I had the opportunity this week to hear Jared Diamond speak about his book ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’. He provided a glimpse of his book and touched on the collapse of many of the societies referenced in his book (which I have not read), but chose to focus on the failure of Viking Greenland to illustrate that this could happen to people of Northern European descent (also the ancestry of the overwhelming majority of the audience). He spoke very eloquently of the factors that lead to collapse and provided a fairly convincing portrait of societies that failed to examine their ‘core values’ and adapt their ways in the face of environmental disasters. He further went on to discuss how modern day society is facing a similar kind of collapse on a much larger scale. He provided a very good discussion of environmental, bio-geographical and structural reasons for the collapse of fairly small, remote societies from the past. He concluded by issuing the warning that our society must change to avoid a similar fate.
Before going to the talk I looked on the web for critiques of his work, as I have often noted that biologists that stray into politics can often present fascist, Malthusian based solutions to society’s problems. I found a really interesting commentary by Richard Smith at www.selvesandothers.org/article12682. Smith points out that Diamond does a good job of demonstrating how societies that fail to alter ‘core values’ are vulnerable to collapse. However, Smith asserts that when Diamond provides solutions for modern society, he actually fails to question our ‘core value’ of capitalism. Indeed during the question period Diamond referenced Churchill’s famous quote about democracy (“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”) and applied it to our economic system. Instead he proposed your typical ‘feel good’ solutions of lobbying, voting & screwing in some florescent bulbs. Of course these things may help, but it did seem to me that he could not recognize his own ‘core values’ (as Smith points out). The idea that we can ‘have our cake and eat it too’, is quite popular today among mainstream environmentalist and is also quite compatible with corporate agendas. Perhaps Diamond does know that we must look at this ‘core value’, but is not willing to say so out of fear of irrelevancy. Of course, he also sits on the board of the corporate friendly World Wildlife Fund.
I must admit that I was very impressed with his analysis and think that if he were willing to admit that economics and politics are not his expertise, his environmental analysis would fit well with the ideas of many anti-capitalist and direct democracy theorist (as Smith demonstrates in his commentary). I must also commend Diamond for not jumping on over-population as the
major problem when asked. He stated that it was one aspect, but did say that consumption was much more important. Listening to him talk and the crowd reaction, I did get the feeling that if this is our leadership in creating sustainability then our society is destined to collapse. I believe diversity of socio-economic political systems is the key. We must develop and promote alternatives to our dominant system. Hopefully, these systems can grow as our current system continues to fade due to it’s inability to adapt. A really good new ecofeminist influenced book “Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology” (edited by Ariel Salleh) describes examples of many such alternative models and theories. While I did find Diamond’s talk to be interesting, I would be really excited if the sponsor of this talk, University of Florida Office of Sustainability, were to invite one of the authors from this book to speak.
