Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [352]
The switch from deforestation to reforestation in Denmark, Switzerland, and France is explained by Alexander Mather, “The transition from deforestation to reforestation in Europe” pp. 35-52 in A. Angelsen and D. Kaimowitz, eds., Agriculture Technologies and Tropical Deforestation (New York: CABI Publishing, 2001). For an account of reforestation in the Andes under the Incas, see Alex Chepstow-Lusty and Mark Winfield, “Inca agroforestry: lessons from the past” (Ambio 29:322-328 (1998)).
Accounts of self-sustaining small-scale modern rural societies include: for the Swiss Alps, Robert Netting, “Of men and meadows: strategies of alpine land use” (Anthropological Quarterly 45:132-144 (1972)); “What alpine peasants have in common: observations on communal tenure in a Swiss village” (Human Ecology 4:135-146 (1976)), and Balancing on an Alp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); for Spanish irrigation systems, T. F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and A. Maass and R. L. Anderson, And the Desert Shall Rejoice: Conflict, Growth and Justice in Arid Environments (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1986); and, for Philippine irrigation systems, R. Y. Siy, Jr., Community Resource Management: Lessons from the Zanjera (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 1982). Those Swiss, Spanish, and Philippine studies are compared in Chapter 3 of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Accounts of ecological specialization within the Indian caste system include Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Two papers that may serve as examples of prudent resource management by ecologically specialized Indian castes include Madhav Gadgil and K. C. Malhotra, “Adaptive significance of the Indian castes system: an ecological perspective” (Annals of Human Biology 10:465-478 (1983)), and Madhav Gadgil and Prema Iyer, “On the diversification of common-property resource use by Indian society,” pp. 240-255 in F. Berkes, ed., Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-based Sustainable Development (London: Belhaven, 1989).
Before leaving these examples of success or failure in the past, let us mention some more examples of failure. I have discussed five failures in detail, because they seem to me to be the best understood cases. However, there are many other past societies, some of them well known, that may also have overexploited their resources, sometimes to the point of decline or collapse. I do not discuss them at length in this book, because they are subject to more uncertainties and debate than the cases that I do discuss in detail. However, just to make the record more complete, I shall now briefly mention nine of them, proceeding geographically through the New and then the Old World:
Native Americans of the California Channel Islands off Los Angeles overexploited different species of shellfish in succession, as shown by shells in their middens. The oldest middens contain mostly the shells of the largest species that lives closest to shore and would have been easiest to bring up by diving. With time in the archaeological record, the middens show that the individuals harvested of that species became smaller and smaller, until people switched to harvesting the next-smaller species that lived farther offshore in deeper water. Again, the individuals harvested of that species decreased in size with time. Thus, each species in turn was overharvested until it became uneconomic to exploit, whereupon people fell back upon the next species, which was less desirable and more difficult to harvest. See Terry Jones, ed., Essays on the Prehistory of Maritime California (Davis, Calif.: Center for Archaeological Research, 1992); and L. Mark Raab, “An optimal foraging analysis of prehistoric shellfish collecting on San Clemente Island, California” (Journal