How Societies Fail-- And Sometimes Succeed | Jared Diamond

this is actually the third in a series of three talks that we've had in the series of seminars about long-term thinking one was by Roger Kennedy used to be head of the National Park Service talking about basically the last ten thousand years of American history and one of the things he pointed out helped lead up to this talk which is that a number of times there have been very advanced civilizations north of the Aztecs up here in North America that Chaco at Cahokia and other places that were pretty darn advanced and crashed and in some places like in Ohio once they crash that place stayed basically forbidden for centuries afterwards and we also had a talk from Daniel Janssen referring to how to protect wilderness you really have to understand it it has got to be a paying proposition that you can't just preserve someplace and say it's going to be okay now it's got to pay its way we've had some talks on the urbanization of the world that's going on now and some side effects of that which may be that people living in dense circumstances have less environmental impact and folks who are scattered all across the landscape either driving around or burning firewood so there's a sequence of ideas gradually emerging in the course of this series of lectures that is feeding into a body of thought about long term thinking that's the whole point of this Jared Diamond coming from his work on Guns Germs and Steel and now on the book collapse is someone who has brought his scientific skills and historical skills that he's added to them and has done some of the most serious rigorous retrospective look at how civilization behaves in aggregate and overtime and it's your to do it tonight [Applause] let me first check whether you'll be able to hear me okay and dak can you hear okay doc it's a great pleasure for me all used to be back in San Francisco which I can sit which for me is the most beautiful American city one of the most beautiful cities in the world I don't know how many of you here know from Franz Schubert's last song cycle that he completed shortly before others death fine and Kazan there's a wonderful sore mysterious song they're called dich doch in which Schubert with the music describes the towers of a city rising through the mist and I think of that song every time I crossed the bay bridge and see San Francisco emerging in the distance and it's also a city with fond memories for me because my parents spent 20 the last 30 years of their lives here and I think the happiest years in San Francisco so I'm very happy to be back here people often ask me why is it that I chose to write a book on the subject of collapses of societies and the answer is simple it was the most fascinating and important and central subject that I could think of to write about after finishing Guns Germs and Steel it appears that the public also finds this subject of collapse fascinating too because as soon as the book was released in January within three days it was on top of the bestseller less now an author likes to believe that of a book sells well is because of that authors beautiful writing a great book but since my book sold well even before it but he could have read it it was clear that had nothing to do with my beautiful writing but simply that people recognized the raw nerve that the subject of collapse touches and they want to understand the book originated as an account of romantic mysteries past societies that collapsed leaving behind as abandoned monuments the remains of cities now covered up by jungle or cities in the desert as a teenager I like most view here was fascinated by the abandoned statues of Easter Island the Maya cities the ruined cities of the Fertile Crescent and we all asked ourselves why on earth did people build cities in an area where nobody is trying to make an urban living today and why having built a city in the Yucatan jungle or in the Four Corners region of the u.s. Southwest why having built a city there did they then abandon the city and so my book contains chapters on some of these famous romantic mysteries the collapse of Easter Island society that I'll tell you something about the collapse of Pitcairn Island society Pitcairn Island famous as the uninhabited island to which the Bounty mutineers fled but when the Bounty mutineers landed on Pitkin in 1790 they discovered their temples and platforms and statues of a Polynesian settlement that had vanished why did the first settlement of Pitkin island die out completely leaving behind their temples on this remote island there's also a chapter on the quintessential romantic mystery collapse the Maya civilization of Guatemala and Mexico and Honduras the most advanced Native American society the new world before Columbus with writing and with great art and architecture that collapsed around 802 not 8900 leaving behind cities covered up the jungle that a favorite tourist destinations today there's also a chapter on the Anasazi collapse the one closest for Californians in the Four Corners region the Anasazi built the tall skyscrapers in the United States until the skyscrapers of the Chicago Loop with reinforced steel and concrete in the 1870s Anasazi skyscrapers went up to six storeys and this in an area of desert feeding themselves by agriculture in an area where nobody makes a living by agriculture today why did the Anasazi build cities in the desert and why having done so did they abandon them and then if you are starting to wonder whether collapses of civilizations are things that before only those remote exotic backwards people like Polynesians and Native Americans deserve it can also happen to Europeans and so there are the longest section of my book is on a society of blond-haired blue-eyed Christian literate Europeans writing Latin and Norse Norwegians who went out to Greenland and 89 84 and built up a farming society where she cows and goats built a great stone cathedral and stone churches and carried on for nearly 500 years longer than the longevity so far of European settlement of North America only to end up all dead just showing that collapse is also something that can befall Europeans blue-eyed blond-haired Europeans not just problem for Polynesians and so-called native peoples my first plan of the book and I still have the sketch was a book of 18 chapters on 18 collapses and I soon realized God that's boring and depressing to have a book of 18 chapters on 18 collapses in addition that misses a big point which is that it's not the case that all past societies collapsed there are lots of past societies that carried on for thousands or tens of thousands of years without any signs of collapse and so we have an intellectual problem to be explained why is it that some societies solve the problems and carried on for a long time solve the problems that did in other societies and so my book also contains chapters on some stories Iceland Japan the New Guinea Highlanders the tikka Pia Islanders who've maintained complex societies for thousands or even tens of thousands of years and finally I realized that it wasn't enough to write a book about past societies because today we are facing the same problems that did in so many past societies plus some new problems and so half the book is also about the difficulties facing modern societies so there's a chapter on the American state of Montana from which I came back two weeks ago the state in which my wife and kids and I spend a summer vacation each year Montana seemingly the most pristine and under populated state of the lower 48 the most environmentally intact state of the richest country in the world the last Society you would expect to see discussed in a book on collapse and yet when you scratch the surface in Montana you find a whole panoply of problems problems of forests and fisheries and water and soil and toxic wastes and global warming etc the whole panoply of problems that have dragged down societies in the past and threaten other societies today there's also a chapter on the African country of Rwanda which