Taking the Long View

Tim O'Reilly writes:

O'Reilly Radar > On Failing to Think Long Term: Stewart Brand gave me permission to post his email summary of Jared Diamond's talk last night. Over to Stewart...

To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!), Jared Diamond articulately spelled out how his best-selling book, COLLAPSE, took shape.

At first it was going to be a book of 18 chapters chronicling 18 collapses of once-powerful societies--- the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. But he wanted to contrast those with success stories like Tokugawa-era Japan, which wholly reversed its lethal deforestation, and Iceland, which learned to finesse a highly fragile and subtle environment.

Diamond also wanted to study modern situations with clear connections to the ancient collapses. Rwanda losing millions in warfare caused by ecological overpressure. China-- "because of its size, China's problems are the world's problems." Australia, with its ambitions to overcome a horrible environmental history. And Diamond's beloved Montana, so seemingly pristine, so self-endangered on multiple fronts.

He elaborated a bit on his book's account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!" The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.

Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide."

The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests-- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past.

Overall, it's a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops....

One good sharp question came from Mark Hertzgaard, who asked the speaker if he agreed "with Stewart Brand's view that the threat of climate change justifies adopting more nuclear power." To my surprise, Diamond said that he was persuaded by last year's "Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges" to treat nuclear as one important way to reduce the production of greenhouse gases....

Comments

[Lee A. Arnold]

"How can people be so dumb?" is answered by "a failure to think long term," which is true, but not an explanation. So we look for the manifestation, perhaps different ones in different eras. Presently we are plagued with scientists and economists who are loath to admit that they cannot predict complex systems. Yet still they promote their specialties for the answer, as if the precision is forthcoming, or perhaps we can just wriggle by. That was okay for a century or two, but now the acceleration of one system-path looks to threaten another--a more hardwired one. So then the question is, "what do you do about it?" It turns out that learning in this area is done partly by metaphor, analogy, and narrative storytelling, as Mr. Brand's great mentor Gregory Bateson showed. Look at the response Mr. Diamond's book is getting. After decades of denial and belittling the prescient, the ground is shifting.

[JR]

Probably nobody cut down the last tree. They just kept cutting and reducing the area of forest until the soil wasn't protected from erosion, young trees couldn't get a hold, and the few last trees finally died. Nobody shot the last passenger pigeon, either. You don't have to have a society of blithering idiots to destroy the environment. You just have to have some people who profit, some who are in denial, and most who don't pay attention.

[Sean Kellett]

I think one important point arising from Jared's book is the notion that it is very difficult to think long-term - particularly in societies with no inter-generational memory (eg. via books).

In the example given regarding the last tree on easter island, it took generations to fell all the trees, starting with the big and best ones ending with the small and worst ones.

Each generation had no 'memory' of the trees previous generations had felled, leading to a situation where no one generation seemed able to recognise a long-term deforestation trend and what it might mean for future generations. Tragically, even if a generation had recognised the trend, the cultural mores of deifying the dead compelled them to cut down trees - against their own long-term interests - in order to build monuments.

A genuine Tragedy of the Generations.

Two conclusions: we need to be able to jettison cultural mores that conflict with our long-term survival and we need to retain our 'memory' - easily said, hardly done.

[Darryl Rosin]

There's an MP3 available of what sounds like a similar speech he gave for the Festival of Ideas in Brisbane earlier this year: http://www.griffith.edu.au/er/diamond/mp3/lecture.mp3

[arles]

Our long term vision reaches out as far as the end of next quarter.

A address of Diamonds was broadcast recently on NPR - it sounded like basically the same talk. It was quite good.
Unfortunately our correspondant author twice removed loses the rather startling Australian accent.

Books really good too.

[jerry]

First they came for the metalworkers, but I wasn't a metalworker, so I said nothing. Then they came for the autoworkers, but I wasn't an autoworker, so I said nothing. Then they came for the information workers, and by then, there was no one left to speak up for me.

Well, no one except for a few economists who failed to understand what they could see.

Today I work at Wal-Mart -- may I help you?

[Movie Guy]

Brad,

Thank you for this fine post.

I have decided not to cut my blackberry bushes.

Decision final...

[mauisurfer]

Here in Hawaii the forests of giant koa trees (acacia koa)are greatly reduced. On Maui there are very few trees left that are big enough that they could be used to build a decent canoe. On the Big Island (Hawaii) thousands of trees were cut and stolen, and it took the state years to realize this was happening, and very light sentences were given to those who were caught (and who made lots of money).
I grow some koa myself, and have tried to help others. In an area that has been taken over by cattle/goats/(now even deer on Maui) it is not simple to return the land to koa forest. The soil has eroded, the mycorhyzia for koa are no longer present, and the animals are still not under control. It is still not uncommon for "cowboys" to turn their cattle into the forest for fattening.
And introduced plants are an even bigger threat than introduced animals.
So you don't have to look very far to see what Diamond is talking about.

