Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [357]
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984) covers disastrous decisions over exactly the time span that she names in the book’s title, also reflecting en route from Troy to Vietnam on the follies of the Aztec emperor Montezuma, the fall of Christian Spain to the Moslems, England’s provocation of the American Revolution, and other such self-destructive acts. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993, reprint of the original 1852 edition) covers an even wider range of follies than does Tuchman, including (just to name a few) the South Sea bubble in 18th-century England, tulip madness in 17th-century Holland, prophecies of the Last Judgment, the Crusades, witch hunting, belief in ghosts and sacred relics, dueling, and kings’ decrees about hair length, beards, and mustaches. Irving Janis, Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983, revised 2nd ed.) explores the subtle group dynamics that contributed to the success or failure of deliberations involving recent American presidents and their advisors. Janis’s case studies are of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the American army’s crossing of the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950, American’s non-preparation for Japan’s 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, America’s escalation of the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1967, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and America’s adoption of the Marshall Plan in 1947.
Garrett Hardin’s classic and often-cited article “The tragedy of the commons” appeared in Science 162:1243-1248 (1968). Mancur Olson applies the metaphor of stationary bandits and roving bandits to Chinese warlords and other extractive agents in “Dictatorship, democracy, and development” (American Political Science Review 87:567-576 (1993)). Sunk-cost effects are explained by Hal Arkes and Peter Ayton, “The sunk cost and Concorde effects: are humans less rational than lower animals?” (Psychological Bulletin 125:591-600 (1999)), and by Marco Janssen et al., “Sunk-cost effects and vulnerability to collapse in ancient societies” (Current Anthropology 44:722-728 (2003)).
Chapter 15
Two books on the oil industry’s history and on scenarios for its future are: Kenneth Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: the Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Paul Roberts, The End of Oil (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004). For a perspective within the industry, a place to start would be the websites of the major international oil companies, such as that of ChevronTexaco: www.chevrontexaco.com.
Fact-filled publications on the state of the mining industry were produced by an initiative termed “Mining, Minerals, and Sustainable Development,” resulting from a partnership supported by major mining companies. Two of these publications are: Breaking New Ground: Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (London: Earthscan, 2002); and Alistair MacDonald, Industry in Transition: a Profile of the North American Mining Sector (Winnipeg: International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2002). Other fact-filled sources are the publications of the Mineral Policy Center in Washington, D.C., recently renamed Earthworks (Web site www.mineralpolicy.org). Some books on environmental issues raised by mining are: Duane Smith, Mining America: the Industry and the Environment, 1800-1980 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1993); Thomas Power, Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996); Jerrold Marcus, ed., Mining Environmental Handbook: Effects of Mining on the Environment and American Environmental Controls on Mining (London: Imperial College Press, 1997); and Al Gedicks, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations (Cambridge, Mass.: