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| Jared Diamond: Eco-Suicide Is The New Danger |
500 Views |
| posted on Thursday, March 15, 2007 |
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AUTHOR OF 'GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL' - ECO-SUICIDE IS THE NEW DANGER; WRITER FINDS A WARNING IN FAILURES OF PAST CIVILIZATIONS
By Steve Parker
Echoes-Sentinel
March 13, 2007
Original Link
Developed nations consume 32 times more of the world's natural resources on a per capita basis than the rest of the world.
If those nations continue to live like gated communities, heedless of looming environmental catastrophe, we all risk falling prey to the dire fate of failed civilizations.
That was the message delivered by Jared Diamond, noted author, professor and the speaker on Thursday, Feb. 8, at the Thomas H. Kean lecture series at Drew University in Madison.
Speaking to a capacity crowd at the Simon Forum, the UCLA professor of geography and influential observer of environmental issues, based his remarks on research done for his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller "Guns, Germs and Steel,'' and his acclaimed follow-up work, "Collapse'' which examines why civilizations succeed or fail.
Failed civilizations share five common characteristics, according to Diamond, including environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, shifting trade patterns, and a shortsighted or greedy leadership response to the threat.
Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an "eco-meltdown" -- especially de-forestation -- is often the primary culprit, he argues, particularly when combined with societal disregard for the coming disaster.
"The typical pattern starts with population growth, leading to intensified agricultural production and ecological damage," he said. "The agricultural practices become unsustainable, leading to shortages and starvation, wars and civil unrest, and ultimately to collapse."
One of the extinct civilizations he cites in his book is the Anasazi, who settled about 600 AD in what is now known as the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona in the American southwest.
Remembered for their remarkable cliff housing, they successfully worked their marginal agricultural land but chopped down all the trees without any plans for reforestation.
By 1200 AD soil erosion had lead to starvation, tribal warfare, cannibalism and societal collapse.
To the south, the Mayan civilization built amazing cities, wrote prolifically, and enjoyed bountiful crops of corn. But the Maya, too, went aground after they clear-cut their forests and fell prey to inter-city warfare. The Maya decline began about 1000 AD, and the Spanish conquistadores delivered the coup de grace about 1675.
Diamond cited the isolated island society of Easter Island during his talk as a metaphor for a Planet Earth that may also reap the whirlwind of short-sighted environmental practices.
Today the 68 square mile tree-less island is famous for its arid landscape and its mysterious collection of 30 foot, 90 ton statues.
When first re-discovered in 1742, its eerie barren landscape was grist for rumination over alien activity. In the past 20 years, archaeologists and paleontologists have forensically pieced together what likely happened to the remote island's prior occupants.
Covered with the world's largest palm trees upon its discovery 1000 years ago, the island enjoyed a verdant ecosystem.
However, settlers did not have the foresight to replant after they systematically denuded the landscape, and the last tree was cut down around 1680. The resultant loss of top soil and the absence of raw materials to build canoes from which they harvested their maritime food supply resulted ultimately in civil war over a shrinking pie. Eventually the civilization succumbed to cannibalism.
In a more current case study, Diamond made an unconventional interpretation of the bloody Rwandan conflict. It was not a mutually genocidal affair propelled by ancient hatreds, as many historians suggest.
Rather Diamond proposes the Malthusian model of too many people with too little land. The Hutu and Tutsi had lived together amicably -- until geometric population growth far exceeded agricultural capacity, fulfilling the Malthus thesis. The brutal killing was thus, according to Diamond, primarily over land, not tribal membership.
Eco-Suicide
Today, he sees similar destructive patterns throughout the world -- the deforested landscapes of Haiti; air and water pollution in China; destruction of vast swaths of forest by sheep and rabbits in Australia; oil and chemical disasters in the North Sea and in Bhopal.
Eco-suicide is an ever-present risk not just in remote parts of the world but stateside as well. Diamond advised the audience to visit Glacier National Park before 2020, by which time -- thanks to global warming -- its name may be Glacier-less National Park.
The state of Montana, pristine in the minds of many, is in Diamond's view a poster child for bad environmental stewardship: toxic chemicals are routinely dumped into over-salinated water supplies, while air pollution is ever-increasing. His home city of Los Angeles also elicits much hand-wringing approbation for its out-of-touch gated communities, urban sprawl and constant smog.
Not all at-risk societies end up collapsing, Diamond points out. Japan long ago recognized its vulnerability and has successfully replanted and protected its forests for the past four centuries. The Dominican Republic also preserved its forests and is now eight times richer than its desperate neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, Haiti, which has systematically ravished both land and forests.
"These are societies that have come to success by right thought and action," according to Diamond. "They are sensible stewards of the environment."
What lessons does Diamond want us to draw from these case studies?
First we must take environmental problems seriously. Ecological suicide has replaced nuclear holocaust as the biggest threat to global civilization, according to Diamond. Second, society needs to move beyond the "either-or" mind set of the environment vs. the economy. Saving the environment does not need to be a "luxury". The deferred maintenance on New Orleans' levee system serves as a notorious reminder that fixing environmental problems early on is cheaper than waiting until after a disaster.
Finally, Diamond said he believes that the notion of the collective good must be re-calibrated. The rights of the individual property owner are indeed important, they but can be taken too far. He speculated bemusedly that the owner of the last tree on Easter Island must have been a libertarian.
Here in the United States, he's particularly concerned about the trend in his home city of Los Angeles toward gated communities of private security, bottled water, private schools, private pension plans, and private health insurance. He'd like the residents of the U.S. to be more like those of the Netherlands, where rich and poor alike live below sea level -- a situation which creates a shared appreciation of common risks.
He sees all of these issues becoming globally critical within a few decades. While Diamond does not foresee an apocalyptic collapse, he does predict that scarcity of resources will result in significantly lower living standards, higher incidents of disease, and more wars.
Diamond acknowledged his critics when he noted that in fact one cannot extrapolate directly from past to future. Some of the differences between conditions in the past and those of today incline him towards pessimism, some towards optimism.
On the negative side he cites the existence today of far more people with far more destructive tools. It took 800 years to pull down trees on Easter Island using primitive tools. Today, thanks to more advanced technology, the whole world is being de-forested at a much faster rate.
He also points out that globalization is not a one-way street. We can also be sent bad things -- like AIDS, cholera and emerging diseases.
In the past, small areas collapsed one by one; today, with fewer fire walls separating societies, all areas are interconnected. Thus, in the global economy, a societal collapse affects all of us. Failed states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and, now, Iraq used to be considered irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy; today, as breeding grounds for terrorists, they are ignored at our profound peril.
Nonetheless, on balance he said there is hope for the future. Today, thanks to advances in their fields, historians and archaeologists tell us what happened in the past, and why, with much greater confidence.
As the first society in history to analyze empirically why prior civilizations failed or succeeded, we have the ability to learn from past mistakes, he said.
Also, improved communication throughout the world means that we are all better informed about good practices sooner. We can share information and respond to challenges in ways that past civilizations never could. Finally, he noted that more and more smart companies -- he cited General Electric and British Petroleum -- understand that money can also be made from helping to solve environmental problems.
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