[John Casey]

One point Diamond makes in his book that hasn't been remarked on here is that Easter Island was a 'perfect storm' of an environmental collapse. Compared to a the median Polynesian Island, Easter had less rain, cooler growing season, less windblown nutrients (volcanic and dust from the Asian mainland) and its terrain was relatively accessible. People following the same forestry practices as at Easter on other more favored islands did OK.

[Alex]

Elites that become insulated from the consequences of their actions...the countervailing forces are twofold: 1) Democracy/Rule of Law and 2) Competition/Markets, no? Crappy elite? 1) Throw the bums out, or 2) Call in their overdraft.

Problems arise when the elite seek either political impunity (tyranny/theocracy/absolutism/oligarchy) or economic impunity (monopoly/cartel/false accounting).

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01diamond.html?ex=1262322000&en=0bca4693e985942b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

The Ends of the World as We Know Them
By JARED DIAMOND

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....

[anne]

PBS is currently showing a series of films on Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." The films are excellent. Interestingly enough it was the study of birds in New Guinea, retracing steps of the magnificent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, that set Jared Diamond on his way to becoming what I refer to as an ecological economist.

[aiontay]

Sean,

Books aren't the only way to preserve inter-generational memory. At some of the aminist Kachin burials in northern Burma, it can take 7 days for the presiding priest to retrace the deceased's ancestoral migration route, which is necessary in order to send the spirit back to it's rightful resting place. Now that is some inter-generational memory. Of course, that sort of memory is threatened by the disruption to Kachin society caused by war, economic collaspe brought on by the Burmese military and environmental collapse brought on by massive deforestation and gold mining to satisfy China's economy and also to pay off the Burmese military's debt to China. And given the Burmese military's hostility to any expressions of ethnic culture, I doubt any books recording those migrations is going to be published any time soon. Besides, books have their weaknesses too. How much inter-generational knowledge went up in smoke in Alexandria?

As you said, preserving memory is tough.

[anne]

Sean Kellett and Aiontay

Interesting exchange, and of course carefully recorded memory in any number of forms is essential for the possibility of reflection but as essential is the cultural flexibility and benign traits to respond to what is remembered. Memory of tragedy has seldom been lost beyond various distortions in the century past, but tragedy has been repeated. There is continual evidence recorded of ecological damage, and as continual a determined effort to excuse the damage we note.

[Seabrook Al]

Nukes? Now that's thinking long term! 13,000 year half life...

[anne]

Lee A. Arnold

I do not quite understand your provocative comment which seems to be suggesting focusing research by story telling. Please continue.

[James Kroeger]

I do not understand why any and all economists do not see every concern expressed about the environment as one that can be reduced, ultimately, to the issue of population control.

No matter how much we might conserve, recycle, or legislate, if we cannot reduce the planet's human population, we are not going to be able to provide all of the earth's inhabitants with what is now considered to be a middle class American lifestyle.

Every time I hear an impassioned plea for environmental action, I ask myself why those who are concerned do not immediately bring up the subject of birth controla?

Well, why don't they?

.

[SW]

Look, I agree that we are probably going to have to bite the nuclear bullet. But how we do it is critical. In my view what we need to do is make an all out honest effort to adopt renewable and other alternative technologies first, then when we fall short, which we inevitably will, fill in with nuclear. If we reach for nuclear first, it will be the easy short term (ironically considering the long term problem of the waste) fix and it will choke off the development of the renewable technologies.

[John Emerson]

I haven't read this one, but it sounds as if, like GG&S, you will end up with a tremendous number of stimulating ideas and a lot of interesting new facts sloppily glued together with some well-meaning general ideas about the environment, racism, etc. I love exploratory books of this type, but people do seem to read them in the wrong way, as though Diamonds overall conclusions were better grounded than they really are.

The same is true of his mentor, McNeill. I love the way the two of them take a millenial, global scope, but when you look at a single specific topic they discuss you often need the grain of salt.

[kharris]

James K,

The Catholic Church and economists share one core belief – "good" in this world is determined by how many people share in the earth's bounty. Arguing against population increase is to argue against an increase in welfare.

It is beyond the study of economics to determine the point at which degradation of living standards – reducing welfare for each of the, say, 7 billion people in the world – is fully offset by new people also enjoying this degraded living standard. Standard practices in estimating of utility forbid comparisons of utility between people.

