Top Quotes: “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” — Jared Diamond

Introduction

“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/ social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”

“Most people would consider the following past societies to have been famous victims of full-fledged collapses rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in Asia, and Easter Island.”

“The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.

Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production (such as irrigation, double-cropping, or terracing), and to expand farming from the prime lands first chosen onto more marginal land, in order to feed the growing number of hungry mouths. Unsustainable practices led to environmental damage of one or more of the eight types just listed, resulting in agriculturally marginal lands having to be abandoned again. Consequences for society included food shortages, starvation, wars among too many people fighting for too few resources, and overthrows of governing elites by disillusioned masses. Eventually, population decreased through starvation, war, or disease, and society lost some of the political, economic, and cultural complexity that it had developed at its peak.”

“The risk of such collapses today is now a matter of increasing concern; indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Many people fear that ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a threat to global civilization. The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Most of these 12 threats, it is claimed, will become globally critical within the next few decades: either we solve the problems by then, or the problems will undermine not just Somalia but also First World societies. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be “just” a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or else of wars, triggered ultimately by scarcity of environmental resources.”

“Some societies that I shall discuss, such as the Icelanders and Tikopians, succeeded in solving extremely difficult environmental problems, have thereby been able to persist for a long time, and are still going strong today. For example, when Norwegian colonists of Iceland first encountered an environment superficially similar to that of Norway but in reality very different, they inadvertently destroyed much of Iceland’s topsoil and most of its forests. Iceland for a long time was Europe’s poorest and most ecologically ravaged country. However, Icelanders eventually learned from experience, adopted rigorous measures of environmental protection, and now enjoy one of the highest per-capita national average incomes in the world. Tikopia Islanders inhabit a tiny island so far from any neighbors that they were forced to become self-sufficient in almost everything, but they micromanaged their resources and regulated their population size so carefully that their island is still productive after 3,000 years of human occupation.”

“Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors — environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners — may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors — the society’s responses to its environmental problems — always proves significant.”

“A society may be able to hold off its enemies as long as it is strong, only to succumb when it becomes weakened for any reason, including environmental damage. The proximate cause of the collapse will then be military conquest, but the ultimate cause — the factor whose change led to the collapse — will have been the factor that caused the weakening. Hence collapses for ecological or other reasons often masquerade as military defeats.”

“The risk arises that, if your trade partner becomes weakened for any reason (including environmental damage) and can no longer supply the essential import or the cultural tie, your own society may become weakened as a result. This is a familiar problem today because of the First World’s dependence on oil from ecologically fragile and politically troubled Third World countries that imposed an oil embargo in 1973. Similar problems arose in the past for the Greenland Norse, Pitcairn Islanders, and other societies.”

Montana

“Among the lower 48 states, Montana is the third largest in area, yet the sixth smallest in population, hence the second lowest in population density.”

“Unfortunately, the ore concentrate that is eventually carried away from a Montana mine in order to extract the metals represents only a fraction of the earth that must first be dug up. The remainder is waste rock and tailings still containing copper, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc, which are toxic to people (as well as to fish, wildlife, and our livestock) and hence are bad news when they get into groundwater, rivers, and soil. In addition, Montana ores are rich in iron sulfide, which yields sulfuric acid. In Montana there are about 20,000 abandoned mines, some of them recent but many of them a century or more old, that will be leaking acid and those toxic metals essentially forever. The vast majority of those mines have no surviving owners to bear financial responsibility, or else the known owners aren’t rich enough to reclaim the mine and treat its acid drainage in perpetuity.”

“By 1900, Butte accounted for half of the U.S.’s copper output. Until 1955 most mining at Butte involved underground tunnels, but in 1955 Anaconda began excavating an open-pit mine called the Berkeley Pit, now an enormous hole over a mile in diameter and 1,800 feet deep. Huge quantities of acidic mine tailings with toxic metals ended up in the Clark Fork River. But Anaconda’s fortunes then declined because of cheaper foreign competition, expropriation of its mines in Chile, and growing environmental concerns in the U.S. In 1976 Anaconda was bought by the big oil company ARCO (more recently bought in turn by the bigger oil company BP), which closed the smelter in 1980 and the mine itself in 1983, thereby eliminating thousands of jobs and three-quarters of the economic base for the Butte area.

The Clark Fork River, including the Berkeley Pit, is now the largest and most expensive Superfund cleanup site in the U.S. In ARCO’s view, it is unfair to hold ARCO responsible for damage done by the mine’s previous owner, before the Superfund law even existed. In the view of the federal and state governments, ARCO acquired Anaconda’s assets, including Anaconda’s liabilities. At least, ARCO and BP are not declaring bankruptcy. As one environmentalist friend told me, “They are trying to get away with paying as little as possible, but there are worse companies to deal with than ARCO.” The acidic water seeping into the Berkeley Pit will be pumped out and treated forever. ARCO has already paid several hundred million dollars to the state of Montana for restoration of the Clark Fork, and its total eventual liability is estimated at one billion dollars.”

“One factor is the direct effects of logging, which often turns a forest into something approximating a huge pile of kindling: the ground in a logged forest may remain covered with lopped-off branches and treetops, left behind when the valuable trunks are carted away; a dense growth of new vegetation springs up, further increasing the forest’s fuel loads; and the trees logged and removed are of course the biggest and most fire-resistant individuals, leaving behind smaller and more flammable trees.”

“Historical records, plus counts of annual tree rings and datable fire scars on tree stumps, demonstrated that a Ponderosa Pine forest experiences a lightning-lit fire about once a decade under natural conditions (i.e., before fire suppression began around 1910 and became effective after 1945). The mature Ponderosa trees have bark two inches thick and are relatively resistant to fire, which instead burns out the understory of fire-sensitive Douglas Fir seedlings that have grown up since the last fire. But after only a decade’s growth until the next fire, those seedlings are still too low for fire to spread from them into the crowns. Hence the fire remains confined to the ground and understory. As a result, many natural Ponderosa Pine forests have a park-like appearance, with low fuel loads, big trees well spaced apart, and a relatively clear understory.

Of course, though, loggers concentrated on removing those big, old, valuable, fire-resistant Ponderosa Pines, while fire suppression for decades let the understory fill up with Douglas Fir saplings that would in turn become valuable when full-grown. Tree densities increased from 30 to 200 trees per acre, the forest’s fuel load increased by a factor of 6, and Congress repeatedly failed to appropriate money to thin out the saplings. Another human-related factor, sheep grazing in national forests, may also have played a major role by reducing understory grasses that would otherwise have fueled frequent low-intensity fires. When a fire finally does start in a sapling-choked forest, whether due to lightning or human carelessness or (regrettably often) intentional arson, the dense tall saplings may become a ladder that allows the fire to jump into the crowns. The outcome is sometimes an unstoppable inferno in which flames shoot 400 feet into the air, leap from crown to crown across wide gaps, reach temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, kill the tree seed bank in the soil, and may be followed by mudslides and mass erosion.

Foresters now identify the biggest problem in managing western forests as what to do with those increased fuel loads that built up during the previous half-century of effective fire suppression. In the wetter eastern U.S., dead trees rot away more quickly than in the drier West, where more dead trees persist like giant matchsticks. In an ideal world, the Forest Service would manage and restore the forests, thin them out, and remove the dense understory by cutting or by controlled small fires. But that would cost over a thousand dollars per acre for the one hundred million acres of western U.S. forests, or a total of about $100 billion. No politician or voter wants to spend that kind of money. Even if the cost were lower, much of the public would be suspicious of such a proposal as just an excuse for resuming logging of their beautiful forest. Instead of a regular program of expenditures for maintaining our western forests in a less fire-susceptible condition, the federal government tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money unpredictably whenever a firefighting emergency arises: e.g., about $1.6 billion to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles.”

“Salinization provides a large part of the explanation for why applying the term “Fertile Crescent” today to Iraq and Syria, formerly the leading center, of today to world agriculture, would be a cruel joke.”

“Seemingly pristine Montana actually suffers from serious environmental problems involving toxic wastes, forests, soils, water, climate change, biodiversity losses, and introduced pests. All of these problems translate into economic problems. They provide much of the explanation for why Montana’s economy has been declining in recent decades to the point where what was formerly one of our richest states is now one of the poorest.”

