The World Until Yesterday

By Jared Diamond

I was excited to read this book.  Why?   I read his books; Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse.  In this book Diamond takes the same very academic approach to enchant the reader into his reading his dissertation.  In time the reader begins to feel like a young college student listening to lecture after lecture.  Diamond faced with the PhD’s life to publish or perish, sent is lectures to his faculty to publish in a book.   Diamond then pens an introduction.  

Unlike his other books that start off with an insulting introduction, Diamond marvels you with an airport scene in New Guinea.  In the airport he describes what we modern western folks see as normal.  Then he brings the reader to appreciate that for New Guineans, relatively speaking, it was only yesterday that they were running through jungles without a clue of how an airliner, and an airport, and the entire associated infrastructure works.  This is his world before yesterday.  He describes how from 1936 until today New Guineans have crossed a bridge that took Western man a millennia to traverse.  Diamond is a professor in a California University, and has such has done a lifetime of research in New Guinea which affords a unique perspective on anthropology.    The net effect is a book chocked full of trivia blended with long winded anecdotal stories.  Unlike his previous books, the reader becomes suspicious that Jared Diamond is getting paid by the word in a very elementary dissertation on the differences in societies.  Speed reading becomes essential.

He covers many aspects of societies from rearing children to caring for the elderly and all the dynamics of society in between.  Depending on the reader, one chapter may be more intriguing than another.  In the end…you are lost for a central theme.  So I will limit my review to one piece of trivial perspective Diamond leaves on religion:  

“Virtually all known human societies have had “religion,” or something like it.  That suggests that religion fulfills some universal human need or at least springs from some part of human nature common to all of us.”  …

“Earth was dominated by a life form that call itself humans and clung to some curious ideas.  Among those ideas: that there is an all  powerful being, called God, which has a special interest in the human species rather than the millions of trillions of other species in the universe, and which humans often picture as similar to human except for being omnipotent.”

Diamond goes on in metaphor to describe an Andromedan space alien who debunks all of the superstitions of religion in the name of science.  This is a classic posture of an atheistic professor bent on the war between religion and science as though they are diametrically opposed.  However, in my opinion Diamond’s falls far short of giving any sort of academic consideration on either the subject of science or religion.  From a scientific aspect, he fails to consider the notion that ideas are synonymous with the function of thought, where thought requires energy.  He doesn’t at all explore the science of energy as it transcends from person-to-person, generation-to-generation, society-to-society.  This alone puts him on weak footing to draw any contrast on science-v-religion a subject he infers as mystical, where thought transcends through time.  Ironically if it’s mystical then it’s as an element of unknown, which science is the study of.  He totally misses the power of prayer or meditation.  At this point I closed the book…never to finish. 

Collapse

by Jared Diamond

Diamond takes a very academic approach to this book, providing a case to inspire one to GO GREEN. His introduction examines societies collapses with a theory on ecocide. There is he claims a simple list for causes ecocide. In a history narrative covering a few collapsed societies Diamond covers deforestation, soil problems, water management, over hunting & fishing, the introduction of new species into areas that could not adapt, and human population growth. As he transitions the reader to current times where collapse has yet to occur he introduces the human caused climate change of today, a build up of toxic chemicals, energy shortage, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. What is not so simple is why man does what he does, nor is the remedy.

In all the events he covers, he associates things man has done or not done as his part to ecocide. Man seems to have historically demonstrated a knack no not recognize subsequent environmental damage caused by man. For example the Deforestation of Easter Island began around 900 and was completed in 1722 when Roggeveen arrived and observed the tallest trees to be 10 ft. The Easter Island people did not recognize that due to the climate of Easter Island the soil could only nourish a slow growth rate of big trees until it was too late. While this simple factor went un-noticed it caused a domino effect through the whole eco system. The intra island competition to build the biggest idols left chiefs focused on besting each other may have been their distraction. In the end with no large trees, the Islanders could not make ocean-going canoes big enough to export. And the became dependent on imports with uncooperative trading partners, for they ran out of things to trade for. Sound like an ominous parallel?