in 1994 solved in quotes its problems of the environment and overpopulation in a grisly fashion when six million Rwandan killed nearly 1 million Rwandan and drove another 2 million into exile the worst case scenario of Thomas Malthus there's a chapter on the island of Hispaniola which is like a control laboratory experiment in a laboratory chemists would take two identical test tubes and then add a dye to one and so see the effect of the dye in history would love to do that we don't get the chance to do it but there are some natural experiments approximating that the island of Hispaniola and the Caribbean is divided into two countries in the West Haiti in the east the Dominican Republic sharing the same island and to fly in a plane over the border from separating Hispaniola to the Dominican Republic is dramatic because as you fly across the border to the west of you it's brown and to the east of you it's green in the Dominican Republic or if you stand on the border you turn this way and you see brown fields with no trees that's Haiti and you turn this way and you see green forests pine forest that's the Dominican Republic Haiti today is the saddest incipient failure in the new world the poorest country in the new world one of the poorest in the world 99 percent deforested with virtually collapsed government and on the same island just across the border the Dominican Republic yes the third struggling third-world country but six times richer than Haiti with the most comprehensive National Park system in the new world with about one-third of its land still covered by Falls as close as you can get to a controlled experiment there's also chapter on China the world's most populous nation whose environmental and population problems automatically affect more people than do the problems of any other country just because they are more Chinese than any other people but also China is so big and it's got such a huge and growing economy that the problems of China automatically become the problems of the rest of the world because China is dumping its gases and wastes into the same atmosphere and oceans shared with the rest of the world and finally there's a chapter on Australia the first world society that faces the most severe environmental problems but that is also today considering the most drastic solutions to its environmental problems as I looked at society after society I arrived at a five-point framework for trying to understand why some societies succeed while other societies fail in no particular order one item on my five-point checklist is human environmental impacts humans use environmental resources in some cases we inadvertently over exploit over harvest our environmental resources such as our forests and our fisheries and soils and as a result there are societies that have unintentionally destroyed themselves by depleting the environmental resources on which they depended that's one factor of my checklist a second factor on my checklist to try to understand success or failure collapse or non collapses climate change today climate change to us means climate change caused by humans global warming but in the past the climate has frequently changed for reasons unrelated to humans in the past the fire has sometimes gotten colder gotten warmer gotten wetter gotten drier and those climate changes have effects on human societies particularly farming societies so that a society that is managing to deal with its environmental problems as long as the climate is in its favor may collapse when the climate turns against the society for example when it gets colder or drawing third item on my checklist along with human environmental impacts and climate change is enemies most societies have neighbors with some of which they're intermittently at war and if a society gets weakened for any reason including its own environmental problems or political or economic problems when a society gets weakened that's the occasion when the enemies are likely to take advantage and walk in on the weakened Society which means that in continental environments it's regularly difficult to decide whether the primary cause of a collapse is a military defeat or whether the primary cause was economic environmental political problems that weakened a society to the point where the enemies then gave the final blow and the classic example of that debate is the fall of the Western Roman Empire there's been a standing unresolved argument we all know that Rome the Western Roman Empire Quotes fell you know I think ad 476 when a Germanic chiefdom deposed the last native Roman Emperor but the Romans had been fighting against those barbarians on their borders for hundreds of years and they've been fighting them off successfully why is that that after centuries of victories for Rome the barbarians filing prevailed was the real cause of the fall of the Western Roman Empire something about the barbarians that they got more numerous or developed more potent military technology or wasn't instead that Rome got weakened by its own environmental economic military political problems and a weakened Rome then received the final blow from the barbarians in which case the fundamental cause of the Roman collapse was Rome's own problems the barbarians were just an epiphenomenon the last blow that question is still debated among historians next last factor my check checklist involves relations not just with enemies but with friends with friendly trade partners the great majority of societies receives some intial imports from friendly trade partners and that means that a society that is managing its own environment perfectly adequately may nevertheless collapse if a trade partner damages its environment to the point of collapsing so that can no longer send the essential imports to the first society that's a problem familiar to us Americans at least to any of you old enough to remember the 1973-74 Gulf oil crisis when the United States economy have received a severe threat not because we were acutely messing up our own environment but because we depended for essential imports in this case oil on some environmentally and politically fragile countries and then finally the last item on my checklist is a society's responses whatever problems of society faces one has to ask how a society responds does it perceive and address and solve the problems yes or no what are the economic political social and cultural facets of a society that either allow it to meet its problems or the cause of to fail to meet them well this is all somewhat abstract so let me give you a concrete example of the collapse of the polynesian society on easter island that built the great stone statues how many of you here has have been to easter island could you raise him okay wonderful place how many of you have seen pictures or national Geographics or all of us have so Easter Island its famous as the most remote habitable scrapple land in the world an island just fifty square miles 2,300 miles west of the coast of Chile and 1,300 miles east of the nearest inhabited Polynesian island and a statements for those gigantic stone statues that sent two of you and me to Easter Island the rest of you to see the pictures stone statues weighing up to 80 tons and up to 33 feet high that were carved and some have dragged and transported up to 12 mile and then erected into a vertical position on platforms against the sea all this done by people without metal tools without graft animals without wheels without any power other than their own muscle power how do they do it so the collapse of Easter Island society and how they erected and then how they tore down their own statues because when Europeans arrived here comes a Tomas man like sentence where I've lost memory of my main verb when Europeans arrived at least one Easter Island the Year 1720 to this was the Dutch navigator Jakob Roggeveen Easter I looked like the last Island where you would expect a great civilization erecting gigantic statues because rogue denoted they were no trees on the island and yet without machines or wheels