“Rich out-of-state homeowners are careful to stay in Montana for less than 180 days per year, in order to avoid having to pay Montana income tax and thereby to contribute to the cost of local government and schools. One local told me, “Those outsiders have different priorities from us here: what they want is privacy and expensive isolation, and they don’t want to be involved locally except when they take their out-of-state friends to the local bar to show their friends the rural lifestyle and the quaint local people. They like wildlife, fishing, hunting, and the scenery, but they’re not part of the local community” Or, as Emil Erhardt said, “Their attitude is, I came here to ride my horse, enjoy the mountains, and go fishing: don’t bother me with issues I moved here to get away from.”

“”Several decades ago Montana was among the top 10 U.S. states in its per-capita income; now, it stands 49 out of 50, because of the decline of the extraction industries (logging, coal, mines, oil, and gas). Those lost jobs were high-paying union jobs. Of course, we should not go back to overextraction, of which there was some in the old days. Here in the Bitterroot, both a husband and wife have to work, and often they each have to hold two jobs, in order to make ends meet, yet here we are surrounded by this overfueled forest. Everybody here, environmentalists or not, agrees that we need some fuel reduction in our forests. Forest restoration would eliminate over-fueling of the forests, especially of the low small trees. Now, that overfueling is eliminated just by burning it. The federal government’s National Fire Plan would do it by mechanical extraction of the logs, the purpose being to reduce the biomass of fuel. Most of our American timber comes from Canada! Yet the original mandate of our national forests was to provide a steady stream of timber, and to provide watershed protection. It used to be that 25% of the revenue from national forests went to schools, but that national forest revenue has decreased greatly recently. More logging would mean more money for our schools.”

Easter Island

“Rano Raraku is an approximately circular volcanic crater about 600 yards in diameter, which I entered by a trail rising steeply up to the crater rim from the low plain outside, and then dropping steeply down again toward the marshy lake on the crater floor. No one lives in the vicinity today. Scattered over both the crater’s outer and inner walls are 397 stone statues, representing in a stylized way a long-eared legless human male torso, mostly 15 to 20 feet tall but the largest of them 70 feet tall (taller than the average modern 5-story building), and weighing from 10 up to 270 tons. The remains of a transport road can be discerned passing out of the crater through a notch cut into a low point in its rim, from which three more transport roads about 25 feet wide radiate north, south, and west for up to 9 miles towards Easter’s coasts. Scattered along the roads are 97 more statues, as if abandoned in transport from the quarry. Along the coast and occasionally inland are about 300 stone platforms, a third of them formerly supporting or associated with 393 more statues, all of which until a few decades ago were not erect but thrown down, many of them toppled so as to break them deliberately at the neck.”

“Ahu Tongariki’s largest statue weighed 88 tons. Yet Easter Island’s prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no cranes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no means other than human muscle power to transport and raise the statues.

The statues remaining at the quarry are in all stages of completion. Some are still attached to the bedrock out of which they were being carved, roughed out but with details of the ears or hands missing. Others are finished, detached, and lying on the crater slopes below the niche where they had been carved, and still others had been erected in the crater. The ghostly impression that the quarry made on me came from my sense of being in a factory, all of whose workers had suddenly quit for mysterious reasons, thrown down their tools, and stomped out, leaving each statue in whatever stage it happened to be at the moment. Littering the ground at the quarry are the stone picks, drills, and hammers with which the statues were being carved. Around each statue still attached to rock is the trench in which the carvers stood. Chipped in the rock wall are stone notches on which the carvers may have hung the gourds that served as their water bottles. Some statues in the crater show signs of having been deliberately broken or defaced, as if by rival groups of carvers vandalizing one another’s products. Under one statue was found a human finger bone.”

“To us modern landlubbers, it is literally incredible that canoe voyagers sailing east from Mangareva could have had the good luck to hit an island only nine miles wide from north to south after such a long voyage. However, Polynesians knew how to anticipate an island long before land became visible, from the flocks of nesting seabirds that fly out over a radius of a hundred miles from land to forage. Thus, the effective diameter of Easter (originally home to some of the largest seabird colonies in the whole Pacific) would have been a respectable 200 miles to Polynesian canoe-voyagers, rather than a mere nine.”

“Still further evidence for agricultural intensification is numerous stone chicken houses (called hare moa), mostly up to 20 feet long (plus a few 70-foot monsters), 10 feet wide, and 6 feet high, with a small entrance near the ground for chickens to run in and out, and with an adjacent yard ringed by a stone wall to prevent the precious chickens from running away or being stolen. If it were not for the fact that Easter’s abundant big stone hare moa are overshadowed by its even bigger stone platforms and statues, tourists would remember Easter as the island of stone chicken houses. They dominate much of the landscape near the coast, because today the prehistoric stone chicken houses — all 1,233 of them — are much more conspicuous than the prehistoric human houses.”

“The “average” erected statue was 13 feet tall and weighed about 10 tons. The tallest ever erected successfully, known as Paro, was 32 feet tall but was slender and weighed “only” about 75 tons, and was thus exceeded in weight by the 87-ton slightly shorter but bulkier statue on Ahu Tongariki that taxed Claudio Cristino in his efforts to reerect it with a crane. While islanders successfully transported a statue a few inches taller than Paro to its intended site on Ahu Hanga Te Tenga, it unfortunately fell over during the attempt to erect it. Rano Raraku quarry contains even bigger unfinished statues, including one 70 feet long and weighing about 270 tons. Knowing what we do about Easter Island technology, it seems impossible that the islanders could ever have transported and erected it, and we have to wonder what megalomania possessed its carvers.”

“The increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rival chiefs commissioning the statues to outdo each other.”

“Given the widespread distribution over Polynesia of platforms and statues, why were Easter Islanders the only ones to go overboard, to make by far the largest investment of societal resources in building them, and to erect the biggest ones? At least four different factors cooperated to produce that outcome. First, Rano Raraku tuff is the best stone in the Pacific for carving: to a sculptor used to struggling with basalt and red scoria, it almost cries out, “Carve me!” Second, other Pacific island societies on islands within a few days’ sail of other islands devoted their energy, resources, and labor to inter-island trading, raiding, exploration, colonization, and emigration, but those competing outlets were foreclosed for Easter Islanders by their isolation. While chiefs on other Pacific islands could compete for prestige and status by seeking to outdo each other in those interisland activities, “The boys on Easter Island didn’t have those usual games to play,” as one of my students put it. Third, Easter’s gentle terrain and complementary resources in different territories led as we have seen to some integration of the island, thereby letting clans all over the island obtain Rano Raraku stone and go overboard in carving it. If Easter had remained politically fragmented, like the Marquesas, the Tongariki clan in whose territory Rano Raraku lay could have monopolized its stone, or neighboring clans could have barred transport of statues across their territories — as in fact eventually happened. Finally, as we shall see, building platforms and statues required feeding lots of people, a feat made possible by the food surpluses produced by the elite-controlled upland plantations.”

“The islanders began by building a gently sloping ramp of stones from the plaza up to the top of the front of the platform, and pulling the prone statue with its base end forwards up the ramp. Once the base had reached the platform, they levered the statue’s head an inch or two upwards with logs, slipped stones under the head to support it in the new position, and continued to lever up the head and thereby to tilt the statue increasingly towards the vertical. That left the ahu’s owners with a long ramp of stones, which may then have been dismantled and recycled to create the ahu’s lateral wings. The pukao was probably erected at the same time as the statue itself, both being mounted together in the same supporting frame.

The most dangerous part of the operation was the final tilting of the statue from a very steep angle to the vertical position, because of the risk that the statue’s momentum in that final tilt might carry it beyond the vertical and tip it off the rear of the platform. Evidently to reduce that risk, the carvers designed the statue so that it was not strictly perpendicular to its flat base but just short of perpendicular (e.g., at an angle of about 87 degrees to the base, rather than 90 degrees). In that way, when they had raised the statue to a stable position with the base flat on the platform, the body was still leaning slightly forwards and at no risk of tipping over backwards. They could then slowly and carefully lever up the front edge of the base that final few degrees, slipping stones under the front of the base to stabilize it, until the body was vertical.”

“The nuts turned out to be very similar to, but slightly larger than, those of the world’s largest existing palm tree, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 65 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. Subsequent visitors to Easter have found more evidence of the palm, in the form of casts of its trunks buried in Mt. Terevaka’s lava flows a few hundred thousand years ago, and casts of its root bundles proving that the Easter palm’s trunk reached diameters exceeding seven feet. It thus dwarfed even the Chilean palm and was (while it existed) the biggest palm in the world.”