There is a big warning in Diamond's work, and the responses to it here, that we cannot know when we have gone too far. Saying "more science, more technology" rather than "let's slow down and take stock" is surely our path to cutting down all the trees. We already well on the way to cutting down all the "trees" on continental shelves around the world.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Anne, I didn't mean to mislead. Research is done by the usual method, hypothetico-deductive or whatever you call it. But research may never be perfectly conclusive (e.g. in much environmental debate,) or cannot be conclusive (e.g. because complex systems remain intractable,) or is called "conclusive" only by limiting the purview or accepting other disputed or normative criteria (e.g. cost-benefit analyses.) As these negative results multiply, WHILE new reports of damage mound up, (BOTH things must occur,) people will return to the older forms of knowing, to decide what to do about a large class of situations regarding the environment. They tell stories and draw analogies. (Diamond's book is one example of that process. For another, right after the Indonesian tsunami, Gary Becker and Richard Posner wrote a Wall St. Journal op-ed arguing that the disaster demonstrates that an unpredictable catastrophe might occur in the climate regime, as well.) This older aproach is less exact, ("sloppily glued together" as John Emerson just wrote,) but I am convinced it will finally determine policy. The attitude, of course, is already generally called "the precautionary principle." The simple tripping switch will be when everyone, or almost everyone, AGREES.

Gregory Bateson (1904 -- 1980) showed that considerations like these can be greatly regularized. He began to posit the axioms of a new secondary science, concerning the flow of information through patterns in living organization. A good, elementary, and delightful place to begin, are the first few chapters of his last (completed) book, "Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity."

[Cranky Observer]

> people will return to the older forms of knowing, to
> decide what to do about a large class of situations
> regarding the environment. They tell stories and draw
> analogies.

Problem being that to the Radicals the "damage" that is mounting up is the damage that left-wing regulations and scare stories are doing to the economy, which is damaging the well-being of people as economic actors. Their stories and analogies tell them that there is no "global warming" and that the left-wing boogeymen are just trying to scare them into allowing their justly-earned income to be taxed away.

Now, I personally happen to think that the Radicals are wrong about environmental damage. But if one steps outside one's own echo chamber of comfort, one has to admit that the "old stories" the Radicals are telling are quite powerful and consistent. How do I know which set of stories and analogies is correct?

Cranky

[wkwillis]

Most of the people who listen to lectures on the ecology have already realised that birth control improves the quality of ecology lecture listeners lives. They are just beginning to understand that birth control degrades the quantity of ecology lecture listeners lives.
In other words, they've already essentially stopped having children.
To move back to economics, has anyone noticed that the shortage of upper middle class professionals due to birth control was on course to improving the wages of upper middle class professionals until we started importing more upper middle class professionals from China and India and Eastern Europe and the rest of the underdeveloped world?
Now as to lack of civil memory, go and ask people if they realise that the native ground cover of the eastern United States is chestnut trees. We are already beginning to forget why so many streets are named Elm Street.
Most people have no idea that the ubiquitous eucalyptus of the southwest coast was imported so recently that we know the name of the people and corporations responsible (class action lawsuit anyone?)Now watch while people forget about the dogwood understory of the East Coast. It will happen within your lives.

[Paul G. Brown]

John Emerson -

examples, please?

Are any of his facts wrong?

Which arguments from facts to conclusions are 'sloppy' in their logic?

On what grounds do you conclude that Diamond's conclusions--that geography played an important part in the course of the development of civilization, or that the relationship between a population and their environment is enormously important their long-term outcomes--are not 'better grounded than they really are.'?

I'm genuinely curious. I spot checked one or two things I found surprising in his books (yes, there is a permanent ice field in Indonesia Papua, for example) and found him accurate.

Or are you just blowin' smoke with your assertions?

[Joe O]

Paul,

The problem isn't his facts are wrong. Or, that his theories are not valid speculations. It is just that people take his speculations to be the gospel truth.

[Chris R]

James K writes, "I do not understand why any and all economists do not see every concern expressed about the environment as one that can be reduced, ultimately, to the issue of population control."

Because that goes at odds with the actual historical experience of many societies. My Germanic ancestors slashed, burned, and pillaged their way across the European and North American continents and inflicted great environmental devastation in a world with a small population. As population has increased in these areas, so has reforestation; agricultural productivity (with enforced property rights) has increased at a greater rate than population.

The great question of development in the rest of the world is how to replicate this rather than Easter Island; institutions are endogenous in a way which makes this difficult. Property rights, for one thing, are important, but again they're endogenous. Resources have to have a price; otherwise they have no marginal value to poachers. If they have no marginal value (via taxes, Coasian bargaining, whatever), they tend to disappear.

