the next few decades the ecological eye of the needle: if societies and humankind as a whole can make it to 2050 (or so) without environmental collapses, then matters are likely to ease— gradually—thereafter. The modern era since 1800 has been characterized above all else by two related trends: enormous growth in energy use (after centuries of marginal in- creases) and enormous acceleration of population growth (after centuries of little to none). These two trends have been the most disruptive ecological forces of modern times.19 The Earth carried 200 or 300 million people in the time of the Roman and Han empires. By 1500 it had perhaps 400 or 500 million, and by 1800 perhaps 750 million. Then growth accelerated until its historical apex about 1965–70, after which it slackened—although it remains very high by historical standards. Still, demographers anticipate that for various reasons, urbanization prominent among them, growth rates will continue to fall, and ever more quickly, so that by 2050 the human population will have reached its zenith at around 9 billion. If they are right, one of the great sources of environmental pressure in the past—and present—will disappear. (At least temporarily: it is unclear what might follow in terms of population trends— decline, stability, alternating growth and decline.) If the post-2050 trend is one of stability or gradual decline, then ecological pressures might well ease. And if the next energy regime is more environment friendly than the last, which is almost certain to be the case, then it is perhaps appropriate to look forward to a new era in the history of the human-biosphere relationship, one in which hu-

19. This case is argued in J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 267–356.

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mankind proves a much less disruptive agent, and the general turbulence and tumult of environmental history abates. This cheerful future is far from guaranteed. There are, again, nonlinear effects and no shortage of ways in which things could go drastically wrong. The cumulative effects of our career on Earth will still be felt. For example, the carbon dioxide now pumped into the atmosphere will on average stay there 80– 100 years, and still be trapping solar radiation and warming the planet in the year 2080. But nonetheless, if the new energy regime comes, and if the demographers are correct, it is the next 40–50 years that are likely to be the most dangerous.

Conclusion

Can today’s states and societies adapt their behavior so as to raise their odds of making it safely through the next half century? Can they avoid the rigidities that undermined the Easter Islanders and the Greenland Norse? If Diamond’s analyses are correct, the answer here probably lies with the conduct of the elites who have the most invested in perpetuating current arrangements. For reasons of short-sighted self-interest, or of ideological or cultural lock-in, they may cling to the status quo and raise the risks to one and all of some sort of collapse. They may fail to see, as one aristocrat says to another amid social rev- olution in Sicily in the novel The Leopard, “If we want things to stay as they are things will have to change.”20 In the last two centuries humankind has become the aristocracy of the biosphere, living a privileged existence partly on the basis of legacies from the deeper past (fossil fuels) and partly at the expense of other creatures. To safe- guard our position will require ªrst that we admit that fundamental things— ecological arrangements—will have to change, and then that we permit them to change. It may not be necessary to do so in six months or even six years, and so it remains difªcult to ªx the attention of the public or policymakers on these fundamentals. Only Machiavelli’s wise princes and prudent men will be likely to do so. The rest of us are caught up with the concerns of the moment. It is therefore most welcome that an author with the public Diamond commands has focused attention on the role of ecological vulnerability in societal declines and collapses, and on the role of wisdom, restraint, and ºexibility in sidestepping them.

20. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Panthe- on, 1960), p. 40. In the original: “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come e’, bisogna che tutto cambi.”

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