“That low contribution of fish to Easter diets was because of its rugged coastline and steep drop-offs of the ocean bottom, so that there are few places to catch fish by net or handline in shallow water. For the same reason the Easter diet was low in molluscs and sea urchins. To compensate, there were those abundant seabirds plus the land birds. Bird stew would have been seasoned with meat from large numbers of rats, which reached Easter as stowaways in the canoes of the Polynesian colonists. Easter is the sole known Polynesian island at whose archaeological sites rat bones outnumber fish bones. In case you’re squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall, from my years of living in England in the late 1950s, recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends who kept them for experiments also used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.”

“Land birds disappeared completely from the diet, for the simple reason that every species became extinct from some combination of overhunting, deforestation, and predation by rats. It was the worst catastrophe to befall Pacific island birds, surpassing even the record on New Zealand and Hawaii, where to be sure the moas and flightless geese and other species became extinct but many other species managed to survive. No Pacific island other than Easter ended up without any native land birds. Of the 25 or more formerly breeding seabirds, overharvesting and rat predation brought the result that 24 no longer breed on Easter itself, about 9 are now confined to breeding in modest numbers on a few rocky islets off Easter’s coasts, and 15 have been eliminated on those islets as well.”

“When five of Easter’s little two-man leaky canoes paddled out to trade with a French ship anchored off Easter in 1838, its captain reported, “All the natives repeated often and excitedly the word miru and became impatient because they saw that we did not understand it: this word is the name of the timber used by Polynesians to make their canoes. This was what they wanted most, and they used every means to make us understand this.” The name “Terevaka” for Easter’s largest and highest mountain means “place to get canoes”: before its slopes were stripped of their trees to convert them to plantations, they were used for timber.”

“Those were the immediate consequences of deforestation and other human environmental impacts. The further consequences start with starvation, a population crash, and a descent into cannibalism. Surviving islanders’ accounts of starvation are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of little statues called mai kavakava, depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs. Captain Cook in 1774 described the islanders as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” Numbers of house sites in the coastal lowlands, where almost everybody lived, declined by 70% from peak values around 1400–1600 to the 1700s, suggesting a corresponding decline in numbers of people. In place of their former sources of wild meat, islanders turned to the largest hitherto unused source available to them: humans, whose bones became common not only in proper burials but also (cracked to extract the marrow) in late Easter Island garbage heaps. Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.””

“Easter’s chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests. They buttressed that ideology by monumental architecture and ceremonies designed to impress the masses, and made possible by food surpluses extracted from the masses. As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa, and Easter’s formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war. The obsidian spearpoints (termed mata’a) from that era of fighting still littered Easter in modern times. Commoners now built their huts in the coastal zone, which had been previously reserved for the residences (hare panga) of the elite. For safety, many people turned to living in caves that were enlarged by excavation and whose entrances were partly sealed to create a narrow tunnel for easier defense. Food remains, bone sewing needles, woodworking implements, and tools for repairing tapa cloth make clear that the caves were being occupied on a long-term basis, not just as temporary hiding places.

What had failed, in the twilight of Easter’s Polynesian society, was not only the old political ideology but also the old religion, which became discarded along with the chiefs’ power. Oral traditions record that the last ahu and moai were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last.”

“That the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis. Around 1680, at the time of the military coup, rival clans switched from erecting increasingly large statues to throwing down one another’s statues by toppling a statue forwards onto a slab placed so that the statue would fall on the slab and break.”

“Easter Islanders’ toppling of their ancestral mai reminds me of Russians and Romanians toppling the statues of Stalin and Causescu when the Communist governments of those countries collapsed. The islanders must have been filled with pent-up anger at their leaders for a long time, as we know that Russians and Romanians were. I wonder how many of the statues were thrown down one by one at intervals, by particular enemies of a statue’s owner, as described for Paro; and how many were instead destroyed in a quickly spreading paroxysm of anger and disillusionment, as took place at the end of communism.”

“Again as on other Pacific islands, “black-birding,” the kidnapping of islanders to become laborers, began on Easter around 1805 and climaxed in 1862–63, the grimmest year of Easter’s history, when two dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1,500 people (half of the surviving population) and sold them at auction to work in Peru’s guano mines and other menial jobs. Most of those kidnapped died in captivity. Under international pressure, Peru repatriated a dozen surviving captives, who brought another smallpox epidemic to the island. Catholic missionaries took up residence in 1864. By 1872 there were only 111 islanders left on Easter.

European traders introduced sheep to Easter in the 1870s and claimed land ownership. In 1888 the Chilean government annexed Easter, which effectively became a sheep ranch managed by a Chile-based Scottish company. All islanders were confined to living in one village and to working for the company, being paid in goods at the company store rather than in cash. A revolt by the islanders in 1914 was ended by the arrival of a Chilean warship. Grazing by the company’s sheep, goats, and horses caused soil erosion and eliminated most of what had remained of the native vegetation, including the last surviving hauhau and toromiro individuals on Easter around 1934. Not until 1966 did islanders become Chilean citizens.”

“Even a brief visit makes obvious that tensions remain between islanders and mainland-born Chileans, who are now represented in roughly equal numbers on Easter.”

Other Pacific Islands

“When one chops trees down in a wet hot place like the New Guinea lowlands, within a year new trees 20 feet tall have sprung up on the site, but tree growth is much slower in a cold dry desert.”

“In the central and eastern Pacific beyond the Andesite Line, the main aerial input of nutrients to renew soil fertility is instead in dust carried high in the atmosphere by winds from the steppes of Central Asia. Hence islands east of the Andesite Line, and far from Asia’s dust plume, ended up more deforested than islands within the Andesite Line or nearer to Asia.”

“Many centuries ago, immigrants came to a fertile land blessed with apparently inexhaustible natural resources. While the land lacked a few raw materials useful for industry, those materials were readily obtained by overseas trade with poorer lands that happened to have deposits of them. For a time, all the lands prospered, and their populations multiplied.

But the population of the rich land eventually multiplied beyond the numbers that even its abundant resources could support. As its forests were felled and its soils eroded, its agricultural productivity was no longer sufficient to generate export surpluses, build ships, or even to nourish its own population. With that decline of trade, shortages of the imported raw materials developed. Civil war spread, as established political institutions were overthrown by a kaleidoscopically changing succession of local military leaders. The starving populace of the rich land survived by turning to cannibalism. Their former overseas trade partners met an even worse fate: deprived of the imports on which they had depended, they in turn ravaged their own environments until no one was left alive.

Does this grim scenario represent the future of the United States and our trade partners? We don’t know yet, but the scenario has already played itself out on three tropical Pacific islands. One of them, Pitcairn Island, is famous as the “uninhabited” island to which the mutineers from the H.M.S. Bounty fled in 1790. They chose Pitcairn because it was indeed uninhabited at that time, remote, and hence offered a hiding place from the vengeful British navy searching for them. But the mutineers did find temple platforms, petroglyphs, and stone tools giving mute evidence that Pitcairn had formerly supported an ancient Polynesian population. East of Pitcairn, an even more remote island named Henderson remains uninhabited to this day. Even now, Pitcairn and Henderson are among the most inaccessible islands in the world, without any air or scheduled sea traffic, and visited only by the occasional yacht or cruise ship. Yet Henderson, too, bears abundant marks of a former Polynesian population.”

“The fates of the first Pitcairners and the Henderson Islanders proved to have been linked to a slowly unfolding environmental catastrophe hundreds of miles overseas on their more populous island trading partner, Mangareva, whose population survived at the cost of a dramatically lowered standard of living.”

“The total population of Pitcairn in Polynesian times was probably not much greater than a hundred people. The descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Polynesian companions living on Pitcairn today number only 52. When their number climbed from the original band of 27 settlers in 1790 to 194 descendants in the year 1856, that population overtaxed Pitcairn’s agricultural potential, and much of the population had to be evacuated by the British government to distant Norfolk Island.”