surely to erect those statues and to drag them twelve miles the Islanders needed wood whether to make sleds or rollers or levers and surely they needed also wood to make rope of natural fiber but here's an island without any trees no way to get wood for transport or for rope there was no way that they could erect the statues and in fact the islands were in the process of dragging nap tearing down making the statues that their ancestors had erected of such an enormous effort with the resultant in 1843 the last one hundreds of statues was torn down and broken by the Islanders themselves a romantic mystery why do these drylands erect these great statues and why having erected them did they tear them all down and break them the answer to that romantic mystery has emerged from archaeological studies of the last twenty years which other when East was first settled by Europeans it was not the barren treeless wasteland that we see today but it was instead covered by a subtropical forest that included the world's biggest palm tree now extinct and so the Polynesian settlers of Easter all proceeded to chop down trees for the same reason that we do today and that other peoples do they chop down trees for clearing land for agriculture and for timber for construction and for fuel for firewood and also to make canoes with which to go out to the ocean to harpoon tuna and dolphin that were their main sources of meat and protein and these two Islanders continued chopping down trees until around the Year 1680 they chopped down the last tree on the island at which point they were now out of wood to make the sleds and the levers and have the rope with which they dragged and transported and erected the giant statues so from 1680 there were no more statues erected but without any wood the Islanders could no longer build canoes so they couldn't go out to sea to harpoon to nor dolphin and that meant that for protein for meat they turned to the only large animal on the island namely Homo sapiens Easter Island Society collapsed in a civil war between the 12 clans that whenever a clan triumphed over another clan the victorious clan would tear down and break the statues of the defeated clan and in this epidemic of cannibalism and civil warfare from those days handed down on Easter Island is the oral memory of the worst insult that an Easter Islander could shriek at another Easter Island in those days if you wanted to make someone else really furious what you said to them to drive now to the mind with rages the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth so that's the end of Easter Island society and a collapse a stark collapse the population of Easter Island decreased by something like 90% and the formerly politically in cultural unified Island collapsed in this epidemic of civil war of all the Prius tower collapses that I've talked about I find that the collapse of Easter Island is the one that grabs people most because the the metaphor is so obvious Easter Island isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when Easter society collapsed there was no one else to in the islands could turn for help nowhere else that they could flee and people see the metaphor if the planet if we on earth today mess up our own planet there is no galaxy to which we can turn to help and no other galaxy out there to which we can flee when I in the last couple of years I've been teaching a course on the material of my book to my UCLA undergraduates they recognized the significance of a problem that had escaped me name how on earth did the people do these self-destructive things like cutting down all their trees and in particular my UCLA students have asked me what do you think the Islander who chopped down the last palm tree said as he or she was chopping down the last palm tree my UCLA students have made a number of suggestions for what they said when they were cutting down the last palm tree maybe the person who did it said never fear technology will solve our problems by finding a substitute for wood or perhaps that person chopping down the last tree said this is my private property this tree is mine private property rights respect them I can do with it whatever I please keep the big government of the Chiefs off my back or my UCLA students suggested maybe the person who chopped down the last tree said the fears of you environmentalists are exaggerated you don't know what's going on in some other part of the island perhaps there are still trees out there a ban on logging would be premature we need more research a couple of weeks ago few weeks ago I received an email from someone who said I know what the island who cut down the last tree said as he was doing it he said never fear have faith God will somehow provide for us so that's the collapse of Easter Island society but my book is not a depressing book about collapses because just collapses because it's also an account of societies that succeeded a society that succeeded in solving the same problems of deforestation that did in these dry lenders in the Mayan the Anasazi was Japan of the Tokugawa era Japan in the 1500s 1600s came to the end of a civil war was unified under the so called Tokugawa shoguns and paradoxically the peace and prosperity of the end of the Japanese Civil War plunged Japan into an environmental crisis as there was a population explosion construction in wood the Shogun's and the nobles building big castles made of wood people bid building cities of wooden buildings which tended to burn down of course and then rebuilding the cities in wood and in the course of the 1600s it became clear that the Japanese archipelago was getting progressively deforested and the Shogun himself was having to employ timber from the far northern ireland Japan Hokkaido but fortunately the Shogun's and the Japanese Nobles the Japanese people recognize the problem deforestation they solved it by combination of negative and positive measures the negative measures included in fact wood rationing restricting the uses to which wood could be put so as to reduce wood consumption and the positive measures included increasing wood production by developing independently of Germany the world's first scientific treatise the Japanese embarked on massive tree plantations to increase wood output and the result was that by the time of 1853 Commodore Perry and then the major restoration of Japan was self-sufficient in wood and today Japan is the first world country covered most extensively with forests 74% forested so there is at least as of 1853 some of you will recognize why Japan cannot in that respect to be considered a success after 53 but until 1853 a success story of managing forests in this area which poses issues of long-term thinking how do you manage a society so that will last hundreds or thousands of years they were surprised they have been surprises to me and perhaps the biggest set of surprises has to do with that question that my UCLA students have kept asking me how on earth do people end up doing these dumb things why do they practice such short term thinking why don't they at least force see a decade ahead why do people do something so obviously dumb as to chop down all their trees or to kill off all their big animals or to run out of fresh water that turns out to be an unexpectedly complicated question there are not simple reasons why people make bad decisions we know that in our individual laws we make bad decisions sometimes sometimes we marry the wrong person or we invest in the wrong investment where we make a poor choice a career and there are complicated reasons why we make these poor choices similarly for human groups human groups sometimes make bad decisions for the same reasons that individuals do but with groups there are additional reasons for failures of decision making problems intrinsic in group dynamics sometimes as the first step towards making or failing to make a good decision it helps if you can anticipate a problem before it arrives but a first reason for cause for failure is a society that or an individual that fails to anticipate