On the subject of social dysfunctions and short sighted leadership that begins with Easter Island, Diamond provides many other examples. The two poignant ones I took note of were first Maya kings who sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples. Where Diamonds message becomes poignant is where he says this is reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. What makes it especially poignant to me is he overlooks the vocal high paid actors from Hollywood. Next you have the differences between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The former is Spanish while the latter is French. Because Dominican Republic was of Spanish origin, received more rain, fed by more rivers; started with less colonization on a more ecologically sustainable land made them less vulnerable to collapse. The causes for the ignorance to these challenges to avert collapse in Haiti where they were not so blessed were social differences and were somewhat self-inflicted. As a legacy of their country’s slave history and slave revolt most Haitians owned their land, used it to feed themselves and received no help from their government in developing cash crops for trade. France did not lose gracefully. Contrarily while Spain did the opposite with their partner Dominican Republic. It seems the French always seem to extol their superior society however in this example they get caught with their pants down, where no one is brave enough to tell the king, even to this day.

The book provides several examples where social decisions were attempted and managed for a while but then over run by short sightedness, caused by limitations in environmental knowledge at the place and time. As one example; the Anasazi Indians existed in the Chaco Canyon of our American Southwest from 600 AD to 1200. They lived in peace until 1110 when resources became scarce. Diamond explains the government system that was administered to manage the random flood plains. Unique to this was the centralization of the government in Chaco Canyon. The Chaco Canyon collapse was founded in the people’s failed effort to plant crops in many locations and redistribute some of the harvest to the people still living at sites that didn’t get enough rainfall that year. It involved the risk that redistribution required a complex political system to integrate activities between different sites. Of course the risk as we know today is in centralization of control. Anaszi groups supplied food, timber, pottery, stone, supporting each other in an interdependent complex society, by coordinating the changes of materials, and re motivating people in outlying areas by political and religious centers. Probably the outlying settlements that formerly supplied the Chaco political and religious center with food lost faith in the Chacoan priests who’s prayers for rain remained unanswered. The missing ingredient was not unanswered prayer but rather knowledge of long term drought patterns that would have been transferred if the written word was at their hand.

It becomes clear that in every case where trees or natural pasture is cultivated for mans use, whether for farming or mining, soil problems are sure to be the first domino before water to lead to societal collapse. In the past and it seems still today society does not respond properly. In the past it may have been out of ignorance. Diamond implies that today it may be also out of systematic greed. An example was discussed in Australia. Because the continent does not have the benefit of volcanic ash fall out, it has a very thin layer of fertile soil to begin with. You find these modern era people guilty of the introduction of new species on a vulnerable eco system. In Australia rabbits and sheep were introduced and they rutted the soil and ate the local vegetation thus accelerating soil erosion. Before colonists realized this is was too late. Ghosts of this problem still exist around the globe. Soil problems lead to water management problems where Stalinization of land is the result of letting once naturally vegetated land go fallow and rain water to leach minerals out of the sublevel rock. I now appreciate their fanatic inspection I receive when I land in Melbourne. Its why the Fertile Crescent is not fertile and Australia’s number one problem in it’s very delicate eco system is water, both fresh and ocean water. All these stories inspired me to go out and purchase trees. I planted ten on my acre of property and many more around my neighborhood. While we get the impression Australia is proactive on the environment, Diamond says otherwise. Like in the Middle East Australia inadvertent societal damage on the environment –vs.- their ability to repair it is out of balance. More on that to come.

Human population growth while out of control in poor countries is of concern even maintaining the present population base does not get us out of the woods when looking at countries achieving first tier living standards. First Diamond introduces the Malthusin concept that human population growth would out grow food production as a cause for collapse. Then he applies this to Rwanda where we find detailed cause and effect of the Malthusin concept as not a battle between Tutsi and Hutu but the ''Haves'' and the '' Have Nots'' in a battle for food in the densest population in Africa. The average Rwandan woman has her first of 5 children at the age of 15. Imagine the societal upheaval when you cannot as a family father support your five kids on your three quarters of an acre and no more land to obtain through civil or uncivil means and your parents move back in because their land was taken. So far genocide seems to have to prevailed over vertical farming or family planning. Amidst the discussion of population we gather that Professor Diamond unabashedly and ironically includes this in his book that he fathered twins at age 58. So we have ignorance, systematic greed and clumsy protocol.