“Virtually every cave and rock shelter near the coast and with a flat floor and accessible opening — even small recesses only three yards wide and two yards deep, barely large enough for a few people to seek protection from the sun — contained debris testifying to former human habitation. Weisler found 18 such shelters, of which 15 were on the heavily used north, northeast, and northwest coasts near the only beaches, and the other three (all of them very cramped) were on the eastern or southern cliffs. Because Henderson is small enough that Weisler was able to survey essentially the entire coast, the 18 caves and rock shelters, plus one shelter on the north beach, probably constitute all the “dwellings” of Henderson’s population.”

“To modern Pacific seafaring peoples, who sail their canoes five days just to buy cigarettes, the journeys are part of normal life. For the former Polynesian inhabitants of Mangareva or Pitcairn, a visit to Henderson for a week would have been a wonderful picnic, a chance to feast on nesting turtles and their eggs and on Henderson’s millions of nesting seabirds. To Pitcairn Islanders in particular, living on an island without reefs or calm inshore waters or rich shellfish beds, Henderson would also have been attractive for fish, shellfish, and just for the chance to hang out on the beach. For the same reason, the descendants of the Bounty mutineers today, bored with their tiny island prison, jump at the chance of a “vacation” on the beach of a coral atoll a few hundred miles distant.”

“Trade within Southeast Polynesia continued from about A.D. 1000 to 1450, as gauged by artifacts in radiocarbon-dated archaeological layers on Henderson. But by A.D. 1500, the trade had stopped, both in Southeast Polynesia and along the other spokes radiating from Mangareva’s hub. Those later archaeological layers on Henderson contain no more imported Mangareva oyster shell, no more Pitcairn volcanic glass, no more Pitcairn fine-grained basalt for cutting tools, and no more Mangareva or Pitcairn basalt oven stone. Apparently the canoes were no longer arriving from either Mangareva or Pitcairn. Because trees on Henderson itself are too small to make canoes, Henderson’s population of a few dozen was now trapped on one of the most remote, most daunting islands in the world. Henderson Islanders confronted a problem that seems insoluble to us: how to survive on raised limestone reef without any metal, without stones other than limestone, and without imports of any type.

They survived in ways that strike me as a mixture of ingenious, desperate, and pathetic. For the raw material of adzes, in place of stone, they turned to shells of giant clams. For awls to punch holes, they fell back on bird bones. For oven stones, they turned to limestone or coral or giant clamshell, all of which are inferior to basalt because they retain heat for less time, tend to crack after heating, and cannot be reused as often. They now made their fishhooks out of purse shell, which is much smaller than black-lipped pearl oyster shell, so that it yields only one hook per shell (instead of a dozen hooks from an oyster shell) and restricts the types of hooks that can be fashioned.

Radiocarbon dates suggest that, struggling on in this way, Henderson’s population of originally a few dozen people survived for several generations, possibly a century or more, after all contact with Mangareva and Pitcairn was cut. But by A.D. 1606, the year of Henderson’s “discovery” by Europeans, when a boat from a passing Spanish ship landed on the island and saw no one, Henderson’s population had ceased to exist. Pitcairn’s own population had disappeared at least by 1790 (the year when the Bounty mutineers arrived to find the island uninhabited), and probably disappeared much earlier.

Why did Henderson’s contact with the outside world come to a halt? That outcome stemmed from disastrous environmental changes on Mangareva and Pitcairn. All over Polynesia, human settlement on islands that had developed for millions of years in the absence of humans led to habitat damage and mass extinctions of plants and animals. Mangareva was especially susceptible to deforestation for most of the reasons that identified for Easter Island in the preceding chapter: high latitude, low ash and dust fallout, and so on. Habitat damage was extreme in Mangareva’s hilly interior, most of which the islanders proceeded to deforest in order to plant their gardens. As a result, rain carried topsoil down the steep slopes, and the forest became replaced by a savannah of ferns, which were among the few plants able to grow on the now-denuded ground. That soil erosion in the hills removed much of the area formerly available on Mangareva for gardening and tree crops. Deforestation indirectly reduced yields from fishing as well, because no trees large enough to build canoes remained: when Europeans “discovered” Mangareva in 1797, the islanders had no canoes, only rafts.

With too many people and too little food, Mangareva society slid into a nightmare of civil war and chronic hunger, whose consequences are recalled in detail by modern islanders. For protein, people turned to cannibalism, in the form not only of eating freshly dead people but also of digging up and eating buried corpses. Chronic fighting broke out over the precious remaining cultivable land; the winning side redistributed the land of the losers. Instead of an orderly political system based on hereditary chiefs, non-hereditary warriors took over. The thought of Lilliputian military dictatorships on eastern and western Mangareva, battling for control of an island only five miles long, could seem funny if it were not so tragic. All that political chaos alone would have made it difficult to muster the manpower and supplies necessary for oceangoing canoe travel, and to go off for a month and leave one’s garden undefended, even if trees for canoes themselves had not become unavailable.”

“While much less is known about environmental changes on Pitcairn, limited archaeological excavations there by Weisler indicate massive deforestation and soil erosion on that island as well. Henderson itself also suffered environmental damage that reduced its human carrying capacity. Five out of its nine species of land birds (including all three large pigeons), and colonies of about six of its species of breeding seabirds, were exterminated. Those extinctions probably resulted from a combination of hunting for food, habitat destruction due to parts of the island being burned for gardens, and depredations of rats that arrived as stowaways in Polynesian canoes.”

“Did everyone die simultaneously in a mass calamity, or did the populations gradually dwindle down to a single survivor, who lived on alone with his or her memories for many years? That actually happened to the Indian population of San Nicolas Island off Los Angeles, reduced finally to one woman who survived in complete isolation for 18 years.”

“Everyone in their microsociety of a hundred or a few dozen people would have been everyone else’s cousin, and it would have become impossible to contract a marriage not in violation of incest taboos. Hence people may just have grown old together and stopped having children, as happened to California’s last surviving Yahi Indians, the famous Ishi and his three companions. If the small population did ignore incest taboos, the resulting inbreeding may have caused congenital physical anomalies to proliferate, as exemplified by deafness on Martha’s Vineyard.”

“The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.”

The Anasazi

“The tree ring method depends on the fact that rainfall and temperature vary seasonally in the Southwest, so that tree growth rates also vary seasonally, as true at other sites in the temperate zones as well. Hence temperate zone trees lay down new wood in annual growth rings, unlike tropical rainforest trees whose growth is more nearly continuous. But the Southwest is better for tree ring studies than most other temperate zone sites, because the dry climate results in excellent preservation of wooden beams from trees felled over a thousand years ago.

Here’s how tree ring dating, known to scientists as dendrochronology (from the Greek roots dendron=tree, and chronos=time), works. If you cut down a tree today, it’s straightforward to count the rings inwards, starting from the tree’s outside (corresponding to this year’s growth ring), and thereby to state that the 177th ring from the outermost one towards the center was laid down in the year 2005 minus 177, or 1828. But it’s less straightforward to attach a date to a particular ring in an ancient Anasazi wooden beam, because at first you don’t know in what year the beam was cut. However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on rain or drought conditions in each year.”

“Tree ring specialists (known as dendrochronologists) proceed by noting the sequence of wider and narrower rings in a tree cut down in a known recent year, and also noting the sequence in beams from trees cut down at various unknown times in the past. They then match up and align ring sequences with the same diagnostic wide/narrow patterns from different beams. For instance, suppose that this year (2005) you cut down a tree that proves to be 400 years old (400 rings), and that has an especially distinctive sequence of five wide rings, two narrow rings, and six wide rings for the 13 years from 1643 back to 1631. If you find that same distinctive sequence starting seven years from the outermost ring in an old beam of unknown felling date with 332 rings, then you can conclude that the old beam came from a tree cut down in 1650 (seven years after 1643), and that the tree began to grow in the year 1318 (332 years before 1650).”

“A series of good years, with adequate rainfall or with sufficiently shallow groundwater tables, may result in population growth, resulting in turn in society becoming increasingly complex and interdependent and no longer locally self-sufficient. Such a society then cannot cope with, and rebuild itself after, a series of bad years that a less populous, less interdependent, more self-sufficient society had previously been able to cope with.”