the problem before the problem appears and so misses a chance to abort the problem as society may fail to anticipate a problem because it reasons by false analogy or because there's been no precedent for the problem in the societies experience example global warming today why on earth did we not thirty years ago recognized that global warming was coming on why didn't we anticipate the problem of global warming it's simple they had never in human history been so many people putting out so many much greenhouse gas as to be able to heat up the temperature of the whole globe it was unprecedented unimaginable instead until 30 years ago people were concerned about global cooling rather than global warming so we did not anticipate the problem of global warming Assaf that we were stupid it was on an anticipated unprecedented a second reason why societies may fail to solve problems is that even after they failed to anticipate in problem arise people may fail to perceive a problem that is there around them some problems developing literally an imperceptible fashion developed slowly another example is again global warming why is it that it took us now 30 years to recognize the reality of global warming why didn't we see after 7 years that the world was starting to cook and the reason is is simple of it's that global warming began literally imperceptibly it was not the case that in 1970 world average temperature was this in 1971 a degree warmer 1972 two degrees warmer one degree warmer every year if that had been the case then after seven years the world would been seven degrees warmer would been clearer but know you know that climate doesn't have that way climate fluctuates there's a warmer year and then a cold year and then a couple of cold years and then another warming cup of warm summer's then some cold year warm cold climate fluctuates and it took 30 years before every knowledgeable scientists and climatologist concerned with these issues of climate was abled were able to agree that behind this noisy fluctuating signal there really was a long-term trend of global warming that's why we didn't see it after seven years the beginning of global warming were literally imperceptible and that's also why it took 30 years before the heads of state of every government on earth except for the head of state of Australia and one other country have recognized the importance of global warming a third reason why society may fail to solve a problem if it hasn't anticipated it or hasn't perceived it is that the society may even not try to solve a problem that it recognizes and that's especially puzzling how on earth would a society or an individual not try to solve a problem that you recognize but there are lots of reasons including conflicts of interest in many cases to perpetuate the problem is in the interests of some individuals or some group within the society and if that group gets big certain benefits and if everybody else suffers disadvantages but those disadvantages a more diffuse and less certain then there's a strong lobby to perpetuate the problem that again is the case with global warming perpetuating global warming by continuing to burn greenhouse gases is in the interest of some elements of our society for example some autumn automobile manufacturers and oil companies but it's not the case that all oil companies are neglect the importance so the issue of global warming a couple of them unfortunately continue to do so and a couple are well attuned to the issue so conflicts of interest sometimes result in people not addressing problems that are going to do them in there are obviously some lessons of history lessons of these past collapses relevant to our present situation today the most transparent lesson is to take environmental problems seriously there are lots of past societies with only 10,000 people the Easter Islanders equipped with just stone tools of wooden stew wooden tools and yet those past societies managed to eventually to destroy their environments and to do themselves in if past societies with a few people and the relatively weak technology were capable of destroying themselves you better believe that we are doing it a much more rapidly that's a transparent conclusion but there were also some deeper conclusions of that emerge for me only in the last stages of working on my book and in fact they've been growing on me since then these really are problems of long-term thinking what are the long-term long-term features of a society that distinguish in the long run the successes and the failures and here I recognize I think two groups of factors relevant to long now thinking one has to do with the role of the elite in a society societies in which the elite are capable of insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions those are societies that are more likely to do themselves in by failing to solve their problems because the elite insulated from the consequences of their actions are cut off from the problems that they are creating the lack of motivation to solve example the Maya Maya civilization of the Yucatan Guatemala Mexico Honduras collapsed in the eight hundreds of nine why as a result especially deforestation soil erosion why on earth did the Maya Kings not just look out the windows of the palaces and see the forest gone from the hillsides and the soil rolling down from the hillsides covering up the buildings down in the valley bottoms up to a depth of quite a few feet why did the Maya King see it I'm sure they saw it but they were insulated from the consequences of deforestation soil erosion because the Maya Kings were living basically by taxing the commoners Maya Kings were living luxuriously at the expense of the commoners they did not suffer the consequences of deforestation and soil erosion until it was too late even as the commoners were beginning to get malnourished and starved until it was too late and the commoners rose and revolt and overthrew the Kings and burnt the palaces of the Kings the Maya Kings had insulated themselves from the consequences of their actions and the result were not motivated to solve their problems whereas there are other societies takagawa Japan the Shogun suffer the consequences of deforestation just as did everybody else in Japan and so the Shogun was motivated to solve Japan's forestry problems I must say that one of the things that concerns me increasingly today in the United States is this phenomenon of insulation of the elite which has been growing conspicuously within the last decade the degree to which a lead Americans wealthy Americans Americans in a position of political power are doing things to ensure that they are walled off from the consequences of their actions and so are not motivated to solve the broader problems of society the Enron phenomenon in Southern California it takes the phenomenon takes the form of the so called gated community that's been proliferating in Southern California in the last decade that I be living there in the gated community of affluent people live explicitly behind gates isolated from society's broader problems and so they're not motivated to solve problems municipal water supplied because they drink bottled water they're not motivated to solve the problems the police force public police force because they've got private security guards they're not motivated to solve the problems of the public schools because the kids go to private schools they're not motivated to solve the issues of social security because they will retire on private pensions and they were also not motivated to solve the problems of national medical insurance or the lack thereof again because they did they depend upon private health insurance and this phenomenon in the United States is growing the installation of powerful Americans the decision makers from the rest of society in the past that's been a blueprint for trouble it's also a phenomenon not only within the United States but also between first world countries and the rest of the world the first world is increasingly behaving like a gated community