The human impact of China becoming a first word country left unabated and assuming the United States leads the way to a friendlier earth will still leave our planet in pearl due to China’s flagrant disregard to our environment. Forget about industry’s disregard; simply look at the human impact of becoming a first tier country. Diamond provides the following simple statistical arguments. First at zero population growth the already large number of China’s households has increased 3.5% per year over the past 15 years. The occupant size decreased from 4.5 to 3.5 and is projected to decrease further to 2.7as there are less multi generation households. There are more divorces where a father can sire more than one child and rear them in separate homes. And finally the per-capita floor space has increased nearly three fold. Having been to China I asked my counter part what happened to the bicycles. He told me the government views bicycles as bad for their image and has placed an exorbitant license fee and thus making polluting mo pads and autos the preferred choice. China’s failure to recognize their guilt is the number one rationale for no country to have signed the Kyoto Treaty in 2000. The right statement is we are on board for green, but we must all be genuinely being on board. China so far has demonstrated everything to the contrary.

Not to stand holier than thou, this transitions my review nicely to Diamonds recommendations to go green. They come with examples in both bottom up and then top down approaches. First lets look at top down from two perspectives. In Japan the spread of silviculture probably promulgated by diffusion of knowledge of the technique from its first two sites of invention, plus perhaps some later inventions in other areas. But the country’s shift was led from the top by successive shoguns who invoked Confucian principals to promulgate official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to prevent disaster. Living in a stable society without input from foreign ideas, Japans elite and peasants alike expected the future to be like the present, and future problems to have to be solved with present resources. In the Dominican Republic while Trujillo was a brutal dictator, he advanced a stronger economy through conservation than Dovalier, his 20th century counterpart in Haiti. He did this though for self-serving reasons and the unstable situation and lack of cooperative productive trade partners today therefore renders the odds for sustainable environmentalism in question. The contrast demonstrates that no one person is smart enough to get the job done.

A good example of Bottom up is provided in Papua New Guinea where a local Chevron employee explained, “We recognized that in Papua no natural resource project could be successful in the long run without support of the local land owners. They would disrupt the project and shut it down”. Conditions allowing such a statement were a decentralized government with a lot of authority at local level. This is an oil project run by the people because the executives saw good reason in terms of risk abatement which led to being first in line for exploration contracts in other countries. In the end the bottom up approach has a positive global impact beyond political boarders.

Each tier, whether political or industrial commerce must reach out to each other in a cooperative spirit. Top Down-v-Bottom Up is discussed where in 1993 eroded land in Australia was purchased by the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Chicago Zoological Society. The managers applied top-down control and gave orders to local community volunteers who became increasingly frustrated, until control was turned over to the private Australian Landscape Trust mobilizing 400 local volunteers for bottom up management. The trust funded in large degree by Australia largest private philanthropic organization, the Potter Foundation which is expressly concerned with reversing the degradation of Australia’s farmland. One must remember that in order for Potter Foundation to exist they needed to earn capital to become of such elite status to help out. It is always a word to the wise to the masses to not bite the hand that feeds you and an equal word to the elite to appreciate who is washing your hand. More on that to come.

It is clear Diamond is a little left of center and a tad antiestablishment. While he maintains for the most part in my opinion a fair degree of objectivity in fact he occasionally digresses in opinion. What I think could be the focused intended outcome in reading this book is to learn from mistakes and then to take both a top down and a then a bottom up approach towards righting a sinking ship. The ship may be sinking due to forces beyond our control as Diamond admits, but then his book would be considerably shorter and provide nothing but hope. In taking a more involved look, Diamond provokes the reader to be much more conscious of his individual environmental impact, much more informed of societal impact on our environment, and much more keen with a invigorated spirit to “pitch in”.