“Initially, rain runoff would have been as a broad sheet over the flat canyon bottom, permitting floodplain agriculture watered both by the runoff and by the high alluvial groundwater table. When the Anasazi began diverting water into channels for irrigation, the concentration of water runoff in the channels and the clearing of vegetation for agriculture, combined with natural processes, resulted around A.D. 900 in the cutting of deep arroyos in which the water level was below field levels, thereby making irrigation agriculture and also agriculture based on groundwater impossible until the arroyos filled up again. Such arroyo-cutting can develop surprisingly suddenly. For example, at the Arizona city of Tucson in the late 1880s, American settlers excavated a so-called intercept ditch to intercept the shallow groundwater table and divert its water downstream onto the floodplain. Unfortunately, floods from heavy rains in the summer of 1890 cut into the head of that ditch, starting an arroyo that within a mere three days extended itself for a distance of six miles upstream, leaving an incised and agriculturally useless floodplain near Tucson.”

“New Guineans with whom I have worked over the past 40 years have matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed disgust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of his recently deceased prospective son-in-law.”

“The final blow for Chacoans was a drought that tree rings show to have begun around A.D. 1130. There had been similar droughts previously, around A.D. 1090 and 1040, but the difference this time was that Chaco Canyon now held more people, more dependent on outlying settlements, and with no land left unoccupied. A drought would have caused the groundwater table to drop below the level where it could be tapped by plant roots and could support agriculture; a drought would also make rainfall-supported dryland agriculture and irrigation agriculture impossible. A drought that lasted more than three years would have been fatal, because modern Puebloans can store corn for only two or three years, after which it is too rotten or infested to eat. Probably the outlying settlements that had formerly supplied the Chaco political and religious centers with food lost faith in the Chacon priests whose prayers for rain remained unanswered, and they refused to make more food deliveries. A model for the end of Anasazi settlement at Chaco Canyon, which Europeans did not observe, is what happened in the Pueblo Indian revolt of 1680 against the Spaniards, a revolt that Europeans did observe. As in Chaco Anasazi centers, the Spaniards had extracted food from local farmers by taxing them, and those food taxes were tolerated until a drought left the farmers themselves short of food, provoking them to revolt.

Some time between A.D. 1150 and 1200, Chaco Canyon was virtually abandoned and remained largely empty until Navajo shepherders reoccupied it 600 years later. Because the Navajo did not know who had built the great ruins that they found there, they referred to those vanished former inhabitants as the Anasazi, meaning “the Anciont Ones.” What actually happened to the thousands of Chacoan inhabitants? By analogy with historically witnessed abandonments of other pueblos during a drought in the 1670s, probably many people starved to death, some people killed each other, and the survivors fled to other settled areas in the Southwest. It must have been a planned evacuation.”

The Maya

“The Maori are the Polynesian people who were the first to settle New Zealand. Traditionally, they fought frequent fierce wars against each other, but only against closely neighboring tribes. Those wars were limited by the modest productivity of their agriculture, whose staple crop was sweet potatoes. It was not possible to grow enough sweet potatoes to feed an army in the field for a long time or on distant marches. When Europeans arrived in New Zealand, they brought potatoes, which beginning around 1815 considerably increased Maori crop yields. Maori could now grow enough food to supply armies in the field for many weeks. The result was a 15-year period in Maori history, from 1818 until 1833, when Maori tribes that had acquired potatoes and guns from the English sent armies out on raids to attack tribes hundreds of miles away that had not yet acquired potatoes and guns. Thus, the potato’s productivity relieved previous limitations on Maori warfare, similar to the limitations that low-productivity corn agriculture imposed on Maya warfare.

Those food supply considerations may contribute to explaining why Maya society remained politically divided among small kingdoms that were perpetually at war with each other, and that never became unified into large empires like the Aztec Empire of the Valley of Mexico.”

“The Classic collapse was obviously not complete, because there were hundreds of thousands of Maya who met and fought the Spaniards – far fewer Maya than during the Classic peak, but still far more people than in the other ancient societies discussed in detail in this book. Those survivors were concentrated in areas with stable water supplies, especially in the north with its cenotes, the coastal lowlands with their wells, near a southern lake, and along rivers and lagoons at lower elevations. However, population otherwise disappeared almost completely in what previously had been the Maya heartland in the south.”

“With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

The third strand consisted of increased fighting, as more and more people fought over fewer resources. Maya warfare, already endemic, peaked just before the collapse. That is not surprising when one reflects that at least 5,000,000 people, perhaps many more, were crammed into an area smaller than the state of Colorado (104.000 square miles). That warfare would have decreased further the amount of land available for agriculture, by creating no-man’s lands between principalities where it was now unsafe to farm. Bringing matters to a head was the strand of climate change. The drought at the time of the Classic collapse was not the first drought that the Maya had lived through, but it was the most severe. At the time of previous droughts, there were still uninhabited parts of the Maya landscape, and people at a site affected by drought could save themselves by moving to another site. However, by the time of the Classic collapse the landscape was now full, there was no useful unoccupied land in the vicinity on which to begin anew, and the whole population could not be accommodated in the few areas that continued to have reliable water supplies.

As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them.”

Norse Settlements

“The Vikings were farmers, traders, colonizers, and the first European explorers of the North Atlantic. The settlements that they founded met very different fates. Viking settlers of Continental Europe and the British Isles eventually merged with local populations and played a role in forming several nation-states, notably Russia, England, and France. The Vinland colony, representing Europeans’ first attempt to settle North America, was quickly abandoned; the Greenland colony, for 450 years the most remote outpost of European society, finally vanished; the Iceland colony struggled for many centuries through poverty and political difficulties, to emerge in recent times as one of the world’s most affluent societies; and the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe colonies survived with little difficulty. All of those Viking colonies were derived from the same ancestral society: their differing fates were transparently related to the different environments in which the colonists found themselves.”

“The Vikings met another people there, the Inuit, whose solutions to Greenland’s environmental problems were very different from those of the Vikings. When that smaller experiment ended five centuries later, Greenland’s Vikings had all perished, leaving Greenland uncontested in the hands of the Inuit. The tragedy of the Greenland Norse (Greenland Scandinavians) thus carries a hopeful message: even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.”

“Modern Icelanders are still the direct descendants of the Viking men and their Celtic wives who were Iceland’s first settlers.”

“Sailboat technology from the Mediterranean finally reached Scandinavia around A.D. 600, at a time when climatic warming and the arrival of improved plows happened to be stimulating food production and a human population explosion in Scandinavia. Because most of Norway is steep and mountainous, only 3% of its land area can be used for agriculture, and that arable land was coming under increasing population pressure by A.D. 700, especially in western Norway. With decreasing opportunities to establish new farms back at home, Scandinavia’s growing population began expanding overseas.”

“The modern English language owes “awkward,” “die,” “egg,” “skirt,” and dozens of other everyday words to the Scandinavian invaders.”

“In the course of these voyages to inhabited European lands, many Viking ships were blown off-course into the North Atlantic Ocean, which at those times of warm climate was free of the sea ice that later became a barrier to ship navigation, contributing to the fate of the Norse Greenland colony and of the Titanic. Those off-course ships thereby discovered and settled other lands previously unknown either to Europeans or to any peoples: the uninhabited Faeroe Islands some time after A.D. 800 and Iceland around 870; around A.D. 980 Greenland, at that time occupied only in the far north by Native American predecessors of the Inuit known as the Dorset people; and in A.D. 1000 Vinland, an exploration zone encompassing Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and possibly some other coastal areas of northeastern North America teeming with Native Americans whose presence forced the Vikings to depart after only a decade.

The Viking raids on Europe declined as their European targets gradually came to expect them and to defend themselves, as the power of the English and French kings and the German emperor grew, and as the power of the Norwegian king began to harness his uncontrolled hotbed of plundering chiefs and to channel their efforts into those of a respectable trading state.”

“Conversions of Vikings overseas contributed to the emergence of Christianity at home in Scandinavia, as overseas Vikings returning on visits brought info about the new religion, and as chiefs and kings in Scandinavia began to recognize the political advantages that Christianity could bring them.”

“The Christian churches that were created in Iceland and Greenland after A.D. 1000 were not independent entities owning their own land and buildings, as are modern churches. Instead, they were built and owned by a leading local farmer/chief on his own land, and the farmer was entitled to a share of the taxes collected as tithes by that church from other local people.”