towards the rest of the world that's to say adopting the attitude that we in the first world can continue to consume even though we see the messes that are being caused out there in the third world even though we see the increasing number of third world countries that are suffering from problems of resource shortage and overpopulation and at least for a while we in the first world can get away with insulating ourselves from the world's problems just as the Maya Kings for a while insulated themselves from the world's problems but September 11th 2001 was or should have been a wake-up call to Americans that in the long run long now thinking the United States and Japan and Australia and Europe the first world is not no longer going to be able to insulate it cells from the problems of the third world so that's one of the deep lessons and I think the other deep lesson that I was realizing only towards the end of my work and that has been growing on me in the time since I finished my book has to do with the question of core values again why do some societies succeed in solving their problems and others while others are failing part of the reason has to do with a willingness to reappraise core values every society has its core values that it holds dear in the United States devout values of freedom and of aspiration opportunities for everybody but every society has its core values and yet conditions change and when conditions change the core values that may have served the society well in the past may no longer be serving the society well at our present and so a society faces the issue of whether to change core values it's agonizing to jettison the values that have served you well in the past it may be essential to carrying on a society that does not is unwilling to change its core values when conditions change may destroy itself by behaving inappropriately the Green Lenore's for example maintain their society for 450 years remote from Europe by their core value of their identity as European Christians and that enable them to survive as the most remote outpost of Europe from 89 84 until 1450 and that was fine until sea ice began to cut off trade with Norway and until the inward the Eskimos arrived in Greenland the Norwegians in Greenland were racist Christians who despise the Inuit and as long as climate and the environment was in their favor they could get away with it but when the climate turned against them the fact was that these pagan Inuit had a much more successful subsistence economy than to the Norse the Norse clung to their identity as Christians refused to learn from the unit and a result ended up all dead by clinging to the values the core values that had given them success for 450 years that again is an issue today there are societies today that have been willing to reappraise their core values I was living in Europe in the late 50s and early 60s when Europeans were undergoing an agonizing appraisal reappraising their core value of the nation-state Europeans had regarded themselves for centuries as citizens of the nation-state and it had been the basis for Europe's prosperity but also in the 20th century it had become the basis for too awful world wars then after the Second World War Europeans began saying our identity as nationalistic citizens of Germany or France served us well in the past and it ruined us in the 20th century and we can't afford another such war so we have to change our core values and start considering ourselves Europeans and there was that the agonizing reappraisal that I saw going on particularly in Britain in the late 1950s and is still going on today in in Europe with the the turndown of the EU Constitution in in France and the Netherlands but that's not the last word the fact is that Europeans have been able to substantially reappraise their core values and as a result have been making a transition that promises Europe power and economic strength who would not have had otherwise again this is something that concerns me in the United States today the Maricruz had held two core values that in the past since seventeen a 1776 have been the source of our identity and strength and served us well in the past but are no longer serving us well the two prime core values that are up for reappraisal in the United States today with which we are struggling or our traditional value of isolationism and consumerism for a long time the United States was isolationist George Washington's farewell address taught us to stay clear of entangling alliances to be isolationist and was good advice that George Washington gave us as long as the Atlantic Pacific oceans in fact could shield us from any country strong enough to be a threat to us after the first world war when we did in to get involved in Europe we pulled back into our traditional isolationism we could get away with it but nowadays particularly since September 11 2001 it's clear that isolation doesn't work it doesn't solve long-term problems it can solve short-term problems because there are too many countries waiting to blow up and so Americans are starting to go through the painful reappraisal of getting involved in the long term long now thinking getting involved in the long term with countries overseas the opposite of our strengths of isolation and throughout our history the other American value that is up for reappraisal now is a value of consumerism the fact is that the United States is the richest country in the world we've consumed more than any other country and our ideal of consumerism made sense as long as there were few relatively few Americans in a rich environment and today our consumerism that made us the richest country in the world no longer makes sense because the world is running out of resources and the world including the United States is increasing in number of people so we are starting to reappraise our consumerism that was the source of our strength in the past and will ruin us in the future if we cling to it but it's going to be a painful reappraisal as any of you who watches Super Bowl halftime ads knows well one finally one might one might object well to draw lessons from the past for the present that's not fear because there are big differences from the past and present you can't just extrapolate directly from the past to the present yes that's true there are differences between the past and present and you have to take account of those differences if you want to be able to learn from the past if you want to be able to draw lessons from history you have to recognize differences between the past and present some of those differences make our present situation worse more dangerous for example I mentioned that in the past societies consist of relatively few people with weak technology but today there are six and a half billion of us with metal tools and bulldozers and nuclear power not ten thousand Easter Islanders with stone tools we are hammering away at our environment with much more power and much faster than any past Society that makes our present situation more dangerous than the situation of past societies another difference between the past and present is that in the past societies could collapse one by one when Easter Island collapsed Easter Island society collapse nobody else in the world knew about it nobody was affected by it and similarly when the Maya collapsed it had some reverberations maybe in the valley of Mexico but certainly none in the southeastern United States or in the Andes and none at all in Europe nobody knew about nobody was affected by the Maya collapse but today thanks to globalization every society potentially can affect any other society and that means that the risk we have faced today is not the risk of an isolated collapse that's now impossible but of a global collapse one knows that from recent history if twenty years ago you would ask some Congress person with no interest in the environment and concern only with global security issues to name the countries in the world of most complete irrelevance to the geopolitical interests of the United States