Collapse
HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED
Jared Diamond, 2005
Excerpts from the book
[p.38] Only when the public pressures its politicians into passing laws demanding different behavior from mining companies will the companies behave differently: otherwise, the companies would be operating as charities and would be violating their responsibility to their shareholders.
[p.114] What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!” Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”?
[p.143] All of these alternative solutions face a similar overarching risk: that a series of good years, with adequate rainfall or with sufficiently shallow groundwater tables, may result in population growth, resulting in turn in society becoming increasingly complex and interdependent and no longer locally self-sufficient. Such a society then cannot cope with, and rebuild itself after, a series of bad years that a less populous, less interdependent, more self-sufficient society had previously been able to cope with.
[p.164] In the United States today, with its highly efficient agriculture, farmers make up only 2% of our population, and each farmer can feed on the average 125 other people.
[p.165] We are accustomed to thinking of military success as determined by quality of weaponry, rather than by food supply. But a clear example of how improvements in food supply may decisively increase military success comes from the history of Maori New Zealand.
[p.205] Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understad that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists. That is not the case in Iceland, where the effects of erosion that began 1,130 years ago are obvious, where most of the vegetation and half of the soil have already been lost, and where the past is so stark and omnipresent. Many studies of medieval Icelandic settlements and erosion patterns are now under way. When one of my archaeologist friends approached the Icelandic government and began to deliver the usual lengthy justification required in other countries, the government’s response was: “Yes, of course we realize that understanding medieval soil erosion will help us understand our present problem. We already know that, you don’t have to spend time convincing us. Here is the money, go do your study.”
[p.210] At the first English and French colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Canada, about half of the settlers died of starvation and disease within the first year. It’s no surprise, then, that 500 Greenlanders, from the most remote colonial outpost of Norway, one of Europe’s poorer nations, could not succeed at conquering and colonizing North America... If it has not been for Native Americans, the Greenlanders might have survived their ecological problems, and the Vinland settlers might have persisted. In that case, Vinland might have undergone a population explosion, the Norse might have spread over North America after A.D. 1000, and I as a twentieth-century American now be writing this book in an Old Norse-based language like modern Icelandic or Faeroese, rather than in English.
[p.240] The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.
[p.247] To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth.
[p.259] Once the harpoon head became embedded in the whale, the cleverly designed toggle connection released, allowing the hunters to retrieve the harpoon shaft now separated from the harpoon head embedded in the whale. Otherwise, if the harpooner had continued to hold a rope tied to the harpoon head and shaft, the angry whale would have dragged underwater the umiaq and all its Inuit occupants. Left attaced to the harpoon head was an air-filled bladder of sealskin, whose buoyancy forced the whale to work harder against the bladder’s resistance and to grow tired as it dived. When the whale surfaced to breathe, the Inuit launched another harpoon with yet another bladder attached, to tire the whale even more. Only when the whale had thus become exhausted did the hunters dare bring the umiaq alongside the beast to lance it to death.