I might add that population has grown in many places because of a decreased death rate, not an increased birth rate. Any person of good will should consider this a blessing. A blessing with challenges, perhaps. But a blessing nonetheless.

Kharris writes, "It is beyond the study of economics to determine the point at which degradation of living standards – reducing welfare for each of the, say, 7 billion people in the world – is fully offset by new people also enjoying this degraded living standard."

Take a look at growth theory. There are at least two broad sets of issues--competition for fixed resources and congestion versus network economies--we can tell convincing stories about innovation (Kremer or indeed Arrow) or specialization (Romer or even Smith). We just don't know enough about the magnitudes involved to make very definite statements. Again, institutions matter quite a bit in determining these tradeoffs, and they're endogenous.

This is why economics is so tough; the correct answer is almost always, "It depends." However, we can make pretty good statements about incentives and tradeoffs at an individual level; indeed, we're probably some of the biggest environmentalists out there for this reason. If environmentalism is a religion to you rather than a broadly utilitarian matter, you will not like this approach because it recognizes limits to policy. If you're a dogmatic libertarian, you will not like it because your objective is to minimize government. Economics has something to offend everyone, which is why we're unpopular with most people.

Good discussion altogether.

[CalDem]

Since you posted this, why don't you invite some of the more radical environmental economists to make their case in your Economist Voice publication, Perhaps Herman Daly?

Most of what mainstream growth/macro economists do supposes sufficient technical progrees and substitutability of natural resources so that environmental problems are always a shideshow to the main issues of maximizing growth. Diamond's book is an attack on this notion, though he does a really poor job in his couple of chapters on technological growth. you could do a much better job of fostering this debate. Its really a much more important debate than the size of the equity premium, after all.

[eyelessgame]

I always have to take off my Super-Liberal Secret Decoder Ring in order to say it, but I happen to think that global warming and energy-crisis-induced global economic collapse are both worse than nuclear power.

I've thought it for a long time, but I'm seeing more people agreeing.

Of course, I don't trust this administration to come up with a rational nuclear energy policy. They'll just give away the store to the oil companies again and not actually solve any problems.

[Dubblblind]

Some problems we are facing today:

A cynical ruling elite who is making a calculated decision to amass as much personal fortune as they can as insulation from the collapse they are quite consciously engendering.

A faith based decision making force who feel no need for long term thinking at all (what with the Rapture coming).

An outdated economist's perspective which promotes the pursuit of ever increasing material wealth for the masses which cannot possibly be sustainable, vis-a-vis natural resources, with concomitant growth in world population.

Peak oil (think agriculture not just transportation) with little effort directed at conservation or replacement technology at a time when such effort is crucial. (OPEC has already privately stated that it is uncertain it can meet demand in 10-15 years.)

Ongoing environmental destruction of a magnitude that could potentially lead to a catastrophic tipping point.

[Dubblblind]

Apropos of collapse we have this from Ben Tripp:

http://counterpunch.org/tripp07092005.html

"With regrets for all the chaos and death and destruction, it was necessary that George W. Bush should ascend to power and retain it for two terms of office. He is a singularly giftless man, but he brings one gift to everyone: disaster. Placed at the pinnacle of the greatest military empire in human history, its wealth and reach unimaginable in Caesar's day, equipped with every conceivable advantage that the very most powerful, influential cabals of rulership and commerce and warmaking can bestow, all of their collective beneficence concentrated behind his every purpose, yet he will fail.

[...]

"It is his magical ability to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory that will end America's unsuitable world domination. Then we can get on with averting the next ice age. Far too late to save what's left of the world as we know it, but that's the cosmic joke our species seems never to get, no matter how often the punch line is repeated.

[...]

"Empires rely on a mutual parasitism between leaders and people: you send us to war, we get cheap resources (or Poland). That sort of thing. Eventually, the rulers start running the show entirely for their own benefit, putting increasing downward pressure on the populace until society breaks down like my Fiat Cinquecento. Bingo! The spoils of a sprawling, resource-grabbing common enterprise have been diverted to a self-selecting few. The ticks are exsanguinating the hyena. What's next? A leader must emerge from the top ranks to ruin everything, pronto.

"That leader is George W. Bush. He brings his gift of failure to our nation and the world...They come along at a time when empires need collapsing, after which the common business of mankind can proceed."

[CalDem]

This is my thought on the nuclear power issue. The safety of nuclear power depends critically on the efficacy of the people regulating the system. The possible damages from a big problem at a nuclear plant far outstrip the net worth of the companies running the plants, so no liability rule could induce companies to take proper care. Therefore you need a really good enforcement and monitoring system to run the plants. If you think that the nuclear enforcement and monitoring will be governed by sane politicians who are not completely bought off by lobbyists then its likely the enforcement and monitoring will be pretty good. If you think the current practice of selling off federal regulatory policy to the highest bidder will continue, then nuclear power is a very bad bet. No regulatory body "governed" by the current Republican establishment can be trusted with expanded nuclear power.