“In AD. 1472 ownership of the Orkneys passed without conquest from Norway (then subject to Denmark) to Scotland, for a trivial reason of dynastic politics (Scotland’s King James demanded compensation for Denmark’s failure to pay the dowry promised to accompany the Danish princess whom he married). Under Scottish rule, the Orkney islanders continued to speak a Norse dialect until the 1700s. Today, the Orkney descendents of indigenous Picts and Norse invaders remain prosperous farmers enriched by a terminal for North Sea oil.”

“The Faroes too were originally occupied by Pict farmers, conquered by Vikings in the ninth century, ceded to Scotland in 1472, spoke Norse for some time thereafter, and have recently profited from North Sea oil. Differences are that they are slightly more remote and northerly.”

“The Vikings found the Faeroes uninhabited except perhaps for a few Irish hermits, about whose existence there are vague stories but no firm archaeological evidence.”

Iceland

“Iceland is ecologically the most heavily damaged country in Europe. Since human settlement began, most of the country’s original trees and vegetation have been destroyed, and about half of the original soils have eroded into the ocean. As a result of that damage, large areas of Iceland that were green at the time that Vikings landed are now lifeless brown desert without buildings, roads, or any current signs of people.”

“At the time that settlement of Iceland began, one-quarter of the island’s area was forested. The settlers proceeded to clear the trees for pastures, and for using the trees themselves as firewood, timber, and charcoal About 80% of that original woodland was cleared within the first few decades, and 96% as of modern times, thus leaving only 1% of Iceland’s area still forested.”

“As one drives across Iceland today, it is striking to notice how the occasional clumps of trees still standing are mostly ones enclosed by fences to protect them from sheep.”

“For several centuries Iceland was self-governing, until fighting between chiefs belonging to the five leading families resulted in many killings of people and burnings of farms in the first half of the 13th century. In 1262 Icelanders invited Norway’s king to govern them, reasoning that a distant king was less of a danger to them, would leave them more freedom, and could not possibly plunge their land into such disorder as their own nearby chiefs. Marriages among Scandinavian royal houses resulted in the thrones of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway becoming unified in the year 1397 under one king, who was most interested in Denmark because it was his richest province, and less interested in Norway and Iceland, which were poorer. In 1874 Iceland achieved some self-government, home rule in 1904, and full independence from Denmark in 1944.”

“By 1950, more than 90% of Iceland’s total exports were marine products, dwarfing the importance of the formerly dominant agricultural sector. Already in 1923, Iceland’s urban population overtook its rural population in numbers. Iceland is now the most urbanized Scandinavian country, with half its population in the capital of Reykjavik alone. The flow of population from rural to urban areas continues today, as Iceland’s farmers abandon their farms or convert them to summer houses and move to the towns to find jobs, Coca-Cola, and global culture.

Today, thanks to its abundance of fish, geothermal power, and hydroelectric power from all its rivers, and relieved of the necessity to scrape up timber for making ships (now constructed of metal), Europe’s former poorest country has become one of the world’s richest countries on a per-capita basis, a great success story.”

Norse Greenland

“The export of dried fish proved decisive in saving Iceland economically after 1300 but was impractical for the more remote Greenland colony, whose shipping lanes to Europe were often blocked by sea ice.”

“The Vinland colony failed because the Greenland colony itself was too small and poor in timber and iron to support it, too far from both Europe and from Vinland, owned too few oceangoing ships, and could not finance big fleets of exploration; and that one or two shiploads of Greenlanders were no match for hordes of Nova Scotia and Gulf of St. Lawrence Indians when they were provoked. In A.D. 1000 the Greenland colony probably numbered no more than 500 people, so that the 80 adults at the L’Anse camp would have represented a huge drain on Greenland’s available manpower. When European colonizers finally returned to North America after 1500, the history of European attempts to settle then shows how long were the odds that those attempts faced, even for colonies backed by Europe’s wealthiest and most populous nations, sending annual supply fleets of ships far larger than medieval Viking vessels, and equipped with guns and abundant iron tools. At the first English and French colonies in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Canada, about half of the settlers died of starvation and disease within the first year. It’s no surprise, then, that 500 Greenlanders, from the most remote colonial outpost of Norway, one of Europe’s poorer nations, could not succeed at conquering and colonizing North America.”

“Some historians think that the name really was coined with deceitful intent by Erik the Red, founder of Greenland’s Viking settlement, so as to induce other Vikings to join him. As my airplane from Copenhagen approached Greenland’s east coast, the first thing visible after the dark blue ocean was a vast area of brilliant white stretching out of sight, the world’s largest ice cap outside Antarctica. Greenland’s shores rise steeply to an ice-covered high plateau covering most of the island and drained by enormous glaciers flowing into the sea.”

“While 99% of the island is indeed uninhabitable white or black, there are green areas deep inside two fjord systems on the southwest coast. There, long narrow fjords penetrate far inland, such that their heads are remote from the cold ocean currents, icebergs, salt spray, and wind that suppress growth of vegetation along Greenland’s outer coast. Here and there along the mostly steep-sided fjords are patches of flatter terrain with luxuriant pastures and good for maintaining livestock.”

“The mystery of their disappearance is symbolized by the stone church at Hvalsey, Norse Greenland’s most famous building, whose photograph will be found in any travel brochure promoting Greenland tourism. Lying in meadows at the head of the long, broad, mountain-rimmed fjord, the church commands a gorgeous view over a panorama of dozens of square miles. Its walls, west doorway, niches, and gables of stone are still intact: only the original roof of turf is missing. Around the church lie the remains of the residential halls, barns, storehouses, boathouse, and pastures that sustained the people who erected those buildings. Among all medieval European societies, Norse Greenland is the one whose ruins are best preserved, precisely because its sites were abandoned while intact, whereas almost all major medieval sites of Britain and continental Europe continued to be occupied and became submerged by post-medieval construction. Visiting Hvalsey today, one almost expects to see Vikings walking out of those buildings, but in fact all is silent: practically no one now lives within twenty miles of there.”

“Compounding the mystery, the Vikings shared Greenland with another people, the Inuit (Eskimos), whereas the Iceland Norse had Iceland to themselves and faced no such additional problem to compound their own difficulties.”

“In 1721, three hundred years after the medieval Vikings died out, other Scandinavians (Danes) came back to take control of Greenland, and it was not until 1979 that Native Greenlanders gained home rule.”

“Greenland is colder than either Iceland or Norway, because the latter are bathed by the warm Gulf Stream flowing up from the south, whereas Greenland’s west coast is bathed by the cold West Greenland Current flowing down from the Arctic.”

“Mean summer temperatures today at the settlements are around 42 degrees Fahrenheit (5–6 degrees Celsius) on the outer coast, 50°F (10°C) in the interiors of the fjords.”

“Strong dry winds frequently blow down from Greenland’s ice cap, bringing drift ice from the north, blocking the fjords with icebergs even during the summer, and causing dense fogs. I was told that the large short-term climate fluctuations that I encountered during my summer visit to Greenland, including heavy rain, strong winds, and fog, were common and often made it impossible to travel by boat. But boats are the main means of transport in Greenland, because the coast is so deeply indented with branching fjords. (Even today, there are no roads connecting Greenland’s main population centers, and the sole communities joined by road are either located on the same side of the same fjord or else on adjacent different fjords separated by just a low spine of hills.)”

“Still another change with location that I couldn’t help noticing during my travels in Greenland is that some fjords have glaciers dumping into them, while others don’t. Those fjords with glaciers constantly receive icebergs of local origin, while those without glaciers only receive whatever icebergs drift in from the ocean. For example, in July I found Igaliku Fjord (on which lay Viking Greenland’s cathedral) free of icebergs, because no glacier flows into it; Eirik’s Fjord (on which lay Brattahlid) had scattered icebergs, because one glacier enters that fjord; and the next fjord north of Brattahlid, Sermilik Fjord, has many big glaciers and was solidly clogged with ice. (Those differences, and the great variations of size and shape among the icebergs, were one of the reasons why I found Greenland such a constantly interesting landscape, despite its few colors.)”

“Snow that falls each year on Greenland’s ice cap becomes compressed by the weight of later years of snow into ice. The oxygen in the water that constitutes snow or ice consists of three different isotopes, i.e., three different types of oxygen atoms differing just in atomic weight because of different numbers of uncharged neutrons in the oxygen nucleus. The overwhelmingly prevalent form of natural oxygen (99.8% of the total) is the isotope oxygen-16 (meaning oxygen of atomic weight 16), but there is also a small proportion (0.2%) of oxygen-18, and an even smaller amount of oxygen-17. All three of those isotopes are stable, not radioactive, but they can still be distinguished by an instrument called a mass spectrometer. The warmer the temperature at which snow forms, the higher is the proportion of oxygen-18 in the snow’s oxygen. Hence each year’s summer snow is higher in its proportion of oxygen-18 than the same year’s winter snow. For the same reason, snow oxygen-18 in a given month of a warm year is higher than in the same month of a cold year.

