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threats. As things got bad on Easter Island, the rival chiefs each demanded bigger and more ostentatious statues until finally the people could no longer believe their ability to influence the gods to save them. The Anasazis found themselves living in a much drier and more marginal world (after they cut all the forests close to their homes) and eventually were overrun by other tribes. The Mayan chiefs spent their time in fighting each other as their climate changed, the crops failed and the large numbers of people starved.
Through meticulous study, Diamond shows how societies do not survive outside the constraints of their environment. It is not just ideology nor is it simply politics that create the world in which a society exists. Societies are part of the real world and their impact on the environment and their ability to adapt to climate change affects their ability to survive. Yet, he also shows, societies can be so blinded by their own ideology, that they essentially commit suicide. The lesson of the Norse in Greenland is a particularly vivid example of this: the Norse starved to death in a land where the Inuits thrived because they refused to change or to copy the techniques of the people they called savages. In a land where the abundance of the sea was close at hand, the Norse Greenlanders never ate fish most likely because of some taboo. Instead they denuded the hillsides to grow hay for their cows, grazed their animals on fragile grasslands, and spent time and energy hunting walruses for their ivory in the summer to buy fancy religious materials from Europe for the greater glory of the Church. Meanwhile their pasturelands were shrinking due to the cutting of large sections of turf, the climate was growing colder and growing seasons were becoming shorter. Eventually the conservatism of the society that required strict obedience to the rulers and the old ways meant that the Norse lost their ability to live in the shrinking environment in which they found themselves.
Malcolm Gladwell who wrote a review about Collapse for the New Yorker painted this picture of the Norses' end in Greenland:
"When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland - crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers - which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found the toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for." [1]
Diamond wrote this book because he could see the trial that we humans are now facing: a world with significant environmental degradation leading to looming climate change brought on by our own actions. By studying societies that failed and others that found ways to survive for thousands of years living within the bounds of their environment, he thought he could help find some answers on what we can do, if we only choose to do so. And he reminds us, the environment must be considered if we want to have a world in which we can survive.
[1] Malcolm Gladwell, The Vanishing, The New Yorker, January 3, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/050103crbo_books
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