Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [204]
Instead, I conclude that population pressure was one of the important factors behind the Rwandan genocide, that Malthus’s worst-case scenario may sometimes be realized, and that Rwanda may be a distressing model of that scenario in operation. Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions. In the case of Rwanda’s collapse we can put faces and motives on the unpleasant solution; I would guess that similar motives were operating, without our being able to associate them with faces, in the collapses of Easter Island, Mangareva, and the Maya that I described in Part 2 of this book. Similar motives may operate again in the future, in some other countries that, like Rwanda, fail to solve their underlying problems. They may operate again in Rwanda itself, where population today is still increasing at 3% per year, women are giving birth to their first child at age 15, the average family has between five and eight children, and a visitor’s sense is of being surrounded by a sea of children.
The term “Malthusian crisis” is impersonal and abstract. It fails to evoke the horrible, savage, numbing details of what millions of Rwandans did, or had done to them. Let us give the last words to one observer, and to one survivor. The observer is, again, Gérard Prunier:
“All these people who were about to be killed had land and at times cows. And somebody had to get these lands and those cows after the owners were dead. In a poor and increasingly overpopulated country this was not a negligible incentive.”
The survivor is a Tutsi teacher whom Prunier interviewed, and who survived only because he happened to be away from his house when killers arrived and murdered his wife and four of his five children:
“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”
CHAPTER 11
One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti
Differences ■ Histories ■ Causes of divergence ■ Dominican environmental impacts ■ Balaguer ■ The Dominican environment today ■ The future ■
To anyone interested in understanding the modern world’s problems, it’s a dramatic challenge to understand the 120-mile-long border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the two nations dividing the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola that lies southeast of Florida (map, p. 331). From an airplane flying high overhead, the border looks like a sharp line with bends, cut arbitrarily across the island by a knife, and abruptly dividing a darker and greener landscape east of the line (the Dominican side) from a paler and browner landscape west of the line (the Haitian side). On the ground, one can stand on the border at many places, face east, and look into pine forest, then turn around, face west, and see nothing except fields almost devoid of trees.
That contrast visible at the border exemplifies a difference between the two countries as a whole. Originally, both parts of the island were largely forested: the first European visitors noted as Hispaniola’s most striking characteristic the exuberance of its forests, full of trees with valuable wood. Both countries have lost forest cover, but Haiti has lost far more (Plates 23, 24), to the point where it now supports just seven substantial patches of forest, only two of which are protected as national parks, both of them subject