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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Ends of the World as We Know Them

By JARED DIAMOND

Published: January 1, 2005

Los Angeles * NEW Year's weekend traditionally is a time for us to reflect,

and to make resolutions based on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the

United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new

presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where

we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10

years from now, or even next year?

Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that

when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and

unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak

population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from

history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined

swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is

complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have

managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.

When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors

have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their

environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and

the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's

not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of

this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose

relative importance varies from case to case.

For instance, in the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter Island

three centuries ago, environmental problems were dominant, and climate change,

enemies and trade were insignificant; however, the latter three factors played

big roles in the disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland.

Let's consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of causes:

the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian settlements on the

Pitcairn Islands.

Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central

America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus.

They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local

origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year

A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th

century.

Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern

Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910,

kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of

the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The

last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count

calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?

A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil

erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food.

Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by

humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse,

as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.

Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see

their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was

that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the

rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well

fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They

had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through

ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run

from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege

of being among the last to starve.

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Whereas Maya societies were undone by problems of their own making,

Polynesian societies on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean

were undone largely by other people's mistakes. Pitcairn, the uninhabited island

settled in 1790 by the H.M.S. Bounty mutineers, had actually been populated

by Polynesians 800 years earlier. That society, which left behind temple

platforms, stone and shell tools and huge garbage piles of fish and bird and turtle

bones as evidence of its existence, survived for several centuries and then

vanished. Why?

In many respects, Pitcairn and Henderson are tropical paradises, rich in some

food sources and essential raw materials. Pitcairn is home to Southeast

Polynesia's largest quarry of stone suited for making adzes, while Henderson has

the region's largest breeding seabird colony and its only nesting beach for sea

turtles. Yet the islanders depended on imports from Mangareva Island, hundreds

of miles away, for canoes, crops, livestock and oyster shells for making to ols.

Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson, their Mangarevan

trading partner collapsed for reasons similar to those underlying the Maya

decline: deforestation, erosion and warfare. Deprived of essential imports in a

Polynesian equivalent of the 1973 oil crisis, the Pitcairn and Henderson

societies declined until everybody had died or fled.

The Maya and the Henderson and Pitcairn Islanders are not alone, of course.

Over the centuries, many other societies have declined, collapsed or died out.

Famous victims include the Anasazi in the American Southwest, who abandoned

their cities in the 12th century because of environmental problems and climate

change, and the Greenland Norse, who disappeared in the 15th century because of

all five interacting factors on the checklist. There were also the ancient

Fertile Crescent societies, the Khmer at Angkor Wat, the Moche society of Peru -

the list goes on.

But before we let ourselves get depressed, we should also remember that there

is another long list of cultures that have managed to prosper for lengthy

periods of time. Societies in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands and

Central and Northwest Europe, for example, have all found ways to sustain

themselves. What separates the lost cultures from those that survived? Why did

the Maya fail and the shogun succeed?

Half of the answer involves environmental differences: geography deals worse

cards to some societies than to others. Many of the societies that collapsed

had the misfortune to occupy dry, cold or otherwise fragile environments, while

many of the long-term survivors enjoyed more robust and fertile surroundings.

But it's not the case that a congenial environment guarantees success: some

societies (like the Maya) managed to ruin lush environments, while other

societies - like the Incas, the Inuit, Icelanders and desert Australian Aborigines -

have managed to carry on in some of the earth's most daunting environments.

The other half of the answer involves differences in a society's responses to

problems. Ninth-century New Guinea Highland villagers, 16th-century German

landowners, and the Tokugawa shoguns of 17th-century Japan all recognized the

deforestation spreading around them and solved the problem, either by developing

scientific reforestation (Japan and Germany) or by transplanting tree

seedlings (New Guinea). Conversely, the Maya, Mangarevans and Easter Islanders failed

to address their forestry problems and so collapsed.

Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country faced its own crisis of

deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the peace and prosperity following the

Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph that ended 150 years of civil war. The subsequent

explosion of Japan's population and economy set off rampant logging for

construction of palaces and cities, and for fuel and fertilizer.