Thus, as you drill down through the Greenland ice cap (something that Greenland-ice-cap-drilling scientists have now done down to a depth of almost two miles) and measure the oxygen-18 proportion as a function of depth, you see the oxygen-18 proportion wiggling up and down as you bore through one year’s summer ice into the preceding winter’s ice and then into the preceding summer’s ice, because of the predictable seasonal changes in temperature. You also find oxygen-18 values to differ among different summers or different winters, because of unpredictable year-to-year fluctuations in temperature. Hence the Greenland ice core yields information similar to what archaeologists studying the Anasazi deduce from tree rings: it tells us each year’s summer temperature and each year’s winter temperature, and as a bonus the thickness of the ice layer between consecutive summers (or between consecutive winters) tells us the amount of precipitation that fell during that year.”

“According to sagas and medieval histories, around the year 980 a hot-blooded Norwegian known as Erik the Red was charged with murder and forced to leave for Iceland, where he soon killed a few more people and was chased out to another part of Iceland. Having ended up, there too, in a quarrel and killed still more people, he was this time exiled entirely from Iceland for three years beginning around 982.

Erik remembered that, many decades earlier, one Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had been blown westwards far off course while sailing for Iceland and had spotted some barren small islands, which we now know lay just off Greenland’s southeast coast. Those islands had been revisited around 978 by Erik’s distant relative Snaebjörn Galti, who of course got into a quarrel of his own there with his shipmates and was duly murdered. Erik sailed for those islands to try his luck, spent the next three years exploring much of the Greenland coast, and discovered good pastureland inside the deep fjords. On his return to Iceland he lost yet another fight, impelling him to lead a fleet of 25 ships to settle the newly explored land that he shrewdly named Greenland. News brought back to Iceland of the fine homesteads available for the asking in Greenland motivated three more fleets of settlers to sail from Iceland during the next decade. As a result, by 1000 virtually all the land suitable for farms in both Western and Eastern Settlements had been occupied, yielding an eventual total Norse population estimated at around 5,000: about 1,000 people at Western Settlement, 4,000 at Eastern Settlement.

From their settlements the Norse undertook explorations and annual hunting trips northwards along the west coast, far north of the Arctic Circle. One of those trips may have gotten as far north as latitude 79°N, only 700 miles from the North Pole.”

“The staple food-producing animals in Greenland became hardy breeds of sheep and goats much better adapted to cold climates than were the cattle. They had the additional advantage that, unlike cows, they can dig down under snow to find grass for themselves in the winter. In Greenland today, sheep can be kept outdoors for nine months per year (three times as long as cows) and have to be brought into shelter and fed for only the three months of heaviest snow cover.”

“One can calculate that Greenland cows were the smallest known in the modern world, not more than four feet high at the shoulder. During the winter they remained all the time in their stalls, where the dung that they dropped accumulated as a rising tide around them until the spring, when the sea of dung was shoveled outside. During the winter the cows were fed on harvested hay, but if its quantities weren’t sufficient, it had to be supplemented with seaweed brought inland. The cows evidently didn’t like the seaweed, so that farm laborers had to live in the barn with the cows and their rising sea of dung during the winter, and perhaps to force-feed the cows, which gradually became smaller and weaker. Around May, when the snow started to melt and new grass came up, the cows could at last be brought out of doors to start grazing themselves, but by then they were so weak that they could no longer walk and had to be carried outside.”

“Even though Greenland’s Norse originated from a fish-eating society, they may have developed a taboo against eating fish.”

“perhaps Erik the Red, in the first years of the Greenland settlement, got an awful case of food poisoning from eating fish. On his recovery, he would have told everybody who would listen to him how bad fish is for you, and how we Greenlanders are a clean, proud people who would never stoop to the unhealthy habits of those desperate grubby ichthyophagous Icelanders and Norwegians.”

“Many possible climatic events could raise the specter of starvation: a short, cool, foggy summer, or a wet August, that decreased hay production; a long snowy winter that was hard on both the livestock and the caribou, and that increased the winter hay requirements of the livestock; ice pileup in the fords, impeding access to the outer fords during the May-June sealing season; a change in ocean temperatures, affecting fish populations and hence the populations of fish-eating seals; or a climate change far away in Newfoundland, affecting harp and hooded seals on their breeding grounds.”

“Belonging to a farm was essential both to survival and to social identity. Every piece of the few useful patches of land in the Western and Eastern Settlements was owned either by some individual farm or else communally by a group of farms, which thereby held the rights to all of that land’s resources, including not only its pastures and hay but also its caribou, turf, berries, and even its driftwood. Hence a Greenlander wanting to go it alone couldn’t just go off hunting and foraging for himself. In Iceland, if you lost your farm or got ostracized, you could try living somewhere else — on an island, an abandoned farm, or the interior highlands. You didn’t have that option in Greenland, where there wasn’t any “somewhere else” to which to go.

The result was a tightly controlled society, in which the few chiefs of the richest farms could prevent anyone else from doing something that seemed to threaten their interests — including anyone experimenting with innovations that did not promise to help the chiefs.”

“Still like Iceland, Viking Greenland was a conservative society resistant to change and sticking to old ways, compared to the society of the Vikings who remained behind in Norway. Over the centuries, there was little change in styles of tools and of carvings. Fishing was abandoned in the earliest years of the colony, and Greenlanders did not reconsider that decision during the four-and-a-half centuries of their society’s existence. They did not learn from the Inuit how to hunt ringed seals or whales, even though that meant not eating locally common foods, and starving as a result.”

“For medieval sailing ships, the voyage to Greenland from Norway took a week or more and was dangerous; annals often mention shipwrecks, or ships that sailed and were never heard from again. Hence the Greenlanders were visited by at most a couple of European ships a year, and sometimes only one every few years.”

“Gardar Cathedral and the other Greenland churches must have consumed horrifyingly large amounts of scarce timber to support their walls and roofs. Imported church paraphernalia, such as bronze bells and communion wine, were also expensive to Greenlanders because they were ultimately bought with the sweat and blood of Nordrseta hunters and competed against essential iron for the limited cargo space on arriving ships. Recurrent expenses that their churches cost the Greenlanders were an annual tithe paid to Rome, and additional Crusade tithes levied on all Christians.”

“Church-associated land ultimately came to comprise much of the best land in Greenland, including about one-third of the land of Eastern Settlement.”

“The excellent preservation of garments wrapped around the corpses buried in the permafrost at Herjolfsnes Churchyard from the final decades of the Greenland colony’s existence shows us that Greenland clothes followed smart European fashions, even though they seem far less appropriate to Greenland’s cold climate than the Inuit one-piece tailored parka with fitted sleeves and attached hood.”

“As temperatures warmed up at the end of the last Ice Age, pollen counts show that grasses and sedges became replaced by trees. For the next 8,000 years there were few further changes in the vegetation, and few or no signs of deforestation and erosion — until the Vikings arrived. That event was signaled by a layer of charcoal from Viking fires to clear pastures for their livestock. Pollen of willow and birch trees decreased, while pollen of grasses, sedges, weeds, and pasture plants introduced by the Norse for animal feed rose. Increased magnetic susceptibility values show that topsoil was carried into lakes, the topsoil having lost the plant cover that had previously protected it from erosion by wind and water. Finally, sand underlying the topsoil also was carried in when whole valleys had been denuded of their plant cover and soil. All of these changes became reversed, indicating recovery of the landscape, after the Viking settlements went extinct in the 1400s. Finally, the same set of changes that accompanied Norse arrival appeared all over again after 1924, when the Danish government of Greenland reintroduced sheep five centuries after their demise along with their Viking caretakers.”

“Unlike the Inuit, who learned to use blubber for heating and lighting their dwellings, remains in Norse hearths show that the Norse continued to burn willow and alder wood in their houses.”

