Collapse

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

0143117009
Jared Diamond

Notes

By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political / economic / social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.

The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into the following categories:

1. Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Human population growth
8. Increased per capita increase of people
9. Human-caused climate-change
10. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
11. Energy shortages
12. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

Deforestation (on Pacific Islands) is most severe on:

1. Dry islands than wet islands
2. Cold high-latitude islands than warm equatorial islands
3. Old volcanic islands than young volcanic islands
4. Islands without aerial ash fallout than islands with it,
5. Islands far from Central Asia’s dust plume than islands near it
6. Islands without makatea than islands with it
7. Low islands than high islands
8. Remote islands than islands with near neighbors
9. Small islands than big islands

Over the course of six centuries the human population of Chaco Canyon grew, its demands on the environment grew, its environmental resources declined, and people came to be living increasingly close to the margin of what the environment could support. That was the ultimate cause of the abandonment. The proximate cause, the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back, was the drought that finally pushed Chacoans over the edge; a drought that society living at a lower population density could have survived.

…the Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an autocatalytic process. In chemistry, the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzyme. Some chemical reactions produce a product that also acts as a catalyst, the the speed of the reaction starts from nothing and then runs away as some product is formed, catalyzing the driving reaction faster and producing more product which drives the reaction still faster. Such a chain reaction is termed autocatalytic, the prime example being the explosion of an atomic bomb when neutrons in a critical mass of uranium split uranium nuclei to release energy plus more neutrons, which split still more nuclei.

“The struggle to understand Balaguer reminds me that history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”

“Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.”

Tuchman

…in Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. The authors found that if managers want their employees to behave in a certain way, the most effective motivation is for the employees to see their managers themselves behaving that way.