Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [192]
Examples of successful bottom-up management of small-scale farming, pastoral, hunting, or fishing economies also abound. One example that I briefly mentioned in Chapter 4 comes from the U.S. Southwest, where Native American societies far smaller than the Inca Empire attempted many different solutions to the problem of developing a long-lasting economy in a difficult environment. The Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mimbres solutions eventually came to an end, but the somewhat different Pueblo solution has now been operating in the same region for over a thousand years. While the Greenland Norse disappeared, the Greenland Inuit maintained a self-sufficient hunter-gatherer economy for at least 500 years, from their arrival by A.D. 1200 until the disruptions caused by Danish colonization beginning in A.D. 1721. After the extinction of Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna around 46,000 years ago, Aboriginal Australians maintained hunter-gatherer economies until European settlement in A.D. 1788. Among the numerous, self-sustaining, small-scale rural societies in modern times, especially well-studied ones include communities in Spain and in the Philippines maintaining irrigation systems, and Swiss alpine villages operating mixed farming and pastoral economies, in both cases for many centuries and with detailed local agreements about managing communal resources.
Each of these cases of bottom-up management that I have just mentioned involves a small society holding exclusive rights to all economic activities on its lands. Interesting and more complex cases exist (or traditionally existed) on the Indian subcontinent, where the caste system instead operates to permit dozens of economically specialized sub-societies to share the same geographic area by carrying out different economic activities. Castes trade extensively with each other and often live in the same village but are endogamous—i.e., people generally marry within their caste. Castes coexist by exploiting different environmental resources and lifestyles, such as by fishing, farming, herding, and hunting/gathering. There is even finer specialization, e.g., with multiple castes of fishermen fishing by different methods in different types of waters. As in the case of Tikopians and of the Tokugawa Japanese, members of the specialized Indian castes know that they can count on only a circumscribed resource base to maintain themselves, but they expect to pass those resources on to their children. Those conditions have fostered the acceptance of very detailed societal norms by which members of a given caste ensure that they are exploiting their resources sustainably.
The question remains why these societies of Chapter 9 succeeded while most of the societies selected for discussion in Chapters 2-8 failed. Part of the explanation lies in environmental differences: some environments are more fragile and pose more challenging problems than do others. We already saw in Chapter 2 the multitude of reasons causing Pacific island environments to be more or less fragile, and explaining in part why Easter and Mangareva societies collapsed while Tikopia society didn’t. Similarly, the success stories of the New Guinea highlands and Tokugawa Japan recounted in this chapter involved societies that enjoyed the good fortune to be occupying relatively robust environments. But environmental differences aren’t the whole explanation, as proved by the cases, such as those of Greenland and the U.S. Southwest, in which one society succeeded while one or more societies practicing different economies in the same environment failed. That is, not only the environment, but also the proper choice of an economy to fit the environment, is important. The remaining large piece of the puzzle involves whether, even for a particular type of economy, a society practices it sustainably. Regardless