because they were so remote and so poor people in fact went through this exercise and on the 1986 list of the country's most relevant to America interests were of course Somalia and Afghanistan and except for its oil Iraq but because of globalization all three of those countries have seen interventions of American troops the American government has seen fit send troops to these remote poor countries Somalia Afghanistan and Iraq because of globalization what happens anywhere even in country like Somalia affects the interests of the first world today there are waves of immigration emigration that are unstoppable and the first world grows resources from the rest of the world the first world attracts terrorists and emergent diseases from the rest of the world so the risk that we face today is not of Easter Island like collapse in isolation but of a global collapse those two thing could make one pessimistic but people often ask me Jared after all this are you a pessimist or an optimist and maybe after what I've told you you say well he must be a pessimist but the fact is that despite all this I'm a cautious optimist and reason that I'm cautious optimist so I think that things could turn out okay is the great advantage that we enjoy over all past societies namely we are the only Society in world history that is capable of learning from the difficulties being faced by societies remote from us in space so in the morning you turn on your TV sets and you see what's happening today in Iraq or Rwanda or Nepal you can learn from these remote countries but when the Easter Islanders were chopping down their last tree in 1680 Easter Islanders didn't have TV sets and they had no way of knowing that Japan in 1680 was in the process of solving its forestry problems while Haiti in the 1680s was getting launched on creating forestry problems so we have that unique advantage and the related unique advantage we have is that we have the first society in world history with a capable capability of learning from the past because we've got archaeologists and historians to tell us about the successes of the ticka pians and the beginni Highlanders and the failures of the Maya and the Anasazi and Easter Islanders the pict at islanders again when the Easter Islanders chop which are getting ready to chop down that last tree in 1680 these dry lenders didn't have archeologists or historians to tell them that 800 years previously Maya civilization collapsed for the exact same reason that Easter Island Society was now on the verge of collapsing or that the Anasazi had collapsed just 500 years earlier so we are we have this great advantage we're the first society in world history with a potential for learning from society's remote from us in space and remote from us in time and my hope for the sake of the generation of my 18 year old twin sons and our children my hope is that we will choose to make use of that advant and learn from the past and become one of the success stories rather than one of the failures [Applause] quite a swarm of questions here by the way if you're not asking a question and somebody near you looks like they want one of these blank cards go ahead and hand it if you want one of these blank cards go ahead and beg around the people around you to see if you get something and if that doesn't work tear a leaf out of the back of this book or something I'll start with your book this is a question from Tom it's going to be the one what do people most often misunderstand about your work first off right over here what do people most often misunderstand about my work my sense has been that the people who misunderstand my work of all those who went into it with a preconceived view and were not receptive to seeing what's happened in history there have been a couple of critical reviews by well-known people whose views are well known it was to be expected that Greg Easterbrook would write a negative review in The New York Times in fact I was pleasantly surprised that he voted one quarters review saying what a good book this was before he then said that it was wrong because this is this is a person who has made a career out of disparaging reports of environmental problems um this is actually question for me you wrote you finish the book as I recall almost a year ago now oh they get them to print faster now that's kind of interesting in its own right that you must have seen and noticed some things both in the world and your students and in the course of making this television series that you would have put in the book if you know a year ago could you run by any of those things sure there are things that I would put in the book now if I were if I were finishing off the book now I came back a month ago from Australia where I was doing the publicity tour for the release of the Australian edition of the book and Australia at the time that I was there I was and still is in the most serious drought in Australian history I'm a major Australian city with a population more than 100,000 was within a few months of having to bring water in by truck and Sydney Australia's bigger city with a population four and a half million has its reservoirs a 38% capacity and dropping dropping but Sydney doesn't have any walk any aquifer beneath it and it doesn't have desalinization plants is going to be quite spectacular if a city of four and a half million at the rate that Sydney is going now it's estimated that Sydney has between one year and 20 months to solve its water problems that's going to be spectacular facility of four and a half million fails to solve its water problem I would put that in my book and are you an optimist on that one I'm a cautious optimist and that was Australians take their environmental problems more seriously than we do or Japanese for the simple reason that they've got the most fragile environment and they know it there's going to be a pair of related questions they're kind of long but they're worthy and long ones from above copic and the other from Sam Borka sinto are you guys on there one over here Bob copic asks don't democracies have a disadvantage of a necessary resource for example force may be destroyed for jobs and profit if the resource is saved once won't the issue arise again later over and over but one wrong decision will do in the resource in the society same Bergesen puts a little more generically do you see any connections between types of government and response to serious societal problems for example in other words is it possible that our own system is poorly equipped to deal with our own long-term problems that's a very interesting question it's a good question the general question about whether democracies or dictatorships are centrally guided societies are better equipped to solve these difficult environmental problems one can make April a priori arguments such as the one outlined in your question there a priori reasons why you might expect democracies to be less successful law successful dictatorships etc surveying democracies and dictatorships I do not see an average difference that's to say they are democracies that have made messes and there were democracies that have courageously solved their problems there are dictatorships that made messes and dictatorships that have solved their problems among dictatorships for example Tokugawa Japan was a dictatorship Indonesia is the dictatorship and at least for some time the Sahara area era Indonesia had a minister of the environment Emile Salim who had the ear of President Suharto and who in this country without an indigenous grassroots movement instituted a large-scale national park system so dictatorships can do some good things they can also do some grateful things Duvalier the dictator of Haiti did some made some dreadful contributions towards deforestation and again in democracies of the United States to mark American democracy just a minute now that the guy who ran sander Domingo which is your wonderful example against Haiti was not exactly a glowing Democrat no no to his oh well Trujillo the guy who runs ran the Dominican