I’m not an insatiable book-eater like some bloggers (cough, Josh Marshall) but most of my life I have had something or other beside the bed. Lately I’ve read a few things which seemed worth passing on:
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel came out some years back and promptly blew the minds of many who read it. Diamond’s writing reminded me of the long early-morning bus ride during freshman year in high school when I knew exactly nobody. To pass the time I’d casually observe something and ask, why. Ususally I could figure that our after thinking about it for a while, like why it was dark before the sun came up and why people wait at stoplights. Then I’d ask why again. After a while the going would get tougher and I’d bump up against either a faith in science (because little molecules that I don’t know about yet make it that way) or a faith in God (because some force that I don’t understand willed it to be that way). Reading Jared Diamond is like finding somebody who played that game as if I was the last pick for a sandlot softball game and he batted third for the Yankees. He’s scary good. Similar to my old game Guns gets its start when a New Guinean friend looks at all of the stuff (cargo) that white people carried around that New Guineans generally didn’t have and asks Diamond why. Three hundred plus pages after posing the question the author answers his friend by way of a delirious journey through the livestock origin of human plagues, latitudinal versus longitudinal transfers of technology and why Columbus discovered and subjugated the New World rather than vice-versa, with time in the middle for a memorably good digression that reconstitutes the Bantu expansion through Africa using linguistics. Short version, when you look at a map of the world Eurasia is long while the Americas are tall. It makes sense when you read it.
Diamond’s latest book, Collapse, asks the corollary question to the problem he addressed in Guns. Why is it that some societies collapse and disappear like Ozymandias into the mists of history while others make it to present day? For all the books that have been written by, about and for the environmental movement this one hits the nail right in the sweet spot. For one thing it wins the framing wars by stripping environmentalism of the anti-progress new-age baggage that it has picked up in the decades since the first Earth Day. If everybody cares about keeping our society from collapsing into chaos, and it seems like we all at least pretend like we do, then we’re all environmentalists. We just need to know how to keep the negative outcome from happening. Diamond attacks the problem of historical collapses with a scientist’s enthusiasm, creating a correlated matrix of risk factors and teasing out the critical variables in the various collapses of Vikings in Greenland, Polynesians on a few separate Pacific islands, the Maya in the Yucatan and the Anasazi in the American southwest.
In the end Diamond distills three main threats to a society’s survival. Assuming that it stands on risky ground a society can fail to anticipate a likely problem (should Easter Islanders cut down their slow-growing palms?), it can fail to perceive when a problem has arrived (the palms disappeared from Easter Island too gradually to notice) and it can fail to act once they perceive a problem (segmented land ownership and a mania for competitive monument building allowed Easter Islanders to cut the few remaining trees).
You can read Diamond’s book for its academic look at dead cultures, but for most of us the real meat of the book comes at the end when he looks at industries that simultaneously sustain society and threaten its survival. Diamond gives an accessible overview of the specific risks from such industries which include logging, hardrock mining, fisheries and petroleum, and he makes a good case for why unique structural incentives make some easier to bring into harmony with the local environment than others. Environmentalists will hate the part of the book where Diamond enthusiastically endorses progress made by some long-hated industries but that’s simply not a serious attitude. We need wood, oil, coal and metals and until we have alternatives fully online we’ll go on needing them, so the best thing that we can do for the world is to find out how to make do with what we have rather than getting in the way and shouting. Anti-environmentalists will call it pointless fear-mongering. In the end activists on both sides should bite their tongue and pick up Collapse.
Coming soon: this looks like a cool read. Expect a review whenever I get around to finishing it.