Australia has a well-educated populace, a high standard of living. and a relative honest political and economic institutions by world standards. Australians are asking a central question: which of our traditional core values can we retain, and which ones instead no longer serve us well in today's world. This is something that should catch on globally. In the bottom up cause where the reader cannot help but find inspiration towards his contribution we find yet another story in McDonalds. In this case McDonalds is subservient to the government hence “bottom-up. McDonalds in the interest of protecting their marketplace (the people) applied public pressure for industries to conform to inspections. They, through their consumers have the world’s largest shopping cart. Diamond uses the mad cow-testing mandate by McDonalds to illustrate the power of the people and big business but seems to overlook the fact that the solution at hand was separate from government involvement. Diamond in my opinion rightly appeals to consumers to press a moral obligation to conform to environmentalism and wrongly proposes the government as the conduit. He falls on to the government, because of its authority through force, as opposed to, schools, television, radio, newspapers, the church, synagogue, or mosque where the conscience of One Man and the Unity of us all is conveyed and thus producing voluntary acceptance and adaptation. What do you think caused people in the United States to “buckle up” your car seat belts more; the “buckle up” “media campaigns or the ticket you get if you don’t buckle up? Equating moral consciousness to government dependency is an indictment on the classic educated elite liberal who has forgotten how to sell ideas. It is an unfortunate undertone in Diamonds message that I fear as one of the many examples impeding on the collective conscience to GO GREEN.

Diamond proposes the root cause of Collapse is group decision making. He outlines causes at group level. First is anticipation of a problem. Second is perception of a problem. And third is problem solving. Greenland climate changes cannot support long-term farming. They did not have the knowledge that when they discovered Greenland it was during a global warming period and that a mini Ice Age would return. This very course in the book had me suspicious of our current “global warming fears”. In Greenland the Norse Vikings could not draw on prior experience and made mistakes through reasoning by false analogy. Separately, I particularly enjoyed Diamonds assumption as to why Norse Greenlander didn’t eat fish. But preferred to eat beef on a land that could not sustain cows. Fish were deemed taboo as Eric the Red got food poisoning in his founding year of Greenland. This only represents an example where ignorant leaders actions can lead a society into collapse. More on that later. Problem solving was preempted by instance of a life style dictated by leaders from distant Norway.

In a more current example of irrational problem solving Diamond presents the reader with the story of competing interest and distant managers in the way we find a practical and commercial argument in Australia. When a farmer buys land and takes out a mortgage, the need to pay the interest on that high mortgage resulting from the land (based in British valuation) results overcapitalization pressures on the farmer to try to extract more from prime land than it could sustain-ably yield. That practice, termed flogging the land, has meant stocking to many sheep per acre. At a world group level the farmer should concede and choose to starve if not for the group to somehow subsidize the farmers transition to a new vocation. Our credit crisis ushered in by Clinton policy and perpetuated by Bush’s' unwillingness to repeal it, but rather perpetuate it, parallels the Australian mistake with sheep. In our case the bank plays the role of farmer and we the people the role of sheep, while the bank is guilty of the flogging. I add this only to illustrate all the obstacles in the way of a society’s ability to perceive and solve a problem collectively, it is not simply the technology of the written word, and it is the word itself and its response.

Here is what the author means in detect-ability relevant to the written word, a frequent dilemma for historians is trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: Apparently there are too many potential independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables' importance statically. In my Six Sigma view, Diamond is flawed in his opinion. I do not believe he has explored a statistical approach to adequate depths rendering potential statistical facts to a mere opinion. Where there is dispute over the numbers there is certain disagreement. With the right statistician this could be solved. In the Papua example statistics were not required. Folks could readily see environmental impact and therefore made appropriate decisions.