Republic was is usually considered the newest most evil dictator in history the new world and yet so and he did lots of absolutely awful things paradoxically his environmental policies worked out that are much better for the dr than did Duvalier's for haiti for the selfish reason that Trujillo wanted to enrich themselves by meant by maintaining the pine forest as property for himself and so he prevented all the people from chopping down the Pauly Flores there's an example of a totally despicable person doing something that doing at least one thing that had some beneficial side effects and among democracies the United States leave some things to be desired in a democracies environmental policies today but there are other democracies notably Sweden the Netherlands Norway Iceland especially Iceland and Australia that are doing some rather bold natural things for the environment so long-winded way of saying on the average I would say that dictatorships lurch more from very bad to very good then do democracies but on the average they are dumb and bright dictators just as they're dumb and bright presidents related of other countries and you know you're always going to look at bio geographical situations and Japan is an island Iceland is an island now Greenland was also an island but a peculiar in a sense of colonized Island whereas it feels me like Iceland was more its own complete thing and they're doing their own personal genome of the entire place and taking a very seriously green approach to things is that partly because they're an island as well as a very old democracy I think there are differences that's an interesting point about Japan and Iceland because yes the islands but also they represent opposite extremes of islands Iceland is environmentally one of the most fragile islands Iceland ended up virtually totally deforested and lost half of its topsoil but in that case the Icelanders learn their lesson and they now have a whole government Department devoted to reforesting Iceland and at the opposite extreme of Japan Japan's success in reforesting itself is partly because of policy but also that Japan had an easier job Japan is the first world country with the highest rainfall most fertile soils so trees grow rapidly we grow rapidly in Japan the Japanese had an easier problem as well as successful politics it occurs to me that both Japan and Iceland also have frames of reference of long-term thinking and Iceland a great deal of knowledge about their own history and concerned with it part of their genetic interest is in their own genealogy and in Japan you have the traditions of Shinto expressed in the say shrine and other of these things which really reach over centuries quite comfortably and you know a question here is does great regard for ancestors play into this at all that's a that's a very good point and I think it ties in in the following additional way that if you're on an island that has been self-contained for long time as has Iceland and Japan you get used to the fact that you are going to have to manage with your own resources and that's not the case in a society with borders where if you make a mess you at least have the strategy of going and grabbing those resources from the people next to so I think it's no accident that Japan at least for some time and Iceland today as we're taught at managing this environment of being self-contained keeps the consequence is close to well yeah here's a question from mark Lavoie professor at Stanford are you waving back there most of the societies look this a little bit but there's a clinker at the end of it most of the societies whose collapse you described or isolated at some level how much does Thomas Friedman's flat world prevent Jared Diamond's collapse in the long run parentheses unless the entire planet collapses yeah it's true that the lost rivet examples that I discussed in my book are drawn disproportionately but not solely from isolated societies because you know and that's for a lot of reasons and isolated societies things tend to happen faster and they're cleaner and there are fewer confounding influences of neighbors but also in my book this whole chapter on the lawyer who are the most advanced society the new world in the most populous embedded part of a new world before Columbus Mesoamerica and there are other continental embedded societies that have collapsed which I did not discuss again for a luster of Reason if I had done the eighteen chapters of 18 collapses you would have had a chapter on the Harappan collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation and there would have been a chapter on the chimera collapse of what's now Cambodia and there would have been a chapter on Great Zimbabwe in Africa and there would have been a chapter on Cahokia outside st. Louis and there would have been a chapter on the Fertile Crescent Iraq Iran etc so the isolated society is a moral us truth but it's not the case that the societies with neighbors are immune from problems what do you think about planetary collapse planetary the risk that we face today the new risk that we face today is the risk of a planetary of collapse namely the problems my worst case scenario my the gentle version my worst case in rem is not not a nuclear holocaust or an epidemic but the conditions of Somalia and Rwanda just gradually spread and conditions of Nepal gradually spread more and Haiti gradually spread more and more countries collapsed and gets and the United States which is now intervening with 150,000 troops and two and fifty billion dollars in one country there are 25 billion countries out there that the United States has intervene in and that's my gentle decline scenario that's a glide path the Oblivion scenario so in the interview is globalization part of the current planetary robustness or part of its brittleness both ways look globalization can buffer if you run out of resources you can get them from somewheres else Japan today is maintaining its forest cover how by globalization by pillaging the forests of all the countries are forests yeah but globalization can buffer you but globalization also exposes you as those American troops have went into Somalia and Iraq now here's a question from Brendan O'Connor who says I'm 22 close to 20 where are you way back thank you all of your examples of societal collapse have environmental destruction as some sort of cause what is the situation I guess are there examples of purely social or political collapse absolutely yes that there are examples of purely political social or military collapse while environmental factors have played a role I think in the majority of the well-known collapses of past societies there are cases of collapses without an environmental component just to the collapse of Carthage in 146 BC was purely military conquest by the Romans and the virtual collapse of Paraguay in the 1800s the depopulation and political collapse of Paraguay was not because of Paraguay's environmental problems but because Paraguay made the mistake of fighting a war while simultaneously against Bolivia and Argentina and Uruguay don't forget Uruguay and that was a big mistake militarily and imp resulted in the collapse of Paraguay so yes there are collapses oh and the collapse of the Soviet Union a recent example yes the Soviet Union made awful environmental messes but it appears that the nevertheless it was not those environmental messes that did in the Soviet Union 15 years ago but it was the Soviet Union's especially economic and resulting political military problems so the answer is yes there are collapses without a big environmental component okay here's a bobcat back again wave your hand again how do you think the New Guinea people will fare a few hundred years after oil runs out and the big die-off occurs isn't there a good chance they will be in better shape than our descendants yes of course the New Guineans will be have a good chance of being in better shape of our than our descendants because New Guineans have been self-sufficient and cut off from the outside world until