Is it ecocide and the depletion of natural resources that is responsible for the collapse of the Mayan and other civilisations? Is it natural disasters, or socio-political cataclysms that are responsible for societal decay? Jared Diamond’s new book discusses these issues
When Satish Sahaney, director of the Nehru Centre in Mumbai, recently asked me to take part in a discussion on Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Penguin, London, 2006, ₤ 6.99 in India), I was intrigued. I was intrigued merely because the title of Diamond’s previous book sounded strangely radical: Guns, Germs & Steel (Vintage, Random House, London, 1998). I had imagined that these were the three ingredients that determined how some societies conquered others.
I had not read that book and, for that reason, was not acquainted with its sub-title: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. When I did some research, I felt that Diamond’s earlier book was far too ambitious, if not arrogant. “Everybody,” really? Can anyone paint on such a vast canvas and yet not leave some areas untouched? In fact, the title is derived from a question that a New Guinea islander (off the Australian coast) put to the author, who is an evolutionary biologist by training: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”
Perhaps unknown to him, Diamond carries a great deal of baggage himself, not all of it visible. In his current book, Penguin leaves no stone unturned in going for the jugular: ‘The No 1 International Bestseller’, it crows above the title.
I delved into the book and found it difficult going, because it is so densely argued, packed with case studies of why certain societies flew out of the pages of history books while others survived to tell the tale.
Diamond was a psychology professor at UCLA Medical School but branched off into a study of the ecology and evolution of birds in New Guinea. I suspect both the careful observation enjoined by ornithology, coupled with a study of the birds’ exotic habitat, led him to examine much more fundamental issues -- the terminal decline of civilisations or, in his own words, ‘ecocide’.
I once asked Dr Salim Ali, India’s pre-eminent birdman, how he was qualified to pronounce on such complex issues as the controversy over the hydroelectric dam in Silent Valley in Kerala or the threat to the Taj Mahal from the Mathura oil refinery. He said that if anyone had spent a lifetime, as he had, painstakingly studying the life of birds he was capable of understanding the impact on the environment of big projects.
At the Nehru Centre, each discussant chose some chapters, so that s/he could do justice to parts of the book.
Diamond’s thesis is that there are eight factors that are seminal to survival or demise: deforestation, habitat destruction, soil, hunting, fishing, population, the human footprint (referring to the actual area that a person uses to obtain all the natural resources he consumes) and the intrusion of foreign species. That’s a fairly comprehensive list and no one would quarrel with these being responsible, in various permutations and combinations, for societal decay.
To begin with, there is the collapse of the Mayan empire. Diamond’s interesting observation is that because the Mayans did not keep proper records of such ‘mundane’ things as drought -- they restricted their notings to the deeds of kings -- they could not learn from history. Droughts, it is now learned (presumably from carbon dating or some other such modern tools), had occurred some two centuries before the collapse of this empire (or more properly, empires), but there was no way that the people knew this.
Diamond refers to ‘Twilight at Easter’, the huge, enigmatic, carved stone faces left on Easter Island, while other traces of human habitation have been totally wiped out. This must have led, in the days before archaeology, to people speculating whether this was the handiwork of visitors from another planet! Some of the statues weighed as much as 80 tonnes, which must have been as much an artist’s masterpiece as it was a marvel of engineering to erect. The story, it seems, is that the islanders, closed to outside societies, farmed far too intensively and in the process robbed the soil of its support systems. There was no escape for them by way of migration.
Diamond also speculates that the construction of the stone visages must have itself taken a terrible toll of the ecology. The builders, who must have numbered several hundred, had to be fed; they were doing ‘unproductive’ work, reminiscent of the pyramids of Egypt. There are archaeological traces of ferocious fighting between clans as well as cannibalism. The Easter islanders had a particularly grisly curse: “May the flesh of your grandmother stick in my teeth!”
There are also historical records that when a French ship sailed past a few centuries ago, the islanders called out in desperation -- not to be rescued from their isolated hell but for the timber embodied in the vessel, a resource they had overexploited to the point of no return. The author wonders, as many environmentalists do today, what it was like when the islanders decided to cut the very last tree. Was it everybody for himself (or herself, in these days of politically correct herstory)? During the Silent Valley controversy, the well-known poet Sugatha Kumari, who is an avid environmentalist and social activist, composed a poem called Maram (‘tree’ in Malayalam), where the last monkey on earth mistakes an electric pole -- Kerala sorely lacked electricity in the 1970s, as it does today -- for a tree, jumps on it and electrocutes itself.
The Mayan civilisation melted into the jungle -- as did some which bear a Hindu hand, the spectacular ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobodur in Indonesia -- till it was ‘re-discovered’ in the 18th century. The Mayans consumed corn, which contained less protein than other staples. What’s more, they couldn’t store it, given the primitive methods of that era, for more than a year, which made them highly vulnerable to famine. There may have also been shortages of freshwater: even though some cities were a square mile in area there were no rivers nearby, especially at those heights, and they had to harvest the rain. As cities grew, it is conceivable that they ran out of this most precious of resources. After all, closer home, Tughlaqabad and Daulatabad have suffered the same fate.