[John Emerson]

Paul: as I said, I haven't read the recent book. I was talking about McNeill generally, and Diamond's first book, together.

Your tone is off-putting, because McNeill and Diamond shovel out judgements and explanations by the bushel. There are more bold and venturesome conclusions in ten or twenty pages of either one than there are in the average good 300-pp. history book.

Diamond, GG&S: He listed all the theoretically domesticatible large mammals and proved in a few pages that none of them could possible be domesticated for meat or for power, giving the eland and American bison as two examples based on failed XXc and XIXc attempts. This proved to him that the range of the horse and cow controlled the development of civilization.

I. The eland and bison domestication experiments took place after the horse and cow had been bred and trained for at least 4000 years and ?6000 years? respectively. The newly-domesticated wild eland and bison had no competitive advantage by that time, but this does not mean that they would not have been economically domesticatible in 2000 or 4000 BC. Why that didn't happen is unknown, but you can't just say that those two animals were undomesticatible.

II. McNeill argued that plague originated in Burma and was carried to China, C. Asia, and finally Europe by Mongol troops, and that the fall of the Mongol Empire was due to depopulation due to plague.

I was unable to verify the Burmese origin theory, and he didn't have it well documented. It still could be true.

More important, by about 1260 the Mongol empire had divided, and the Russian Mongols were fighting the Persian Mongols. The Mongols in China and Persia were an elite political caste, and steppe demographics wouldn't have been a major factor in their fall.

Furthermore, the Mongols on the steppe (where plague was endemic) retained their power. The steppe Mongols were a threat to the Ming and Ch'ing for a considerable period, and the Russian Mongols (become Tatars) controlled the Crimea until 1783. (That's McNeill, but the two work very similarly).

[John Emerson]

I forgot to mention that part of animal domestication is breeding for tameness, and that this is a gradual process taking many, many generations. Diamond used the wildness of certain species as proof of their undomesticatibility.

[Matthew McClure]

The nuclear fuel cycle - mining, transportation, mill tailings, waste "disposal" is very messy.

The NRC staff has estimated in detail the number of cancers, birth defects, and other causes of premature death which are likely to result from the designed operation of the nuclear fuel cycle. Barring accidents, NRC would anticipate some 378,000 lethal cancers and 113,000 genetic effects to result over the long term during which the released isotopes will persist in the environment. The Commission has indicated that these figures could be low by a factor of 2, which would make the upper range estimate of the agency 756,000 lethal cancers and 226,000 genetic effects. All cancers (i.e.: double the number of lethal cancers) and birth defects could total 1,740,000 in the Commission's upperbound estimate, which it terms "acceptable."

And there's not all that much uranium. According to David Goodstein, physics prof, provost of Cal Tech and author of _Out of Gas: the end of the age of oil_ , "To produce enough nuclear power to equal the power we currently get from fossil fuels, you would have to build 10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants. . . at that burn rate, our known reserves of uranium would last only for 10 or 20 years." Peak uranium! (http://www.energybulletin.net/2311.html )

[John Emerson]

I second Caldem's suggestion about Herman Daly.

[Ari]

Lee A. Arnold and KHarris

Together then you are making a rather significant argument that I had not thought about. There is a need, just as Jared Diamond has been doing, to abstract detailed ecological study to make the stories that shape cultural responses more benign. Of course, and well pointed out.

[anne]

KHarris

'There is a big warning in Diamond's work, and the responses to it here, that we cannot know when we have gone too far. Saying "more science, more technology" rather than "let's slow down and take stock" is surely our path to cutting down all the trees. We are already well on the way to cutting down all the "trees" on continental shelves around the world.'

Lee A. Arnold

'It turns out that learning in this area is done partly by metaphor, analogy, and narrative storytelling...'

Ari

'There is a need, just as Jared Diamond has been doing, to abstract detailed ecological study to make the stories that shape cultural responses more benign. Of course, and well pointed out.'

Nicely done.

[anne]

Lee Arnold and KHarris

We are in many senses made of stories, and you have shown this well. Jared Diamond's work is indeed setting economists a new set, a broader set, of stories to attend to.

[Hedley Lamarr]

Easter Islanders played "The Mothers"? Who knew!?

