Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [172]
CHAPTER 9
Opposite Paths to Success
Bottom up, top down ■ New Guinea highlands ■ Tikopia ■ Tokugawa problems ■ Tokugawa solutions ■ Why Japan succeeded ■ Other successes ■
The preceding chapters have described six past societies whose failure to solve the environmental problems that they created or encountered contributed to their eventual collapse: Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island, the Anasazi, the Classic Lowland Maya, and the Greenland Norse. I dwelt on their failures because they offer us many lessons. However, it’s certainly not the case that all past societies were doomed to environmental disaster: the Icelanders have survived in a difficult environment for over 1,100 years, and many other societies have persisted for thousands of years. Those success stories also hold lessons for us, as well as hope and inspiration. They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the bottom-up and the top-down approach.
This recognition stems especially from the work of archaeologist Patrick Kirch on Pacific islands of different sizes, with different societal outcomes. The occupation of tiny Tikopia Island (1.8 square miles) was still sustainable after 3,000 years; medium-size Mangaia (27 square miles) underwent a deforestation-triggered collapse, similar to that of Easter Island; and the largest of the three islands, Tonga (288 square miles), has been operating more or less sustainably for 3,200 years. Why did the small island and the large island ultimately succeed in mastering their environmental problems, while the medium-sized island failed? Kirch argues that the small island and the large island adopted opposite approaches to success, and that neither approach was feasible on the medium-sized island.
Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that they are affected by developments throughout the island, and share a sense of identity and common interests with other inhabitants. Hence everybody realizes that they will benefit from sound environmental measures that they and their neighbors adopt. That’s bottom-up management, in which people work together to solve their own problems.
Most of us have experience of such bottom-up management in our neighborhoods where we live or work. For instance, all homeowners on the Los Angeles street where I live belong to a neighborhood homeowners’ association, whose purpose is to keep the neighborhood safe, harmonious, and attractive for our own benefit. All of us elect the association’s directors each year, discuss policy at an annual meeting, and provide the association’s budget by means of an annual dues payment. With that money, the association maintains flower gardens at road intersections, requires homeowners not to cut down trees without good cause, reviews building plans to ensure that ugly or oversized houses aren’t built, resolves disputes between neighbors, and lobbies city officials on matters affecting the whole neighborhood. As another example, I mentioned in Chapter 1 that landowners living near Hamilton in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley have banded together to operate the Teller Wildlife Refuge, and have thereby contributed to improving their own land values, lifestyle, and fishing and hunting opportunities, even though that in itself does not solve the problems of the United States or of the world.
The opposite approach is the top-down approach suited to a large society with centralized political organization, like Polynesian Tonga. Tonga is much too large for any individual peasant farmer to be familiar with the whole archipelago or even