Laws of supply & demand directly challenge attempts to overcome agendas for individual survival as the mining industry deals with their ability to stockpile their core product. Diamond provides sound historical economic argument as to why mining companies are recalcitrant to properly funding mine cleanup. But in merely rightly or wrongly ridiculing he mining companies he falls short of a complete solution, which would be pointing a finger at consumers as well to be held accountable for the higher end-product pressure aimed at environmentalism. Putting the right measured information in front of consumer leveraging environmental purchasing pressure on the distant managers in mining industry has proven ineffective so far due to the consumers ignorance to the core ingredients blinded by the end product of their demand on the core product. Putting the written word in front of the consumers would go a long way to applying the right forces. What if right next to the words that said this product is environmentally safe, there were a before and after price? This is my solution aimed by environmentalist at industry but a paradigm shifting solution that includes the whole food chain…consumers.

In rethinking our approach consider the following. Once established overseas in Christian lands, pagan Vikings were quite prepared to inter marry and adapt to local customs and that included embracing Christianity. Conversions of Vikings overseas contributed to the emergence of Christianity at home. As chiefs and kings recognized the political advantages that Christianity would bring them they were adopted and made official. Norwegian kings then force Christianity on to all its conquered lands and trading partners, whether it made sense or not. The things deemed important in Bergen, ended up costing Greenlanders their lives. If only the true ideologies of Christianity were embraced as opposed the power found in “the secret” bestowed upon religious leaders. Some of our global problems are distant problems and hence we as distant and detached managers are apt for power over another rather than love for one another, and pawn the problem off. Are we as leaders and individuals across the globe truly prepared meet the Australian question to forego power a cousin to ignorant greed and reprioritize? Owning the concern one by one, and then recognizing the inter connectedness of our part in the concern is what this book conveys. If indeed it is our will to live then let it be that we work together. If it is Gods will then let us …work together anyway.

The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital. It makes no sense to be content with our present comfort when it is clear that we are currently on a non-sustainable course. I weaved Diamond’s 500-page thesis message to a short review to hopefully with minor flaws aside compel you to overcome any intentional or most likely unintentional opposition to environmentalism in any form and read this book. For me I was immediately inspired to plant trees. I would enjoy hearing from you how you pitched in as a result of reading this book.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

by Jared Diamond

This book is a very enjoyable accounting of the history of man with an
attempt to use 'scientific method' to answer the question that arises late
into a party. The question as put in the book goes like this.: Why is it
you some people developed so much baggage and brought it here to New Guinea
while we black people had little cargo of our own? From here the author
provides well organized, easy to read argument that is based on the
following points which give meaning to the title of the book. Or in other
words, what conditions existed for one society to evolve faster. The racial undertones at the begining are the only flaw in the book.

First, there is the element of starting materials that could be domesticated. That is large grain cereals and large mammalian animals.
These two elements were most prevalent in the Fertile Crescent region allowing for an agrarian age

2. Then after considering the domestication of plants and animals, the
author offers numerous scenarios in many regions of our planet earth, across
the history of man, to illustrate how mans selected use determined the fate
of their region. For instance, what if the folks in the Fertile Crescent
managed their land better. Or what if later in history those same people
adopted a religion that embraced technology. Or what was it in the first
large united people's leaders in China, to suddenly ban everything
mechanical including clocks. In the end, or to date, it proved to be the
disparate Europe that advanced in the scientific age. It was through
competition between the regions that propelled advancement.

3. Unfortunately this story of man includes the need to conquer other
lands. The book sites examples, with counter fact, describing why one
region conquered another and not vice versa. For instance, why did Cortez
conquer the Aztecs, instead of the Aztecs sailing to Spain? As in most events first
Germs, inherent from farming and animal husbandry. Then advanced technology
and organized government afforded the conquerors an advantage with Steel and
Guns.

The book is a great refresher course in history using scientific method in
constructing the rationale for the occurrences of events. As the author
concludes, the book clearly provides a shift in our paradigm moving history
from the Humanities building on campus to the Science building. From there
what new lessons could we learn? I am not sure Diamond ever answered that
late night party question. In fact the book did not require such an introduction.