Identify and explain the reasons why some societies make disastrous decisions, according to Diamond. What are the most serious problems identified by Di
Please answer one of the following questions:
Please be thorough in your answers, identifying important concepts and defining them, providing examples from the course materials.
- Identify and explain the reasons why some societies make “disastrous decisions,” according to Diamond. What are the most serious problems identified by Diamond? Identify specific “signs of hope,” as discussed by Diamond. Utilize the course materials we’ve reviewed to date and your own knowledge and experience to argue in support of 3 things people could do on an individual level and 3 things we could (should?) do as a nation to address issues of environmental degradation across the globe. What objections might be raised against arguments for improving the environment? Are these objections sound? Why/why not?
- In Chapter 15, Diamond discusses Big Business and the Environment. What are some of the reasons why different companies perceive it as being in their interests to adopt different policies, either harming or sparing the environment? What changes does Diamond suggest would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead? Please use examples from this reading.
- Summarize the main ideas of Lecture 7. What, if anything, can the state and policy do to address issues of environmental justice? Please be thorough and provide examples from the course material.
The State & Policy:
Imperialism, Exclusion, and Ecological Violence as State Poliy
Introduction
One of the most enduring views of the state (the government and its various administrative arms, agencies, and structures) is of pluralism .
Pluralism is the idea that politics in a democracy is a process in which various associations (eg trade unions, business groups, churches) engage in a competition for access to state resources and governmental control. Pluralism involves groups sharing power with the state , thus avoiding dominance by government or by any particular interest group. Interest groups strive to influence state policy making through this process, thus allowing citizens multiple paths for voicing their concerns and gaining access to the political system.
In practice, however, we are often less pluralist than we might imagine.
The Treadmill of Production
Schnaiberg and Gould (2000) developed a theoretical framework that captures the dynamis of how market forces and political institutions interact to produce ecological disorganization while creating wealth and power for a minority of persons and lower wages and less power for the majority.
The Treadmill of Production is a system in which we can see the increasing accumulation of wealth and investments into capital intensive technologies, rising social inequalities, and greater “ecological withdrawals” (Gould and Lewis,, 2009), or natural resource extraction, and “additions” (ibid) or pollution, all of which are encouraged and facilitated by the nation state.
One of the best ways to increase profits is not only to ignore pollution but to also reduce labor costs. Most businesses do this by introducing automation, cutting wages, downsizing employment rolls, and reducing workers’ benefits—increasing levels of economic inequality and instability both nationally and globally.
Examples of this include: the number of temporary workers has increased dramatically in the past 3 decades; the richest 2,500 people on earth possess as much wealth as do the poorest 2.5 billion; 1% of the US population owns 40% of the nation’s wealth, real wages have declines precipitously since the 1970s.
This leads to a workforce that is increasingly non-unionized, hold temporary jobs, receive low wages, and are at risk of experiencing under/un-employment. While the other end of the spectrum exists a much smaller elite class of white collar “knowledge workers” with higher pay, higher education levels, higher social status, greater career mobility options, and safer jobs.
Furthermore, we have greater pollution levels,, social instability, social conflict, and pressures on the state to take up the slack for people who have been downsized and have no childcare or healthcare.
The State has been offering billions of dollars in subsidies to corporations in hopes of keeping them within national borders and therefore has fewer funds to pay out to citizens/consumers/workers in social benefits.
As the ideology of economic growth at all costs becomes a dominant theme, there is less political will or sympathy for downsized workers.
According to Schnaiberg and Gould, the modern treadmill of production really grew in scope beginning in the post-WWII era—good economic times. But as economic globalization intensified, the industrial and governmental belts began to tighten. As early as the 1960s, the US treadmill had already begun to undergo significant changes from its post-1945 structure.
As global economic competition increased, industry felt the need to cut costs in order to remain solvent and/or to continue offering high rates of return to investors and shareholders.
They did this by weakening the labor movement, reducing workers’ wages, and downsizing many positions in firms. These actions, combined with the movement of companies to lower-cost regions of the country or to other nations, created massive unemployment in urban areas and a national crisis in the form of chronic economic downturns.
Before and during this time, there was also an exponential increase in the use of chamicals and toxins in industrial production, with a weak or non-existent environmental regulatory system—producing urban and rural wastelands across the world.
So many in urban areas now have extensive unemployment, hundreds of square miles of abandoned factories, and toxic hotspots. Ecological disruption and social disruption exist side-by-side and go hand-in-hand. These dynamics form the essence of the treadmill of production. The treadmill of production produces and reinforces social and economic inequalities,– locally, nationally, globally.