[Slocum]

My difficulty with "Collapse" was that his most prominent examples--East Island and Greenland had special, atypical problems--for example:

- Marginal climate
- Geographical isolation
- Limited, fragile trading networks

These are simply not characteristics of large industrialized countries or of the world as a whole. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that Western civilization might not collapse anyway, but what it does mean is that the histories of Easter Island and Greenland are not likely to tell us anything very interesting about our own prospects.

[SW]

Hope all of Diamond's critics above have at least bothered to read the book.

[gmoke]

I'll seriously consider nuclear power after we have a serious energy conservation and efficiency program (including updating the grid) and the first thing I'll seriously consider about nuclear power is radiation safety and clean-up. Only after that, I believe, should any serious person seriously consider nuclear power.

If it does work that way, then I know the discussion is a silly one.

[gmoke]

Correction: If it doesn't work that way, then I know the discussion is a silly one.

Sorry about the confusion. I guess this proves I'm not a serious person.

[Dubblblind]

Anne, it is my turn to say nicely done for the way you have distilled out some noteworthy essences from this thread. Alas, I view the world darkly lately as "we" have managed to elect Bush not only once but twice. Bush, who seeks with a vengeance to squash the "stories we are made of" in favor of a world sans knowledge, wisdom or compassion.

[John Emerson]

I am more sympathetic than not to Diamond's environmentalist message, and I also applaud the boldness of his writing. However, people seem to be taking his book as much solider than it can possibly be, given his boldness. My guess is that, as in his first book, he made a good case but he didn't establish anything.

[anne]

Dubblblind

Interesting, for I was thinking that was just your sadness when I read your comment. This really is a difficult time. I understand. Thank you.

[Michael Noble]

Nuclear power's Achilles heels are these four: cost, safety, waste storage/transportation, and security. The first three are engineering and science problems, that have been seemingly intractable over the 50-year life of the technology. But it is certainly conceivable that an economic, safe reactor could be designed and built, and that some method of isolation of waste from the biosphere for a quarter of a million years could be engineered. (Harder than the first two, admittedly.)

But security, that's a social and political problem even more than an engineering problem. It seems just too big to solve, now or soon. Remember that thin rumors of "yellowcake uranium" caused the US to launch a $300 B adventure in Iraq. Now all eyes turn to nuclear operations in Iran under its new pro-nuclear president.

What kind of world security is possible when the next 4 subway terrorists take the train to the nuclear reactor? In Nuclear Regulatory Commission "force-on-force" simulations, the pretend terrorists took over reactors about half the time... until the simulation program was ended after 9/11.

I too am frightened enough by global warming that nuclear power cannot be completely taken off the table, but there are a gajillion dollars of investments in efficiency and renewables that make better sense now, and carbon capture from a new generation of coal will probably makes more sense than nuclear power over the next 20 years.

But the global warming problem is such that while doubling the world's economy, we should be halving the world's global warming pollution, and as the economy doubles again, it should be halved once more.

That's reason enough to leave the "nuclear option" open. But not now.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Don't forget the multi-billion-dollar government subsidy for the nuclear industry that is in the Price-Anderson Act, one of the most astonishing government subsidies of all time, which limits insurance liability for plant owners, leaving the taxpayer to pick up the tab for big nuclear accidents. If Three Mile Island had blown, how much would it have cost to decontaminate eastern Pennsylvania and all of New Jersey, and reconstitute the lives and livelihood of the people who lived there, and take care of their medical bills, and reimburse the fisheries of the Eastern seaboard?

[piotr]

Emerson: I think that you exagerate weaknesses of Diamond. The concept of "domesticability" of animals seems not particularly controversial to me. Domestication of horse, sheep, goat, pig and donkey was a bit gradual perhaps, but it did not take "thousands of years". The neolitic revolution was perhaps slower than industrial revolution, but it took place over several hundred years.

For at least 1000 years pastoralists and cultivators lived side by side with elands, zebras etc., while their ability to herd cattle was severely curtailed by tse-tse flies that communicated a disease to which elands, zebras etc. were immune. Thus in East Africa humans had means and incentives to domesticate more animals, and they failed.

Golden Horde was indeed fatally undermined by Black Plague, while Russians (and Slavs in general) survived it well, which altered the balance of power; starting from the time of Black Plague, Golden Horde moved to defensive, got fragmented, and later Russia conquered all parts of Golden Horde except for Crimean Khanate that had a more favorable strategic position to survive. Mongols who ruled China could perhaps stay in power longer if they could get more manpower from the steppe, and they lost that power shortly after Black Plague. On these two examples, Diamond 2, Emerson 1.

[anne]

Lee Arnold :)

Watching to PBS series on Jared Diamond's work last evening, I was impressed that your paradigm or story telling shift is a fully conscious part of the work. This is thoroughly exciting and broadly promising.

