The title worries. It might remind one of an episode of therapeutic treatment. The one where the discovery of one’s unconscious history opens up such a vast field to the individual that it causes them to feel dizzy. Applied to humanity, it downright becomes terrifying. It probably requires genuine lucidity about the human being, a good dose of wisdom, and real knowledge of the vast world to venture into so many fields at once. Born in 1937, an evolutionary biologist, then physiologist, a professor of geography – one might be tempted to say “human” – at the University of California, Jared Diamond remains a tireless visitor of distant lands and a keen observer of the most modern to the most ancient civilizations. With such credentials, he convinces us to follow him in this fantastic adventure: a comparative, almost universal reflection, on the brink of time and space, on the reasons likely to illuminate the survival or disappearance of societies in the world.
As an excellent educator, his prologue aims to familiarize us with his reasoning by presenting the seemingly similar exploitation conditions of two livestock farms. One contemporary, prosperous in the American state of Montana, the other, in the southwest of Greenland, abandoned for over five hundred years. The geographical distance and time separation have nothing to do with this difference in fortune. Moreover, the author explains, we easily find this issue all over the planet for hundreds of years. Civilizations are born and develop, others decline and die, the first sometimes geographically distant but similar in their functioning, the latter neighboring in territory but foreign by their social system. Jared Diamond then gives us the keys to the enigma: an “analysis grid composed of five factors at play” in the tragic or happy destiny of a nation. Four of them can prove “significant” for a given society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors or, conversely, trade partners represent so many cumulative elements to be considered. But the fifth comes, in some way, to oversee all the others. It is understood: the human being and primarily the “responses” they are capable of providing to these environmental questions, placing them at the heart of the solution. Their decisions determine the proper conditions for maintaining the city or seal the inexorable beginning of its decline. Far from inviting us to political reflection, the author sticks to his or rather his specialties: the field, history, and observing the subtle link between man and nature. He explains the multiple influences on environmental factors: modes of ownership and exploitation of land, forests, and waterways, regional climate changes induced by these human interventions, hostility, natural or provoked, of neighbors who accept or refuse the presence of new occupants and turn into enemies, establishment of trade relations and economic interdependence, factor of war or prosperity. Armed with his “tools,” Jared Diamond then invites us to embark on a magnificent journey. It begins in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, once one of the richest American states, now one of the poorest. The responsibility falls on vast deforestation, soil and waterway pollution due to unbridled overexploitation of toxic mines. He then takes us to the mysterious Easter Island and allows us to understand how food management methods came to exhaust natural resources, depriving the Pascuans of the means of their survival. Like drought and war for the Maya civilization. Further north, he describes in detail the conditions of the Vikings’ extinction in Greenland in a particularly interesting manner as it “involves all five factors.” Horizons as diverse as the Africa of the Great Lakes, particularly mentioning the Rwandan tragedy, but also the elements of vulnerability in China or the environmental concerns in Australia, offer the author the opportunity to elaborate, at the end of the book, a broad range of theoretical models. Decision-making processes intended to avoid ecological disasters, reflections on the ambiguous relationships between the corporate world and its natural environment, not forgetting demographic risks and food supply threats. One might think that all these journeys distance us from daily realities. To read here or there in the press that cereal stocks now only ensure 57 days of food for the world population instead of 116 days before the year 2000, that occupational diseases, particularly pulmonary ones, cost China around 12 billion Euros annually, that particularly degraded health and food conditions are responsible for a deficit in Russia’s population of almost 6 million souls, suddenly brings awareness: Jared Diamond’s work is anything but fiction!
Jared Diamond, Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Collection NRF Essays, Gallimard, 2006, 648 pages, 29,50 Euros.
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