Additionally, stripping the forest slopes to cultivate crops may have caused the downfall, since it would have led to erosion, especially when coupled with population pressures. Unfortunately -- once again, the vital importance of communication -- Spanish bishops burned historical records for being ‘pagan’, leaving no trace of why this most sophisticated civilisation had to bite the dust.
The discussants raised a most fundamental issue. How does Diamond judge which society is successful and which is not? By any yardstick, the US is the most successful economy (as distinct from society!) in the world. But by ecological standards it is a disaster. This is why his overall thesis is flawed: while North Americans and Europeans are enjoying unprecedented prosperity, it is their insatiable appetite for natural resources, and energy in particular, that is destabilising the entire climate regime of the world and causing tremendous havoc globally. Might there be a Diamond -- or ‘Heera’ in this neck of the woods -- who, in the 23rd century, excavates the tip of the Empire State Building or similar skyscrapers in Manhattan and analyses the causes of the collapse of this affluent society?
Diamond employs a comparative approach, which was endorsed by some of the discussants. Citing the absence of traces of animals in the Mayan and Easter Island societies, one pointed out how rhino bones have been discovered in Harappan towns. These two early societies must have depended on wild nuts and other sources of protein.
A great deal depended on the presence or absence of ruling elites in early societies, as well as what produce they marketed or bartered. Ecocide, in Diamond’s words, was more of a process than an event or sudden calamity. In Harappa there was a co-existence of city and countryside, with agriculture and animal husbandry continuing alongside. Out of 132 Indus Valley civilisations, as many as 101 were abandoned. These populations didn’t simply disappear, they must have voted with their feet -- an option that the Easter islanders didn’t possess. Elsewhere, in the Saraswati Valley, the population actually increased. The Indus Valley decline was more of a socio-political-economic disaster than a cataclysmic event.
There is speculation in our country on how the vegetation around Lothal consisted of thorn and dry deciduous forests, which were used to make charcoal. There are also traces of teak growing near what is now Ahmedabad. Ultimately, whether due to climate, or population, or over-intensive agriculture, only acacia was left. Interestingly, in Harappan culture, we find deodhar logs brought all the way from the Shivaliks.
Metallurgy gave rise to several ecological problems. To produce a single kilo of smelted copper -- recall the Indus Valley figurines which have given this country one of its most potent iconic images -- it took 620 kg of charcoal: convert that into trees lost. Incidentally, the Bishnois have a long tradition of protecting the sparse natural terrain around them in memory of their fellow community members who were hacked to death when a king wanted to cut down their kejri trees to fire bricks for his palace. Verrier Elwin has recorded how the Agaria tribe in Madhya Pradesh had to search for trees for their livelihood as traditional ironsmiths.
There are also records of how the Harappan civilisation prompted soil salinity and massive erosion. It is difficult to say what population pressures there were between 2600 and 1800 BC. In Mohenjodaro it is possible to speculate that the widespread cultivation of wheat and barley required cattle to plough. In turn, the cattle had to be given fodder, which would have impacted on the local vegetation. The huge quantities of bricks found there would have lopped off the topsoil; there are records of some 700 wells, which would have been affected too.
A discussant who is a sociologist had difficulties with Diamond’s methodology, which all research depends on. He ascribes far too benign a role to business, even if one subscribes to neither environmentalism nor anti-environmentalism. The reference to ecocide would also trigger off the “deepest anxieties” in western readers, with visions of an apocalypse. This is reminiscent of Samuel P Huntington book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 2004) where the best-selling author raises fears of Americans being swamped by the Hispanic culture.
Similarly, I was uneasy about the glib assumptions that the best-selling Diamond makes, like the two maps showing how there is congruence between the political and environmental ‘trouble spots’ in the world, which include Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan (fortunately, we have escaped!). Only recently, a study by the New Economics Foundation and the Open University in the UK pointed out that the United Kingdom is “eating the planet” -- in other words, depleting the earth of natural resources far faster than it is able to replenish them. If global consumption levels reached those of the UK, it would take 3.1 earths to meet the demand. Needless to add, neither the UK nor Europe, and least of all the US, figure in Diamond’s demonology.
I have even greater problems with the author’s assertion that business can play a constructive role in protecting the environment, which he illustrates by his experience as a consultant with an oil company in New Guinea. Anyone who is painting a picture of entire societies in decline cannot fail to see how the oil companies have contributed to global warming for 150 years. And, as for the record of companies like Shell in Nigeria, where the earlier military government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa, the celebrated opponent of its oil fields in a tribal region, the less said the better...
In conclusion, what does one make of this book? There is a danger, like in the mainstream American media, that most Americans will derive their notions of why societies collapse from books like these that catch their attention as they wait to pay their bills at the supermarket. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a novel that pooh-poohs the whole science of climate change, is an even worse example of preaching scepticism to the ignorant. There is a great deal of fact in Diamond’s book, but there is some fiction as well. Indeed, his thesis resembles a rough, uncut gem, which deserves to be polished to reflect its myriad facets, not to present a unilateral view of the world.
InfoChange News & Features, May 2006
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