Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [272]
The problem of catastrophic forest fires in dry parts of the U.S. Intermontane West could probably be brought under control by management techniques to reduce the fuel load, such as by mechanically thinning out new growth in the understory and removing fallen dead timber. Unfortunately, carrying out that solution on a large scale is considered prohibitively expensive. The fate of Florida’s Dusky Seaside Sparrow similarly illustrates failure due to expense, as well as due to the usual penalty for procrastination (“too little, too late”). As the sparrow’s habitat dwindled, action was postponed because of arguments over whether its habitat really was becoming critically small. By the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed in the late 1980s to buy its remaining habitat at the high cost of $5,000,000, that habitat had become so degraded that its sparrows died out. An argument then raged over whether to breed the last sparrows in captivity to the closely related Scott’s Seaside Sparrow, and then reestablish purer Dusky Seaside Sparrows by back-crossing the resulting hybrids. By the time that permission was finally granted, those last Dusky captives had become infertile through old age. Both the habitat preservation effort and the captive breeding effort would have been cheaper and more likely to succeed if they had been begun earlier.
Thus, human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it. This chapter began with my relating the incredulity of my students, and of Joseph Tainter, that societies could allow environmental problems to overwhelm them. Now, at the end of this chapter, we seem to have moved towards the opposite extreme: we have identified an abundance of reasons why societies might fail. For each of those reasons, each of us can draw on our own life experiences to think of groups known to us that failed at some task for that particular reason.
But it’s also obvious that societies don’t regularly fail to solve their problems. If that were true, all of us would now be dead or else living again under the Stone Age conditions of 13,000 years ago. Instead, the cases of failure are sufficiently noteworthy to warrant writing this book about them—a book of finite length, about only certain societies, and not an encyclopedia of every society in history. In Chapter 9 we specifically discussed some examples drawn from the majority of societies that succeeded.
Why, then, do some societies succeed and others fail, in the various ways discussed in this chapter? Part of the reason, of course, involves differences among environments rather than among societies: some environments pose much more difficult problems than do others. For instance, cold isolated Greenland was more challenging than was southern Norway, whence many of Greenland’s colonists originated. Similarly, dry, isolated, high-latitude, low-elevation Easter Island was more challenging than was wet, less isolated, equatorial, high Tahiti where ancestors of the Easter Islanders may have lived at one stage. But that’s only half of the story. If I were to claim that such environmental differences were the sole reason behind different societal outcomes of success or failure, it would indeed be fair to charge