[anne]

The need of course, which will continue is for meticulous research in filling a new ecological paradigm. Interestingly enough, ecology begins with "Origin of Species" only to be neglected till Rachel Carson. Think how recent this is.

[John Emerson]

Piotr, my point really was that Diamond painted with such a broad brush that he should not be taken as an authority, the way people seem to be doing. He's a pioneer, and I admre his boldness and also his willingness to look for lessons, but he needs criticisms.

As far as Mongol demographics after the Black plague, McNeill didn't document that, nor did you, and still less did he show that it was the reason for the Mongol collapse. Since the Persian Mongols were fighting the Russian Mongols, a demographic collape on the steppe should have helped them. As far as I know, the weakening of the steppe Mongols did not historically coincide with the Black Plague, but was gradual over time. In the case of China, weak leadership is usually given as the cause, (though the Chinese always do explain the fall of dynasties that way.)

I know more about the domestication of the horse than that of cattle, and I'm not up to date, but the first signs of it are at least a thousand years before horse was widely used, and it's been suggested that there was a considerable period when wild horses were hunted like buffalo. As for why the African peoples didn't domesticate the eland, or the Native Americans didn't domesticate the buffalo, various explanations can be give. (But what Diamond talked about was the XIXc experiment).

My point in any case is that in two or three cases I know of, McNeill and Diamond presented conclusions with more confidence than I thought they deserved, not that I thought they were definitely wrong.

[anne]

John Emerson

As always you are clever, but you may be overlooking the most significant approach being pioneered: ecological economics.

[anne]

Jared Diamond's background is that of an evolutionary biologist. Catch at the extent to which he has returned under the influence of Ernst Mayr to Darwin's introduction to ecology in "Origin of Species." While Darwin introduced the concepts of geographic dependence and species interdependence in introducing ecology, the significance was almost unnoticed. Mayr noticed in studying birds in New Guinea and Diamond noticed as well when he studied birds in New Guinea. Mayr and Rachel Carson limited their ecological perspectives, while Diamond sought to use the broad framework of Darwin to change and broaden the contemporary paradigm economists might use. The theoretical constructs are brilliant, however many specific gaps there happen to be.

[kharris]

Slocum,

Yes, but… North Africa is not geographically isolated, and we know that it was far more livable once upon a time. Greener, wetter, more full of wildlife, until humans got to work changing things. Fragile? After the fact, that certainly seems true, but would we have known before the fact and taken steps to avoid desertification? Roman tastes in entertainment apparently had a big impact on the large animal population along Africa's Mediterranean margin. That seems such a trivial cause for population collapse, but that's really the worry.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/science/27farm.html?ei=1&en=ce2e3c82f7bbc8c1&ex=1122782836&pagewanted=all&position=

African Pastoral: Archaeologists Rewrite History of Farming
By BRENDA FOWLER

Archaeologists have long believed that food production developed worldwide much the way it did in the Near East: as climate changes made wild grains less available, hunters and gatherers settled in villages and relatively quickly domesticated plants and then, over the next few thousand years, animals.

But recent genetic studies and excavations in Africa suggest that the patterns of domestication there were strikingly different. This new research, emerging in the last few years in academic books and articles, shows that in Africa, wild cattle were domesticated several thousand years before plants, and that farming and herding spread patchily and slowly across the continent.

Why Africans were relatively late to take up farming and where the domestication of wild grains first happened are now the subjects of intense research. One theory is that wild grain was so abundant throughout the continent that there was no need to settle down to farming. Already the new discoveries have caused archaeologists to adjust their thinking about how societies evolved and to realize how assumptions arose from concepts developed for the Near East, where most archaeological work has been done.

"African scholars kept expecting to find domestic plants very early because the model from the Near East was driving the thinking on Africa," said Dr. Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis who in a 2002 article in The Journal of World Prehistory was among the first to recognize that Africa followed a different paradigm. "It took us a long time to see that we had a different pattern."

As Dr. Angela E. Close, an archaeologist at the University of Washington, put it: "There was this idea that once you get domesticated plants or animals, or both, then you become a farmer. But a number of peoples didn't do this."

For archaeologists, the story of how Near Eastern hunters and gatherers became farmers has become as familiar as a bedtime fable. Beginning as early as 11,000 B.C., people settled into villages and began cultivating wild grasses like rye, emmer wheat and barley. Over time, the genetic makeup of the plants changed, so they needed to be sown and tended in order to grow.

Cows, goats and sheep were domesticated over the next few thousand years, and then ceramics were developed to store food. This new way of life quickly swept across Europe and much of Asia. Soon, almost everyone was farming.

