Good news?

"Collapse" by Jared Diamond is a book about how civilizations deal (or fail to deal) with impending environmental disasters. The author is a director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In the book, he takes as on a grand tour through Polynesia, Central America, Southwestern United States, Greenland, Iceland and even modern Montana. Other landfalls include Rwanda, Japan and the Dominican Republic, whose late president Balaguer turns out to have been an "environmentalist" of sorts.

"Collapse" lacks the grand narratives and unified theories from Diamond's earlier book "Guns, germs and steel". Diamond never presents a universal theory about why many human civilizations end up destroying their environment. He does mention a dozen quite different causes, but seems to believe that these work idiosyncratically. But then, that's the point! The idea that each case is unique, and no grand narrative can be found, have important repercussions (see further below).

Diamond claims that many pre-modern cultures destroyed their environment. In fact, he seems to believe that more or less wilful environmental destruction is the most common reason behind societal collapse. This is surely an exaggeration. After all, the fact that many cultures have survived for centuries or millennia in the same area, shows that they *didn't* end up destroying their environment, certainly not in an absolute sense. Still, it can hardly be denied that pre-modern cultures (including the egalitarian ones) didn't necessarily live in harmony with their surroundings. In the book, Diamond discusses both bio-friendly and downright ecocidal cultures in Polynesia. Also, there is the mass extinction of the megafauna during the Palaeolithic, probably caused by human over-hunting. Conversely, some high cultures were eco-friendly: Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate and the modern Dominican Republic under presidents Trujillo and Balaguer.

I find these facts interesting, but also somewhat disturbing. The idea that Palaeolithic, Neolithic or medieval cultures were necessarily eco-friendly (a common idea among radical Greens) is falsified by the fact that some such cultures also destroyed their environment. Note that Palaeolithic cultures were probably egalitarian, but this intra-human harmony didn't always extend to animals or nature. Thus, there are unfortunately no guarantees that a primitive culture will become more eco-friendly.

The facts in this book also disprove another branch of the eco-radical movement. The followers of the late Murray Bookchin claim that only a non-hierarchic society can end exploitation of nature. (In contrast to the primitivists, Bookchin believed that a non-hierarchic society could be modern.) But as already mentioned, some hierarchic societies were "Green". There simply isn't any connection between the social and political relations *within* humanity, and the relation between humanity as such and nature at large. Groups which try to find such a connection are often politically left-wing and attempt to exorcize the fact that Green politics might as well be right-wing. The idea that there's a necessary connection between progressive politics and peace with nature is offered as a solution to this dilemma, but it doesn't seem to be working. And, hand on heart, why should it? Why can't a hierarchic society be eco-friendly, for instance by throwing poor squatters off the land used by animals, and why shouldn't an egalitarian tribe kill and eat mammoths or moas? They could, after all, be shared equally. An egalitarian society might be desirable, but Green solutions have to be argued for at a parallel track, as it were.

Despite its gloomy title, "Collapse" also gives a certain room for hope and optimism. If Diamond is right, humans don't have to end up destroying their environment. While many civilizations have indeed done so, some have managed to survive by adopting sustainable practices. Others were destroyed because of environmental factors outside their control, or through sheer lack of knowledge. Since there isn't a general "law" saying that Homo sapiens must overshoot and crash, there is hope for our own civilization during the times ahead.

Ironically, "Collapse" might therefore be...good news. Well, I hope!