The shoguns responded with both negative and positive measures. They reduced

wood consumption by turning to light-timbered construction, to fuel-efficient

stoves and heaters, and to coal as a source of energy. At the same time, they

increased wood production by developing and carefully managing plantation

forests. Both the shoguns and the Japanese peasants took a long-term view: the

former expected to pass on their power to their children, and the latter expected

to pass on their land. In addition, Japan's isolation at the time made it

obvious that the country would have to depend on its own resources and couldn't

meet its needs by pillaging other countries. Today, despite having the highest

human population density of any large developed country, Japan is more than 70

percent forested.

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There is a similar story from Iceland. When the island was first settled by

the Norse around 870, its light volcanic soils presented colonists with

unfamiliar challenges. They proceeded to cut down trees and stock sheep as if they

were still in Norway, with its robust soils. Significant erosion ensued,

carrying half of Iceland's topsoil into the ocean within a century or two. Icelanders

became the poorest people in Europe. But they gradually learned from their

mistakes, over time instituting stocking limits on sheep and other strict

controls, and establishing an entire government department charged with landscape

management. Today, Iceland boasts the sixth-highest per-capita income in the

world.

What lessons can we draw from history? The most straightforward: take

environmental problems seriously. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are

even more likely to do so now. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able

to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal

tools and bulldozers are doing today. Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected

just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means

that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. Just think

how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States

today.

Other lessons involve failures of group decision-making. There are many

reasons why past societies made bad decisions, and thereby failed to solve or even

to perceive the problems that would eventually destroy them. One reason

involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance,

the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland)

can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society. Another

is the pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival, as

when fishermen overfish the stocks on which their livelihoods ultimately depend.

History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful

societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in

blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its

actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made

choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not

begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.

Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to

me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private

security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on

private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these

things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water

supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much

for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually

burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island

chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice

in recent decades.

In contrast, the elite in 17th-century Japan, as in modern Scandinavia and

the Netherlands, could not ignore or insulate themselves from broad societal

problems. For instance, the Dutch upper class for hundreds of years has been

unable to insulate itself from the Netherlands' water management problems for a

simple reason: the rich live in the same drained lands below sea level as the

poor. If the dikes and pumps keeping out the sea fail, the well-off Dutch know

that they will drown along with everybody else, which is precisely what

happened during the floods of 1953.

The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core

values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense. The

medieval Greenland Norse lacked such a willingness: they continued to view themselves

as transplanted Norwegian pastoralists, and to despise the Inuit as pagan

hunters, even after Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had

grown too cold for a pastoral existence. They died off as a result, leaving

Greenland to the Inuit. On the other hand, the British in the 1950's faced up to the

need for a painful reappraisal of their former status as rulers of a world

empire set apart from Europe. They are now finding a different avenue to wealth

and power, as part of a united Europe.

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In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face.

Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so

we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that's no longer viable in a world

of finite resources. We can't continue to deplete our own resources as well as

those of much of the rest of the world.

Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from

our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now,

technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In

recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking

short-term military solutions at the last minute.

But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth,

there's simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the

dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each

intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than

100,000 troops.

A genuine reappraisal would require us to recognize that it will be far less

expensive and far more effective to address the underlying problems of public

health, population and environment that ultimately cause threats to us to

emerge in poor countries. In the past, we have regarded foreign aid as either

charity or as buying support; now, it's an act of self-interest to preserve our

own economy and protect American lives.

Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they

contemplate the world's growing population and human demands colliding with

shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity's biggest

problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond

our control don't figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save

ourselves, we don't need new technology: we just need the political will to face up

to our problems of population and the environment.

I also draw hope from a unique advantage that we enjoy. Unlike any previous

society in history, our global society today is the first with the opportunity

to learn from the mistakes of societies remote from us in space and in time.

When the Maya and Mangarevans were cutting down their trees, there were no

historians or archaeologists, no newspapers or television, to warn them of the

consequences of their actions. We, on the other hand, have a detailed chronicle

of human successes and failures at our disposal. Will we choose to use it?

Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for

"Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," is the author of the

forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."