Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [173]
Yet Tonga is still large enough for a centralized government under a paramount chief or king to have arisen. That king does have an overview over the whole archipelago, unlike local farmers. Also unlike the farmers, the king may be motivated to attend to the long-term interests of the whole archipelago, because the king derives his wealth from the whole archipelago, he is the latest in a line of rulers that has been there for a long time, and he expects his descendants to rule Tonga forever. Thus, the king or central authority may practice top-down management of environmental resources, and may give all of his subjects orders that are good for them in the long run but that they don’t know enough to have formulated themselves.
This top-down approach is as familiar to citizens of modern First World countries as is the bottom-up approach. We’re accustomed to the fact that governmental entities, especially (in the U.S.) state and federal governments, pursue environmental and other policies affecting the whole state or country, supposedly because the government leaders can have an overview of the state or country beyond the capacity of most individual citizens. For example, while the citizens of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley do have their own Teller Wildlife Refuge, half of the valley’s acreage is owned or managed by the federal government, as national forest or under the Bureau of Land Management.
Traditional middle-sized societies, occupying medium-sized islands or homelands, may not be well suited for either of these two approaches. The island is too large for a local farmer to have an overview of, or stake in, all parts of the island. Hostility between chiefs in neighboring valleys prevents agreement or coordinated action, and even contributes to environmental destruction: each chief leads raids to cut down trees and wreak havoc on rivals’ land. The island may be too small for a central government to have arisen, capable of controlling the entire island. That appears to have been the fate of Mangaia, and may have affected other middle-sized societies in the past. Today, when the whole world is organized into states, fewer middle-sized societies may be facing this dilemma, but it may still arise in countries where state control is weak.
To illustrate these contrasting approaches to success, I shall now relate briefly the story of two small-scale societies where bottom-up approaches worked (the New Guinea highlands and Tikopia Island), and one large-scale society where top-down measures worked (Japan of the Tokugawa era, now the eighth most populous country in the world). In all three cases the environmental problems addressed were deforestation, erosion, and soil fertility. However, many other past societies have adopted similar approaches for solving problems of water resources, fishing, and hunting. It should also be understood that bottom-up and top-down approaches can coexist within a large-scale society that is organized as a pyramidal hierarchy of units. For example, in the United States and other democracies we have bottom-up management by local neighborhood and citizens’ groups coexisting with top-down management by many levels of government (city, county, state, and national).
The first example is the highlands of New Guinea, one of the world’s great success stories of bottom-up management. People have been living self-sustainably in New Guinea for about 46,000 years, until recent