Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [178]
Today, New Guineans are facing a new population explosion because of the success of public health measures, introduction of new crops, and the end or decrease of intertribal warfare. Population control by infanticide is no longer socially acceptable as a solution. But New Guineans already adapted in the past to such big changes as the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, glacial melting and warming temperatures at the end of the Ice Ages, the development of agriculture, massive deforestation, volcanic tephra fallouts, El Niño events, the arrival of the sweet potato, and the arrival of Europeans. Will they now also be able to adapt to the changed conditions producing their current population explosion?
Tikopia, a tiny, isolated, tropical island in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, is another success story of bottom-up management (map, p. 84). With a total area of just 1.8 square miles, it supports 1,200 people, which works out to a population density of 800 people per square mile of farmable land. That’s a dense population for a traditional society without modern agricultural techniques. Nevertheless, the island has been occupied continuously for almost 3,000 years.
The nearest land of any sort to Tikopia is the even-tinier (one-seventh of a square mile) island of Anuta 85 miles distant, inhabited by only 170 people. The nearest larger islands, Vanua Lava and Vanikoro in the Vanuatu and Solomon Archipelagoes respectively, are 140 miles distant and still only 100 square miles each in area. In the words of the anthropologist Raymond Firth, who lived on Tikopia for a year in 1928-29 and returned for subsequent visits, “It’s hard for anyone who has not actually lived on the island to realize its isolation from the rest of the world. It is so small that one is rarely out of sight or sound of the sea. [The maximum distance from the center of the island to the coast is three-quarters of a mile.] The native concept of space bears a distinct relation to this. They find it almost impossible to conceive of any really large land mass . . . I was once asked seriously by a group of them, ‘Friend, is there any land where the sound of the sea is not heard?’ Their confinement has another less obvious result. For all kinds of spatial reference they use the expressions inland and to seawards. Thus an axe lying on the floor of a house is localized in this way, and I have even heard a man direct the attention of another in saying: ‘There is a spot of mud on your seaward cheek.’ Day by day, month after month, nothing breaks the level line of a clear horizon, and there is no faint haze to tell of the existence of any other land.”
In Tikopia’s traditional small canoes, the open-ocean voyage over the cyclone-prone Southwest Pacific to any of those nearest-neighbor islands was dangerous, although Tikopians considered it a great adventure. The canoes’ small sizes and the infrequency of the voyages severely limited the quantity of goods that could be imported, so that in practice the only economically significant imports were stone for making tools, and unmarried young people from Anuta as marriage partners. Because Tikopia rock is of poor quality for making tools (just as we saw for Mangareva and Henderson Islands in Chapter 3), obsidian, volcanic glass, basalt, and chert were imported from Vanua Lava and Vanikoro, with some of that imported stone in turn originating from much more distant islands in the Bismarck, Solomon, and Samoan Archipelagoes. Other imports consisted of luxury goods: shells for ornaments, bows and arrows, and (formerly) pottery.
There could be no question of importing staple foods in amounts sufficient to contribute meaningfully to Tikopian subsistence. In particular, Tikopians had to produce and store enough surplus food to be able to avoid starvation during the annual dry season of May and June,