But not in Africa....

[James Wimberley]

I'm surprised that on an economics website no-one has linked to Partha Dasgupta's hostile review of "Collapse" in the London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n10/dasg01_.html
Dasgupta, a professor at Cambridge, accuses Diamond of ignoring the entire discipline and toolkit of environmental economics.

The charge is pretty obviously true; but does it matter? Dasgupta writes for instance that "Global warming is a case in point. When the downside risks associated with such limits and thresholds are brought into estimates of sustainable development, the growth in wealth among the world’s wealthy nations will in all probability turn out to have been less than present estimates would suggest. It may even have been negative."
So what? What are the policy implications of such a finding? I can see that proper environmental accounting is a good way of improving micro decisions on particular investment projects, such as proposed dams, or even fine-tuning spending priorities by governments. When you try to extend it to issues of the global commons like species diversity, environmental economics becomes scholasticism. More important, it doesn't seem to address Diamond's concern, that should be ours, the big risk that we might be about to drive our entire society over a cliff.

Treating sustainability as a set of prior constraints on economic rationality may be crude, but at least it generates perfectly clear, if very difficult, policy prescriptions: stop burning all fossil fuels, manage forests and fisheries for sustained yield.

Oh, and nobody is following up Diamond's discussion on blinkered world-views as factors in collapse: for example, the Viking Greenlanders' choice to import church furnishings rather than iron to trade for food with Inuits, and their extraordinary unwillingness to eat fish). After all, economic rationality may be part of the problem here. In the long-term perspective, can one really justify systematic discounting of future benefits and costs, even correctly identified?

[John Emerson]

Diamond's GG&S argument was that the differential development of civilization (etc) on the various continents was a simple function of the available domesticatible plants and animals. That's pretty simplistic. Others of his arguments seemed more powerful, e.g. that the N-S layout of the Americas compared to the E-W layout of Eurasia meant that agricultural technologies couldn't spread as easily in the New World.

I really like Diamond and think that his work will continue to be productive, but it really needs criticism and improvement. I don't idnore economic geography. A geographical interpretation of Eurasian history is my thing (and global history too), so he's right down my alley. But a pioneer, not an authority.

[John Emerson]

Everybody should read Diamond! I love him! I was just saying.

[kharris]

It takes a bit of nudging to get our rough-around-the-edges John E to say what he really means. Now, I think, we are there.

Diamond is part of a big discussion. John is part of it, too. Diamond's contribution is big and important, but can't be perfect right out of the box. We need to push on the details to see what parts holds together. If we keep half of what comes out of Diamond's work, and discard half, we will still have learned a great deal.

[anne]

John Emerson and KHarris

Right in both instances, the idea is use Jared Diamond's framework and circle back to where he began as an evolutionist studying bird species in New Guinea in meticulous detail. Remember, Diamond already had the frameworks of Darwin and Mayr to work from in studying birds. Now let's us detail Diamond's paradigm.

[CalDem]

John, do you have a link to your work? I couldn't open the web site you have listed.

Thanks

[John Emerson]

http://www.idiocentrism.com/ -- should work.

[lash marks]

Except for one thing....

Nuclear power, especially the one-off public-dole American-built version, is still *by far* the most expensive form of energy, and that's even with the off-book on waste disposal and mining cleanup.

Nevermind it's also the most lethal form of power, immediate and teratogenic as any Downwinder, or
Navajo or former resident of Chernobyl can attest.

20,000 years of US NRC Waste Storage Management?
WSM$ = HMO ^ 200 by the shorthairs.

[Robert Merkel]

Lash, how many people do you think died because of the effects of Chernobyl?

Have a look at what the UN committee on the subject at http://www.unscear.org has to say on the subject. The answer appears to be a hell of a lot less than you think, and miniscule compared to the tens of thousands of Americans killed by coal pollution every single year.

[James Wimberley]

Let Schiller and Dilbert have the last word.
Schiller: "Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst umsonst".
Dilbert: http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2005071744023.gif

[anne]

Jared Diamond examines geographic determinants of social structure, but he is decidedly not a geographic determinist. We have the capability of social and personal intorspection and analysis, and can change the ways in which we live as Japan and Iceland did when recognizing severe environmental problems requiring social structure change.

[Neil Craig]

"This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it."

If there was a last tree owned by an individual it would be unlikely that he would cut it down since he waould be destroying his monopoly on a valuable property.

It is more likely that the cutter said either:

"This tree is common property - I have as much right to it as anybody & if I don't do it somebody else will"

or

"We are going to raid the other tribe's land & destroy their tree. Otherwise someday they may be able to make canoes & we won't. At all costs we must not allow the development of a tree gap."