Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [356]
Chapter 13
A deservedly acclaimed account of the early history of the British colonies in Australia from their origins in 1788 into the 19th century is Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Knopf, 1987). Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Chatsworth, New South Wales: Reed, 1994) begins instead with the arrival of Aborigines over 40,000 years ago and traces their impact and that of Europeans on the Australian environment. David Horton, The Pure State of Nature: Sacred Cows, Destructive Myths and the Environment (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2000) offers a perspective different from Flannery’s.
Three government sources provide encyclopedic accounts of Australia’s environment, economy, and society: Australian State of the Environment Committee 2001, Australia: State of the Environment 2001 (Canberra: Department of Environment and Heritage, 2001), supplemented by reports on the website http://www.ea.gov.au/soe/; its predecessor State of the Environment Advisory Committee 1996, Australia: State of the Environment 1996 (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 1996); and Dennis Trewin, 2001 Year Book Australia (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001), a Centenary of Australia’s Federation celebratory edition of a yearbook published annually since 1908.
Two well-illustrated books by Mary E. White provide overviews of Australian environmental problems: Listen . . . Our Land Is Crying (East Roseville, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1997) and Running Down: Water in a Changing Land (East Roseville, New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 2000). Tim Flannery’s “Beautiful lies: population and environment in Australia” (Quarterly Essay no. 9, 2003) is a provocative shorter overview. Salinization’s history and impacts in Australia are covered by Quentin Beresford, Hugo Bekle, Harry Phillips, and Jane Mulcock, The Salinity Crisis: Landscapes, Communities and Politics (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2001). Andrew Campbell, Landcare: Communities Shaping the Land and the Future (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1994) describes an important grassroots movement to improve land management in rural Australia.
Chapter 14
Along with questions by my UCLA students, Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapses of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) provided a starting point for this chapter, by stating clearly why a society’s failure to solve its environmental problems poses a puzzle crying out for explanation. Thomas McGovern et al. “Northern islands, human error, and environmental degradation: a view of social and ecological change in the medieval North Atlantic” (Human Ecology 16:225-270 (1988)) traces a sequence of reasons why the Greenland Norse failed to perceive or solve their own environmental problems. The sequence of reasons that I propose in this chapter overlaps partly with that of McGovern et al., whose model should be consulted by anyone interested in pursuing this puzzle.
Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues have studied the tragedy of the commons (alias common-pool resources), using both comparative surveys and experimental games to identify the conditions under which consumers are most likely to recognize their common interests and to implement an effective quota system themselves. Ostrom’s books include Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Her more recent articles include Elinor Ostrom, “Coping with tragedies of the commons” Annual Reviews of