References
Goulder, Kenneth A. and Tammy L. Lewis (2009) “Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology.” Oxford University Press: NY.
Schnailberg, Allan and Kenneth Gould (2000) “Environment and Society: The Enduring Conflict.” Blackburn Press: Caldwell, NJ.
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COLLAPSE HOW S O C I E T I E S CHOOSE
TO FAIL OR S U C C E E D
J A R E D D I A M O N D
V I K I N G
VIKING Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2005 All rights reserved
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p. cm. Includes index.
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Case studies. I. Title. HN13. D5 2005
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To Jack and Ann Hirschy,
Jill Hirschy Eliel and John Eliel, Joyce Hirschy McDowell,
Dick (1929-2003) and Margy Hirschy, and their fellow Montanans:
guardians of Montana's big sky
I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things, The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."
"Ozymandias," by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
C O N T E N T S
List of Maps xiu
Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms
1 Two farms « Collapses, past and present » Vanished Edens? A five-point framework Businesses and the environment The comparative method Plan of the book
PartOne: MODERN MONTANA 25
Chapter 1: Under Montana's Big Sky 27 Stan Falkow's story « Montana and me Why begin with Montana? Montana's economic history Mining • Forests Soil Water «» Native and non-native species Differing visions » Attitudes towards regulation • Rick Laible's story Chip Pigman's story » Tim Huls's story John Cook's story Montana, model of the world *
PartTwo: PAST SOCIETIES 77
Chapter 2: Twilight at Easter 79 The quarry's mysteries « Easter's geography and history People and food * Chiefs, clans, and commoners Platforms and statues Carving, transporting, erecting The vanished forest Consequences for society Europeans and explanations Why was Easter fragile? Easter as metaphor •
Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands 120 Pitcairn before the Bounty Three dissimilar islands » Trade The movie's ending *
Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors 136 Desert farmers • Tree rings * Agricultural strategies * Chaco's problems and packrats • Regional integration Chaco's decline and end * Chaco's message
X Contents
Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses 157 Mysteries of lost cities The Maya environment Maya agriculture Maya history Copan * Complexities of collapses Wars and droughts Collapse in the southern lowlands The Maya message
Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues 178 Experiments in the Atlantic The Viking explosion Autocatalysis Viking agriculture Iron Viking chiefs Viking religion Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes Iceland's environment Iceland's history Iceland in context Vinland
Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering 211 Europe's outpost Greenland's climate today Climate in the past
Native plants and animals « Norse settlement Farming Hunting and fishing An integrated economy Society Trade with Europe * Self-image
Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End 248 Introduction to the end Deforestation » Soil and turf damage The Inuit's predecessors Inuit subsistence Inuit/Norse relations * The end Ultimate causes of the end «
Chapter 9: Opposite Paths to Success 277 Bottom up, top down New Guinea highlands Tikopia Tokugawa problems Tokugawa solutions Why Japan succeeded Other successes
Part Three: MODERN SOCIETIES 309
Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide 311 A dilemma Events in Rwanda * More than ethnic hatred Buildup in Kanama Explosion in Kanama Why it happened
Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti 329
Differences * Histories Causes of divergence * Dominican environmental impacts Balaguer The Dominican environment today The future
Contents xi
Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant 358 China's significance Background Air, water, soil Habitat, species, megaprojects Consequences Connections The future •
Chapter 13: "Mining" Australia 378 Australia's significance * Soils Water Distance Early history E Imported values Trade and immigration Land degradation • Other environmental problems Signs of hope and change
Part Four: PRACTICAL LESSONS 417
Chapter 14: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? 419
Road map for success Failure to anticipate Failure to perceive Rational bad behavior Disastrous values Other irrational
failures Unsuccessful solutions • Signs of hope «
Chapter 15: Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes 441
Resource extraction « Two oil fields » Oil company motives Hardrock mining operations * Mining company motives • Differences among mining companies The logging industry « Forest Stewardship Council The seafood industry Businesses and the public »
Chapter 16: The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? 486
Introduction The most serious problems • If we don't solve them … Life in Los Angeles • One-liner objections The past and the present Reasons for hope
Acknowledgments 526 Further Readings 529 Index ' 561 Illustration Credits 576
LIST OF MAPS
The World: Prehistoric, Historic, and Modern Societies 4-5
Contemporary Montana 31
The Pacific Ocean, the Pitcairn Islands, and Easter Island 84-85
The Pitcairn Islands 122
Anasazi Sites 142
Maya Sites 161
The Viking Expansion 182-183
Contemporary Hispaniola 331
Contemporary China 361
Contemporary Australia 386
Political Trouble Spots of the Modern World; Environmental Trouble Spots of the Modern World 497
I
C O L L A P S E
P R O L O G U E
A Tale of Two Farms Two farms Collapses, past and present Vanished Edens? A five-point framework * Businesses and the environment
The comparative method * Plan of the book
few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were
by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnifi- cent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their pro- duction of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respec- tively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teaming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or fjord (below Gardar Farm).
Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, be- cause their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to wnich they could market their products, so that transportation costs and
A
hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more cen- trally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners' control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies.
The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls, who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabi- tants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me to- day of Gardar's former attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at their peak, their decline seemed as inconceiv- able as does the decline of Huls Farm and the U.S. today.
Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms, I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed to decline. At present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the process of expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for adoption by neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most pow- erful country in the world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in gen- eral are prone to collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar, others have survived uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing envi- ronmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also strug-
gled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse), and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding.
Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or van- ished, leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imag- ined in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is thus an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse. Some of those milder types of decline include the normal minor rises and falls of fortune, and minor political/ economic/social restructurings, of any individual society; one society's con- quest by a close neighbor, or its decline linked to the neighbor's rise, with- out change in the total population size or complexity of the whole region; and the replacement or overthrow of one governing elite by another. By those standards, most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zim- babwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4-5).
The monumental ruins left behind by those past societies hold a roman- tic fascination for all of us. We marvel at them when as children we first learn of them through pictures. When we grow up, many of us plan vaca- tions in order to experience them at firsthand as tourists. We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose. The scales of the ruins testify to the former wealth and power of their builders—they boast "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" in Shelley's words. Yet the builders vanished, abandoning the great structures that they had created at such effort. How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing? What were the fates of its individual citizens?— did they move away, and (if so) why, or did they die there in some unpleas- ant way? Lurking behind this romantic mystery is the nagging thought: might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists
someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?
It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandon- ments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadver- tently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scien- tists). The processes through which past societies have undermined them- selves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat de- struction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), wa- ter management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per- capita impact of people.
Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses consti- tuting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double- cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally mar- ginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society in- cluded food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or dis- ease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural com- plexity that it had developed at its peak. Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives—to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senes- cence, and death—and to assume that the long period of senescence that most of us traverse between our peak years and our deaths also applies to societies. But that metaphor proves erroneous for many past societies (and for the modern Soviet Union): they declined rapidly after reaching peak numbers and power, and those rapid declines must have come as a surprise and shock to their citizens. In the worst cases of complete collapse, every- body in the society emigrated or died. Obviously, though, this grim trajec- tory is not one that all past societies followed unvaryingly to completion:
different societies collapsed to different degrees and in somewhat different ways, while many societies didn't collapse at all.
The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern; indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civi- lization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apoca- lyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be "just" a future of signifi- cantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could as- sume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources. If this rea- soning is correct, then our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generation of children and young adults lives out their middle and late years.
But the seriousness of these current environmental problems is vigor- ously debated. Are the risks greatly exaggerated, or conversely are they un- derestimated? Does it stand to reason that today's human population of almost seven billion, with our potent modern technology, is causing our en- vironment to crumble globally at a much more rapid rate than a mere few million people with stone and wooden tools already made it crumble locally in the past? Will modern technology solve our problems, or is it creating new problems faster than it solves old ones? When we deplete one resource (e.g., wood, oil, or ocean fish), can we count on being able to substitute some new resource (e.g., plastics, wind and solar energy, or farmed fish)? Isn't the rate of human population growth declining, such that we're already on course for the world's population to level off at some manageable num- ber of people?
All of these questions illustrate why those famous collapses of past civili- zations have taken on more meaning than just that of a romantic mystery. Perhaps there are some practical lessons that we could learn from all those
past collapses. We know that some past societies collapsed while others didn't: what made certain societies especially vulnerable? What, exactly, were the processes by which past societies committed ecocide? Why did some past societies fail to see the messes that they were getting into, and that (one would think in retrospect) must have been obvious? Which were the solutions that succeeded in the past? If we could answer these questions, we might be able to identify which societies are now most at risk, and what measures could best help them, without waiting for more Somalia-like collapses.
But there are also differences between the modern world and its problems, and those past societies and their problems. We shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them; some of those respects often mentioned include our powerful technology (i.e., its beneficial effects), globalization, modern medicine, and greater knowledge of past societies and of distant modern societies. We also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them: mentioned in that connection are, again, our potent technology (i.e., its unintended destructive effects), globalization (such that now a collapse even in remote Somalia affects the U.S. and Europe), the dependence of millions (and, soon, billions) of us on modern medicine for our survival, and our much larger human population. Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons
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