Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [177]
I have presented New Guinea highland casuarina silviculture as an example of bottom-up problem-solving, even though there are no written records from the highlands to tell us exactly how the technique was adopted. But it could hardly have been by any other type of problem-solving, because New Guinea highland societies represent an ultra-democratic extreme of bottom-up decision-making. Until the arrival of Dutch and Australian colonial government in the 1930s, there had not been even any beginnings of political unification in any part of the highlands: merely individual villages alternating between fighting each other and joining in temporary alliances with each other against other nearby villages. Within each village, instead of hereditary leaders or chiefs, there were just individuals, called “big-men,” who by force of personality were more influential than other individuals but still lived in a hut like everybody else’s and tilled a garden like anybody else’s. Decisions were (and often still are today) reached by means of everybody in the village sitting down together and talking, and talking, and talking. The big-men couldn’t give orders, and they might or might not succeed in persuading others to adopt their proposals. To outsiders today (including not just me but often New Guinea government officials themselves), that bottom-up approach to decision-making can be frustrating, because you can’t go to some designated village leader and get a quick answer to your request; you have to have the patience to endure talk-talk-talk for hours or days with every villager who has some opinion to offer.
That must have been the context in which casuarina silviculture and all those other useful agricultural practices were adopted in the New Guinea highlands. People in any village could see the deforestation going on around them, could recognize the lower growth rates of their crops as gardens lost fertility after being initially cleared, and experienced the consequences of timber and fuel scarcity. New Guineans are more curious and experimental than any other people that I have encountered. When in my early years in New Guinea I saw someone who had acquired a pencil, which was still an unfamiliar object then, the pencil would be tried out for myriad purposes other than writing: a hair decoration? a stabbing tool? something to chew on? a long earring? a plug through the pierced nasal septum? Whenever I take New Guineans to work with me in areas away from their own village, they are constantly picking up local plants, asking local people about the plants’ uses, and selecting some of the plants to bring back with them and try growing at home. In that way, someone 1,200 years ago would have noticed the casuarina seedlings growing beside a stream, brought them home as yet another plant to try out, noticed the beneficial effects in a garden—and then some other people would have observed those garden casuarinas and tried the seedlings for themselves.
Besides thereby solving their problems of wood supply and soil fertility, New Guinea highlanders also faced a population problem as their numbers increased. That population increase became checked by practices that continued into the childhoods of many of my New Guinea friends—especially by war, infanticide, use of forest plants for contraception and abortion, and sexual abstinence and natural lactational amenorrhea for several years while a baby was being nursed. New Guinea societies thereby avoided the fates that Easter Island, Mangareva, the Maya, the Anasazi, and many other societies suffered through deforestation and population growth. Highlanders managed to operate sustainably