alt.atheism.holysmoke,alt.atheism,talk.origins
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/10659829.htm
Posted on Sun, Jan. 16, 2005
Fate of the planet
Earth's success, failure depends on interconnected societies
Reviewed by Robert D. Kaplan
In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in
need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think
historically and spatially across an array of disciplines to
make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in
depth, but in fact aren't.
He did this so well in "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which has been a
huge best seller since its publication in 1997, that one might
think Diamond would have little more to say about the vast sweep
of human history. Think again. In his extraordinarily panoramic
"Collapse," he moves his wide lens to yet another telling
phenomenon: failed nations, of both the distant and the recent
past.
Take the 1994 slaughter in Rwanda, which produced the
third-largest body count of any genocide since the 1950s, topped
only by Bangladesh in 1971 and Cambodia in the mid-'70s. According
to the media, liberal intellectuals and Hollywood, the Hutu
militias' mass murder of Tutsi civilians was the consequence of
evil men manipulating ethnic hatreds, while the United Nations and
the United States stood by and did nothing.
As "Collapse" indicates, that interpretation is accurate and
places the moral responsibility squarely where it belongs.
Nevertheless, it is far from complete.
In perhaps the wisest and most all-encompassing short summary of
why genocide occurred in Rwanda, Diamond observes that
pre-genocide Rwanda had a population density approaching that of
Holland, supported by Stone Age agriculture: In the years
preceding the genocide, Rwanda suffered a precipitous decline in
per capita food production because of drought and overworked soil,
which in turn caused massive deforestation. The upshot was
dramatically rising levels of theft and violence perpetrated by
landless and hungry young men.
Diamond quotes a French scholar on East Africa, Gerard Prunier:
"The decision to kill was of course made by politicians, for
political reasons. But at least part of the reason why it was
carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants
... was feeling that there were too many people on too little
land, and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be
more for the survivors."
Diamond adds that such a partial explanation should be respected
as such and not dismissed out of hand as an excuse for genocide,
as moralists have been wont to do. By not reducing Rwanda to a
cut-and-dried morality tale, and by including environmental
factors that can be usefully employed as early warning systems to
prevent future genocides, Diamond has provided a truly enlightened
vision of what happened there. He has the intellectual bravery to
say that, in this case, the much-abused late 18th-century
philosopher Thomas Malthus was right: "population and
environmental problems created by non-sustainable resource use
will ultimately get solved ... if not by pleasant means ... then
by unpleasant" ones.
Rwanda forms but a strand in Diamond's complex historical web of
how human communities either master their environments or become
victims of them.
A professor of geography at UCLA, Diamond rightly states that his
book "doesn't preach environmental determinism." Still, he
extracts a plethora of environmental explanations for why things
have turned out as they have. "Collapse," like "Guns, Germs, and
Steel" which was about how Western civilizations developed the
technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate the
world is the work of an academic superstar in the mode of Samuel
P. Huntington and David S. Landes. He takes a lifetime of research
and, in normal English, leads the reader painstakingly where the
media and intellectual journals often have refused to go.
For example, while recent media reports correctly describe a
decline in the rate of world population growth, the more crucial
short-term truth is that there will be a continued rise in the
population of poor young males in some of the most politically
unstable countries, as children born in the last decade reach
their teens and 20s. Diamond's book makes one think of connections
like these.
Or take the December 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of South
Asia. Because humans are living in environmentally fragile zones
where they have never before been in such concentrated numbers,
the normal occurrence of earthquakes and other natural events the
environment has faced since time immemorial is poised to wreak
havoc in the new century. While the urban elite intelligentsia
focus on abstract ideas, nature and demography will be driving
history.
In an exploration of why medieval societies such as the Mayans in
Central America, the Anasazis in the American Southwest, the
Polynesians on Easter Island and the Norse in Greenland all
ultimately became extinct, of why the Inuit in the Arctic and
Polynesians on Tikopia managed to survive, and of why places such
as Montana's Bitterroot Valley and the Dominican Republic have had
happier destinies than Rwanda and Haiti, Diamond brings balance to
a debate that went from one extreme at the beginning of the 20th
century to another at that century's end.
Partly because of the corruption of Darwin's theory of evolution
by Nazi eugenics, post-Holocaust intellectuals have tended to
avoid explanations of human behavior rooted in environmental,
ethnic, cultural or demographic causes. By avoiding both extremes,
Diamond sheds light on what the media have often left in darkness.
Of all the countries surveyed in "Collapse," China is the most
pivotal. Its goal of achieving a First World lifestyle for its 1.3
billion people will double the world's human resource use, but as
Diamond tells us, "it is doubtful whether even the world's current
human resource use ... can be sustained. Something has to give
way."
Raising the stakes is what the author calls China's pattern of
unified lurches. China's geographical unity unlike Great
Britain, it lacks major islands, and unlike Italy, it lacks large
peninsulas has given it a political and linguistic homogeneity
that Europe never had. Thus China's leaders have had the
organizational capacity to create gargantuan tragedies such as the
Great Leap Forward, when 20 million people were killed between
1958 and 1962, or to take positive steps on a similarly grand
level, as when they instituted a national ban on logging in 1998.
Diamond's cautious optimism about the fate of the Earth is
conditioned on vigilance. He defends the false alarms about
resource scarcity issued in the 1970s and '80s by the demographer
Paul Ehrlich, suggesting that Ehrlich's larger, implied point
about surging populations and diminishing resources is true: While
these trends do not necessarily lead to global cataclysm, they
certainly have been a factor encouraging warfare and civil unrest
across the underdeveloped world.
That's the reason why Diamond expends so much detail on the
failure of such obscure civilizations as Easter Island and western
Greenland. On Easter Island, the felling of trees for
high-altitude gardens, the cremation of bodies, the building of
canoes and scaffolding for statues led to massive deforestation
and decreased crop yields. As for the Greenland Norse, they were a
fiercely communal and hierarchical society, whose strict adherence
to European Christianity may have accounted for their conservatism
and consequent failure to learn from the indigenous Inuits, who
burned whale and sea blubber for fuel and used sealskins in their
kayaks in order to conserve wood.
But as Diamond notes, we shouldn't be dismissive of these failed
civilizations. The parallels between an interconnected Earth, in
which each continent increasingly affects the other, and the dozen
clans of Easter Island are, in the author's words, "chillingly
obvious."
Like them, we would have no place to flee if something
fundamentally goes wrong: not just suddenly wrong but gradually
wrong, so that the danger remains deniable until it's too late.
Thus false alarms like Ehrlich's and Malthus' will continue to be
made in a good cause. Thank heavens there is someone of the
stature of Diamond willing to say so.
Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly, is the
author of "The Ends of the Earth" and "The Coming Anarchy." His
latest book, "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the
Ground," will be published in August. He wrote this for Washington
Post Book World.
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