Collapsing with Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse," looks at civilizations both ancient and modern in search of the reasons why some succeed and others fail. The answers, not surprisingly, turn out to be largely environmental. The more gripping question is why many civilizations were unable to avert destruction. In examining one civilization after another, Diamond provides a host of answers, ranging from the imperceptibility of certain problems, such as the level of salt in a particular soil, to the inability of a society to change a dangerous but learned behavior, to plain selfishness. There comes a definite point, after many chapters under the tutelage of Diamond's clinical perspective, when the reader begins to perceive the mortal outline of our own civilization. It's an alarming thought, to say the least. But, in a marked departure from his last book, Diamond leaves more room here for human agency. These dread outcomes are avoidable -- if, he suggests, we can find the strength to see past our cultural biases, our class prejudices, our distrust of big business, our loathing of one political party or the other, our fear of terrorism and so on. Only, in short, if we can see how peripheral we are to the future of our own civilization can we have any hope of saving that civilization.

The CHL spoke with Diamond right after he returned from a family cruise to the Panama Canal from Costa Rica, a country that interested him because of its relative prosperity in Central America.

CHL: So, what did you discover while you polluted your way down to and back from Costa Rica?

Diamond: It's very interesting, the contrast between Costa Rica on the one hand and Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala on the other -- all relatively poor countries and yet all five are adjacent to one another, and they were all joined in a single country, the Republic of Central America, for 20 years in the last century. Couple of reasons. In Costa Rica there were very few natives for the Spaniards to enslave. The Spaniards had to do the work themselves, and they therefore developed institutions that were not the enslaving and extracting sort, as in Guatemala and Honduras, where the populations were denser, but more based on free enterprise. So a different culture developed in Costa Rica, partially as a result of the different geography. It's an example of what economists call "reversal of fortune." Namely, the areas colonized by Europeans that were richest 500 years ago have ended up poorest today because Europeans arrived there and set up these extractive institutions.

CHL: This reminds me of the fate of the Inuit, which you discuss in your book.

Diamond: The Inuit are an interesting example. The Inuit have been a success story in the past; they succeeded where a European culture, the Vikings, failed. On the other hand, it has come out within the last year that of all the peoples of the world the Inuit have the highest levels of toxic chemicals in their body tissue and in their blood -- even though they are the farthest from the sites, in Europe and North America, where toxic chemicals are produced. For example, Inuit mothers' breast milk ranks as toxic waste on the basis of its content of toxic chemicals. And the explanation is that they consume more seafood than any other people. That's just a dramatic example of globalization. Everybody affects everyone else nowadays.

CHL: Perhaps one difference between ourselves and the Inuit is that we can rely more on technology to buffer the effects of pollution. Many people these days, for instance, use Brita filters. To what extent should we expect technology to slow homogenization?

Diamond: That's a really key question, and one that I've discussed with some of the most thoughtful people in the business and financial worlds. One was Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a very thoughtful person. I was really impressed by him. Nevertheless, he said -- in a diffident, self-deprecating way -- "Well, I think technology will solve our environmental problems, and so I'm not so concerned about them as I am other things." But I think that he's wrong -- I know that he's wrong. Let me give you an example. I was born in 1937 so I remember the revolution in refrigerators that happened in my childhood, the introduction of Freon and CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons]. The refrigerator gases that were used in my childhood were things like ammonia. Of course, if they leaked they were toxic, and therefore it was hailed as a breakthrough when these supposedly nontoxic gases, the CFCs, were introduced. They were tested and under earth conditions they appeared to be perfectly benign. What people couldn't predict was that under stratospheric conditions CFCs get broken down into substances that destroy the ozone layer, and it took 20 years to get that well established. And I see that as a metaphor for why technology alone won't solve our problems, namely that there are lots of technologies out there and they have unexpected side effects.

CHL: Toward the end of "Collapse" you describe two crucial factors for determining whether or not a civilization will survive or get wiped out in one big-ass homogenization event, and one of them is whether there's a willingness to discard unhelpful values. Clearly we have some values in this country that are very important to us, and some of them, like anathematizing family planning, will accelerate our path to homogenization.

Diamond: You're right. One of the two or three key issues is discarding values dear to us, values that we held for a long time and that were important in the history of the United States but just no longer make sense today. The two traditional American values that I think -- that I know -- have to be discarded are, first, unbridled consumerism resulting from our sense of being in a land of unlimited resources. Historically the United States has viewed itself as the land of infinite bounty, endless fields of grain. But now we're in a world that does not have unlimited resources, and we have to come to grips with that. And the other long-held American value is the value derived from the United States' relative isolation. George Washington in his farewell address warned Americans about the danger of entangling alliances, and for a couple of hundred years the United States was able to function well because we were separated by oceans from any country that might damage us. But now the oceans don't separate us from countries that could damage us. Now, even desperately poor countries like Afghanistan and Iraq can raise absolute hell with our economy -- as well as killing a few thousand people in the process. So the other long-held value with which we have to come to grips is our sense of isolation. We're not isolated anymore. We have to engage with the rest of the world -- not in order to be charitable to them but for our own self-interest. It's much cheaper to put a few tens of billions of dollars into world programs for public health and environment than to throw $150 billion into Iraq and $100 billion into Afghanistan, when there are about 20 other countries waiting to become the next Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't afford it.

CHL: Have you heard of Michael Crichton's new book, "State of Fear," and its premise that a bunch of environmentalists are upset that their cause isn't getting the attention it deserves so they go around staging environmental disasters? Crichton has said publicly, as well as in his heavily footnoted book, that global warming is bunk.

Diamond: Everything you say is true. There are a couple of things to be added to it. One is that my previous book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," has sold more copies than Michael Crichton's one and a half million, so I think my new book will get to more readers. And the other thing is that Michael Crichton is a very skilled writer of fiction. And fiction is, by definition, the telling of stories that are untrue. He's very good at that. And I'm a writer of nonfiction, which aims to be the telling of stories that are true.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:52 PM | |