very recently a one of my New Guinea friends was on the expedition it was on the party that made the last stone axes in his area in the 1970s and Peter still knows how to make stone axes of the New Guinea villages in that I visited last August were still self-sufficient growing all their own food with minimal dependence on anything from the outside world so yes if there is a global collapse New Guineans will be very well positioned to carry on while we Americans who don't know how to light a fire or how to get food except from a supermarket card will have some difficulties this is question from Rajeev a time value of money drives most decision-making is this one of the prime causes of short-term thinking what was the first word of that time value of money district took time time value of money does this drive most this is one of the prime causes of short-term thinking it's a I don't know that it's a product there are so many there are so many causes of short-term thinking but but yes that is a cause of short-term thinking particularly among professional economists who think in terms of what's called discounting that's to say a thousand dollars ten years in the future is not as valuable as a thousand dollars today because you can earn interest in next ten years and economists broaden that argument to say that it makes sense it's perfectly okay to chop down the forest some to to drive into extinction the fisheries today if the money that we earn by deforesting and overfishing gets invested in other stuff such as human capital this is a common fallacy on the part of economists and reminds me of a book by an economist on whose title page appeared if I can get it right the following quote in a world of finite resources the only people who believe in the possibility of unlimited growth are idiots and economists do you identify other nail ball causes of short-term thinking lots of causes of short-term thinking other causes of short-term thinking they include desperation for example why is it in the tropical third world that fishermen dynamite the reefs in order to get fish even though these fishermen know very well the value of the reefs and they know that they're destroying their own livelihood and the potential livelihood for their children because of short-term desperation of getting the food for their children tomorrow or why is it that some New Guinea groups sell leases to logging companies DeForest their land even though they know better than anybody else the products that they get for free from their forest again short-term desperation of needing the cash to buy clothes and food and schoolbooks for their children those are some of the motives behind short-term thinking this may be a core values question as well because it occurs to me when Ryan and I were on Easter Island we talked to the same archaeologist you did I think and he told the story of a lobster fishery just was discovered around the Easter Island little archipelago there some years ago it was great because they could you know eat the lobsters but sell them to Chile so they call them all and sold them all to Chile and now they're in any lobsters left and we sort of asked you know come on these guys must know better than anybody not to make that kind of mistake and his answer was he thought it was in some sense of Polynesian core value I see I seem to be more general than that what why is the fisherman Jennifer why is it that the great majority of the world's fisheries are overfished why is it that lobster fishermen throughout the world larger sinistra but lobster fishermen on see now around Australia of over fish why is that the European Union the fishermen in the world were the most detailed scientific information about the consequences overfishing why is the e why is the EU having over fish their own waters now all the fish in the waters in Africa and other countries I don't see anything uniquely pol yeah there may be something about the way we think about the ocean that it seems like an infinity that you can tap or something here's a leading question from reporter Mark Hertz guard the Nation magazine do you agree with Stuart brand that climate change is so threatening to our future that we must turn to nuclear power for much of our future energy supply good luck with that I was not aware that Stuart brand had said this but if I had known that he would have said this I would say said said yes to deal with our energy problems we need everything that is available to us including nuclear France today generates I believe 80% of its power from nuclear sources and has done it very carefully and has never had a nuclear accident Britain now is going through one of its agonizing reappraisal to the core values about whether to bring back nuclear power of the United States had bad experiences but the fact is that we get some percentage of our power today from nuclear and our nuclear plants were all old and again get phased out so what are we going to do when the nuclear plants get phased out but what are we also going to do when we deplete fossil fuels a few months ago you probably know the the report of the bipartisan Commission the National Energy Commission that released a thoroughly practical this is not pie in the sky environmental a thoroughly practical energy policy to the United States where are we going to get our energy from and they went through all the possibilities some of it can come from nuclear if done carefully like France and some of it can come from wind there are some really SuperDuper new windmills and some of it can come from tidal and some of it can come from solar and some of it can come from better use of coal data together so yes I grew was agree with Stuart brand on that as well as I think all a lot of matters I I did not expect that answer Marc deal with it okay here's a question from Mike cluck where's Mike buck waiting back there and this would be the last question is it you'll see why are there plans to make collapse into a documentary to eat reach a broader audience interesting question some of you may know that Guns Germs steal my previous book has been made into a documentary which is now showing in fact the first episode I'm aired on PBS this past Monday and if you like that first episode the next two episodes are even better on this coming Monday you'll see on PBS 10:00 to 10:00 p.m. or 9 p.m. check your local listings you'll see on PBS of the confrontation between Europe and the new world and particularly creation of the battle calf lock the National Geographic Alliance TV got 1,000 Quechua Indians including great guy to play out of walpa and magnify them by computer to 80,000 to restage the battle calf marker so that's next Monday and the following week Monday the the what is that Monday the 25th will be the future a program on Africa which you find a gut-wrenching program so I and those involved in the Guns Germs and Steel television program have been waiting to see how the ggs television program would fare with the public before getting concrete about the possibility of a TV series on collapse I hope there will be a TV series on collapse and I would add that any of you here with about three million dollars to spare who would like to do who would like to get an environmental message to tens of millions hundreds of millions people around the world lots more people watch TV program programs than read Jared Diamond's book and the ggs program cost four and a half million of which one and a half million was generated internally so it cost about 3 million of grands if any of you would like to put up three million then you can short-circuit what otherwise will be an agonizing search for money and you can launch a TV series of collapse right away and that is a wonderful note on which drift thank you and good night you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 39,858

Rating: 4.8300653 out of 5

Keywords: Culture, Environment, History, Economics, Ecology, Collapse, Society

Id: wpkS1xym0HA

Length: 74min 25sec (4465 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2011