Eldan Goldenberg's lab notebook

Why I found Collapse so depressing

On Monday, Mano Singham wrote about The odd response to global warming warnings, and this reminded me that I never finished my response to Jared Diamond's Collapse. I finished reading the book some time ago, and unfortunately continued to be more convinced by the doom-and-gloom side of the argument...than the hopeful side.

The book is divided roughly evenly between case studies of environmental failure (leading to the collapses of the title) and environmental success. The success stories are all cases where an isolated civilisation faced disaster and took steps that prevented it. Diamond makes the case, quite successfully, that the whole world is now one interconnected island civilisation and we are recapitulating these case studies on a grander scale, but we don't yet know which group our history belongs to.

All too often, the reasons for a success story seem to have been chance factors. Islands that had some sort of natural bounty, be it airborne particles adding to soil fertility or potential trading partners nearby, had longer to notice their ecological decline and do something about it, but they're really not the relevant case here, because if the more pessimistic projections are true we don't have time to see and arrest a gradual decline now. The important case studies are the ones where action was taken quickly and decisively. Of those, some of the most impressive (Japan's forest protection, the Dominican Republic's national parks) were the product of otherwise terrible autocrats. I find scant cause for optimism in the thought that world might need Tokugawa's determination to preserve resources for an inherited elite or Balaguer's well... actually I don't even understand what drove Balaguer's interest in national parks, which makes it impossible to draw any conclusion about how it might be replicated.

From my reading, the only really encouraging case studies of societies collectively deciding to save themselves were from islands where everybody was able to meet routinely. Mostly these were Pacific islands small enough for every chief to know the entire island well and see any changes that happen, and where every resident would be able to clearly see how things anywhere on the island would affect them directly. The one larger place where something similar happened was Iceland, but Iceland's success was only partial. Trees were almost entirely wiped out, leaving much of the landscape as a semi-desert, and leaving the country perpetually dependent on resources shipped in from overseas. Needless to say, this is not an experience we can afford to repeat on a planetary scale.

Diamond does also point to some smaller-scale changes for the good that are happening right now; things like movements towards more sustainable use of resources and less envirotoxic manufactured goods. The trouble with these is that all the successful ones seem to be those that either don't have much of a cost to the consumer (such as Forest Stewardship Council wood) or are perceived as having a direct benefit to the consumer that justifies the cost (such as organic food, which is mostly popular because of perceived health and taste benefits). Asking people to make real sacrifices is a different matter. Merely trying to get people to carpool to a shared destination is a painful and taxing experience, and that's with a group who have more reason than most to know and care about global warming.

This is where Mano's post comes in. He wrote about the extraordinary cognitive dissonance people are willing to accept rather than accepting that anthropogenic global warming is real and will have serious consequences for humanity. The post finished with a serious and unanswered question:

So why this unusual level of hostility to the idea that global warming might be real? Is this coming from people who are angry with scientists about other things that do offend their religious sensibilities and are now out to attack anything that scientists say that might affect their lives? Or are these people part of an "astroturf" (i.e. fake grass roots) movement funded by the oil industry and polluting companies? Or are these people who, for ideological reasons, will side with Bush and big corporations come what may, whatever the issue? Or is there some other reason that I am missing?

I'd like to suggest another answer: people are terrified of having to make real sacrifices. If anyone in a resource-intensive developed country accepts both anthropogenic global warming and its consequences for humanity as fact, then a difficult choice follows. Either one has to fiddle while Rome burns, or make lifestyle changes to stop contributing to the problem. I think that what we're seeing is a significant number of people going out of their way to prevent having to wrestle with such a choice, by denying that the problem exists in the first place, or that humans have enough influence over it to justify trying to do anything.

Unfortunately, this fits perfectly with the lessons of Collapse. As I read it, the only societies in which the mass of the populace saw disaster coming and managed to avert it were those that were small enough for everyone to be keenly aware of how their actions impact everyone else, and vice versa: a very difficult thing to scale up successfully to the entire planet.