Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [11]
In fact, I am not hired by big businesses, and I describe frankly what I see happening on their properties even though I am visiting as their guest.
On some properties I have seen oil companies and logging companies being destructive, and I have said so; on other properties I have seen them being careful, and that was what I said. My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems. Thus, I am writing this book from a middle-of-the-road perspective, with experience of both environmental problems and of business realities.
How can one study the collapses of societies “scientifically”? Science is often misrepresented as “the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.” Actually, science is something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. In some fields, such as chemistry and molecular biology, replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory are feasible and provide by far the most reliable means to acquire knowledge. My formal training was in two such fields of laboratory biology, biochemistry for my undergraduate degree and physiology for my Ph.D. From 1955 to 2002 I conducted experimental laboratory research in physiology, at Harvard University and then at the University of California in Los Angeles.
When I began studying birds in New Guinea rainforest in 1964, I was immediately confronted with the problem of acquiring reliable knowledge without being able to resort to replicated controlled experiments, whether in the laboratory or outdoors. It’s usually neither feasible, legal, nor ethical to gain knowledge about birds by experimentally exterminating or manipulating their populations at one site while maintaining their populations at another site as unmanipulated controls. I had to use different methods. Similar methodological problems arise in many other areas of population biology, as well as in astronomy, epidemiology, geology, and paleontology.
A frequent solution is to apply what is termed the “comparative method” or the “natural experiment”—i.e., to compare natural situations differing with respect to the variable of interest. For instance, when I as an ornithologist am interested in effects of New Guinea’s Cinnamon-browed Melidectes Honeyeater on populations of other honeyeater species, I compare bird communities on mountains that are fairly similar except that some do and others don’t happen to support populations of Cinnamon-browed Melidectes Honeyeaters. Similarly, my books The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal and Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality compared different animal species, especially different species of primates, in an effort to figure out why women (unlike females of most other animal species) undergo menopause and lack obvious signs of ovulation, why men have a relatively large penis (by animal standards), and why humans usually have sex in private (rather than in the open, as almost all other animal species do). There is a large scientific literature on the obvious pitfalls of that comparative method, and on how best to overcome those pitfalls. Especially in historical sciences (like evolutionary biology and historical geology), where it’s impossible to manipulate the past experimentally, one has no choice except to renounce laboratory experiments in favor of natural ones.
This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies) had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last