Collapse
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Viking, 592 pp., $29.95
HUMAN CIVILIZATION HAS RAINED DEATH and disease on the planet and now threatens to destroy itself, biologist and polymath Jared Diamond informs us, unless--surprise, surprise--powerful, overly centralized governments step in to save us from ourselves. In his first-person account, Diamond offers a compelling case to raise readers' consciousness and finally take seriously just how we may be sealing our collective doom by ignoring and abusing our natural surroundings.
Take, for example, Easter Island, a somewhat less-than-paradisiacal pinpoint in the South Pacific, whose occupants suffered the progressive dribble of European intruders and missionaries, replete with smallpox, a proclivity for "black-birding" (the kidnapping of natives into forced labor), and, finally, sheep, whose pacific exterior belies their devastating impact on fragile pasture land. Add to all this deforestation, the willful plundering of the backbone of the island's ecological integrity and the basis of much societal persistence.
The tiny society of Easter Island finally gave up the ghost, but not for want of trying. As one reads Diamond's account of its agricultural foundation, it is impossible to avoid asking how the natives could possibly have cut down the very last tree. What were they thinking? To his credit, Diamond breaks the problem into four mistaken paths any group can take in dealing with such a problem: Failure to anticipate the problem; failure to perceive it after it has arrived; failure to try to solve it; and, finally, taking a shot at a solution and missing the mark. As he puts it, Easter Islanders failed to acknowledge the problem until the last few trees were felled.
From a certain vantage point, the problem of contemporary American society is one of consciousness. It is probably fair to say that most Americans are not nearly as perturbed about environmental issues as Diamond thinks they should be. And while they want clean streams and blue skies, how far they will go to achieve such goals is questionable at best.
As Diamond sees it, there are two ways to meet the challenge of potentially massive ecological decline: bottom up and top down. The former option is best in a society with a small landmass in which the inhabitants are familiar with the entire place and will know if they are affected by any environmental changes that occur. When it comes to highly developed societies with large geographical areas, and with complex political organizations, the top-down approach wins the prize. But it is here that I have problems with Diamond's position--and with so many of those in the environmental movement.
From an intuitive standpoint, it may seem reasonable to think of a single leader, or a small group of decision-makers, deciding which species to protect, how many trees to plant, or what dams not to build. Such a model is simple and seems all too reasonable. It is the model Karl Popper railed against in The Open Society and its Enemies, where he critiqued the utopian social engineering inherent in the top-down approach. Friedrich Hayek, who addressed the same issue throughout his life, suggested that it is impossible for any individual to possess adequate knowledge about the market so that he or she would be able to make prudent decisions about the well-being of everyone else engaging in the market process.
Diamond doesn't recognize this key point. If we take Hayek's point to be true, then why should we believe a single agent or group could know enough to render optimal decisions regarding an entire society's approach to environmental challenge?
A fine example of centralized failure is the federal government, an awful environmental steward and the worst polluter in the public or private sphere. The 1972 Clean Water Act resulted in expenditures of more than $500 billion, and no adequate database evaluating water quality.
Diamond doesn't seem to consider Hayek's alternative, which, despite the ecumenical approach of the book, only brushes past the idea that free economic agents are capable of solving large problems such as hazy water, leaden skies, and dying forests. For instance, Ronald Coase, the Nobel economics laureate, in his writings on transaction costs, contracts, and the intersection of economics and the law, reveals how the conflicting motivations of opposing economic actors might be reconciled on such issues as environmental disputes.
I would have preferred that Diamond had used such a model rather than that of the Japanese shogun who happened to hit on a solution to the catastrophic deforestation of 17th-century Japan. Millions of individuals enabled by law and the freedom to act in their own best interests will protect the environment more efficiently than top-down planners who can't possibly possess the collective knowledge resident in the sum of all those transactions.
Diamond's undeveloped economic perspective looks even worse in light of his broad understanding of biology, history, anthropology, geography, and geology. He offers us provocative arguments, graphic examples, and a humanitarian spirit. He makes us think and provides the substance with which to reflect on what he says deep into the night. Why, then, could he not have departed from the path of so many of his colleagues who so often neglect the economic dimension of human civilization?
Collapse is a big book on a wide screen--and well worth reading--but weak at the knees in its predictable prescription for saving ourselves.
Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist at UCLA.