“A result of the Greenlanders’ iron poverty was reduced efficiency of essential processes of their economy. With few iron scythes, cleavers, and shears available, or with those tools having to be made of bone or stone, it would have taken more time to harvest hay, butcher a carcass, and shear sheep, respectively. But a more immediately fatal consequence was that, by losing iron, the Norse lost their military advantage over the Inuit.”

“Today, about 65 Greenland families raise sheep as their main occupation, with the result that overgrazing and soil erosion have reemerged. Greenland lake cores show the same changes after 1924 as occurred after A.D. 984: a decrease in tree pollen, increase in grass and weed pollen, and increase of topsoil carried into lakes. Initially after 1924, sheep were left outdoors in the winter to forage for themselves whenever the winter was sufficiently mild. That caused grazing damage at the time when the vegetation was least capable of regenerating. Juniper trees are especially sensitive, because both sheep and horses browse them in the winter when there is nothing else available to eat. When Christian Keller arrived at Brattahlid in 1976, juniper was still growing there, but during my visit in 2002 I saw only dead juniper.

After more than half of Greenland’s sheep starved to death in the cold winter of 1966–67, the government founded a Greenland Experimental Station to study the environmental effects of sheep by comparing vegetation and soil in heavily grazed pastures, lightly grazed ones, and fields fenced to keep sheep out. A component of that research involved enlisting archaeologists to study pasture changes during Viking times. As a result of the appreciation thereby gained about Greenland’s fragility, Greenlanders have fenced off their most vulnerable pastures and brought sheep indoors for barn feeding throughout the entire winter. Efforts are being made to increase the supplies of winter hay by fertilizing natural pastures, and by cultivating oats, rye, timothy, and other non-native grasses.

Despite these efforts, soil erosion is a big problem in Greenland today. Along Eastern Settlement fjords, I saw areas of bare stone and gravel, largely devoid of vegetation as a result of recent sheep grazing. Within the last 25 years, high-velocity winds have eroded the modern farm at the site of the old Norse farm at the mouth of the Qorlortoq Valley, thereby furnishing us with a model for what happened at that farm seven centuries ago. While both the Greenland government and the sheep farmers themselves understand the long-term damage caused by sheep, they also feel under pressure to generate jobs in a society with high unemployment. Ironically, raising sheep in Greenland doesn’t pay even in the short run: the government has to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the sheep.”

“As far as archaeological evidence for contact is concerned, the Inuit might as well have been living on a different planet from the Norse, rather than sharing the same island and hunting grounds.”

“When later European explorers began visiting Greenland in the late 1500s, they were immediately amazed at the speed and maneuverability of kayaks and commented on the Inuit appearing to be half-fish, darting around in the water much faster than any European boat could travel. They were equally impressed by Inuit umiags, marksmanship, sewn skin clothing and boats and mittens, harpoons, bladder floats, dogsleds, and seal-hunting methods. The Danes who began colonizing Greenland in 1721 promptly embraced Inuit technology, used Inuit umiags to travel along the Greenland coast, and traded with the Inuit. Within a few years, the Danes had learned more about harpoons and ringed seals than the Norse had in a few centuries.”

“One answer is the cultural obstacles to intermarriage or just to learning between the Norse and the Inuit. An Inuit wife would not have been nearly as useful to a Norseman as was a Norse wife: what a Norseman wanted from a wife was the ability to weave and spin wool, to tend and milk cattle and sheep, and to make skyr and butter and cheese, which Norse but not Inuit girls learned from childhood. Even if a Norse hunter did befriend an Inuit hunter, the Norseman couldn’t just borrow his friend’s kayak and learn how to use it, because the kayak was in effect a very complicated and individually tailored piece of clothing connected to a boat, made to fit that particular Inuit hunter, and fabricated by the Inuit’s wife who (unlike Norse girls) had learned from childhood to sew skins. Hence a Norse hunter who had seen an Inuit kayak couldn’t just come home and tell his wife to “sew me one of those things.”

If you hope to persuade an Inuit woman to make you a kayak to your own measurements, or to let you marry her daughter, you have to establish a friendly relationship in the first place. But we have seen that the Norse had a “bad attitude from the beginning, referring to both North American Indians in Vinland and Inuit in Greenland as “wretches,” and killing the first natives they encountered in both places. As church-oriented Christians, the Norse shared the scorn of pagans widespread among medieval Europeans.

Still another factor behind their bad attitude is that the Norse would have thought of themselves as the natives in the Nordrseta, and the Inuit as the interlopers. The Norse arrived in the Nordrseta and hunted there for several centuries before the Inuit arrived. When the Inuit finally appeared from northwestern Greenland, the Norse would have been understandably reluctant to pay the Inuit for walrus tusks that they, the Norse, regarded as their own privilege to hunt.”

“Calculations of climate from Greenland ice cores show that it was relatively mild (i.e., as “mild” as it is today) when the Norse arrived, went through several runs of cold years in the 1300s, and then plunged in the early 1400s into the cold period called the Little Ice Age that lasted until the 1800s. That lowered hay production further, as well as clogging the ship lanes between Greenland and Norway with sea ice. Third, those obstacles to shipping were only one reason for the decline and eventual end of trade with Norway on which the Greenlanders depended for their iron, some timber, and their cultural identity. About half of Norway’s population died when the Black Death (a plague epidemic) struck in 1349–1350. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark became joined in 1397 under one king, who proceeded to neglect Norway as the poorest of his three provinces. The demand by European carvers for walrus ivory, Greenland’s principal export, declined when the Crusades gave Christian Europe access again to Asias and East Africa’s elephant ivory, whose deliveries to Europe had been cut off by the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean shores. By the 1400s, carving with ivory of any sort, whether from walruses or elephants, was out of fashion in Europe. All those changes undermined Norway’s resources and motivation for sending ships to Greenland.”

“All of these archaeological details tell us that the last inhabitants of those Western Settlement farms starved and froze to death in the spring. Either it was a cold year in which the migratory seals failed to arrive; or else heavy ice in the fords, or perhaps a band of Inuit who remembered their relatives having been stabbed by the Norse as an experiment to see how much blood ran out of them, blocked access to the seal herds in the outer fords. A cold summer had probably caused the farmers to run out of enough hay to feed their livestock through the winter. The farmers were reduced to killing their last cows, eating even the hoofs, killing and eating their dogs, and scrounging for birds and rabbits.”

Rwanda

“Rwanda’s average population density is triple even that of Africa’s third most densely populated country (Nigeria), and 10 times that of neighboring Tanzania.”

“Unfortunately, Rwanda’s economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforestation, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a steep decline in world prices for Rwanda’s principal exports of coffee and tea, austerity measures imposed by the World Bank, and a drought in the south. Habyarimana took yet another attempted Tutsi invasion of northeastern Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in October 1990 as the pretext for rounding up or killing Hutu dissidents and Tutsi all over Rwanda, in order to strengthen his own faction’s hold on the country. The civil wars displaced a million Rwandans into settlement camps, from which desperate young men were easily recruited into militias. In 1993 a peace agreement signed at Arusha called for power-sharing and a multi-power government. Still, businessmen close to Habyarimana imported 581,000 machetes for distribution to Hutu for killing Tutsi, because machetes were cheaper than guns.

However, Habyarimana’s actions against Tutsi, and his newfound toleration of killings of Tutsi, proved insufficient for Hutu extremists (i.e., Hutu even more extreme than Habyarimana), who feared having their power diluted as a result of the Arusha agreement. They began training their militias, importing weapons, and preparing to exterminate Tutsi. Rwandan Hutu fears of Tutsi grew out of the long history of Tutsi domination of Hutu, the various Tutsi-led invasions of Rwanda, and Tutsi mass killings of Hutu and murder of individual Hutu political leaders in neighboring Burundi. Those Hutu fears increased in 1993, when extremist Tutsi army officers in Burundi murdered Burundi’s Hutu president, provoking killings of Burundi Tutsi by Hutu, provoking in turn more extensive killings of Burundi Hutu by Tutsi.

Matters came to a head on the evening of April 6, 1994, when the Rwandan presidential jet plane, carrying Rwanda’s President Habyarimana and also (as a last-minute passenger) Burundi’s new provisional president back from a meeting in Tanzania, was shot down by two missiles as it came in to land at the airport of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, killing everyone on board. The missiles were fired from immediately outside the airport perimeter. It remains uncertain to this day by whom or why Habyarimana’s plane was shot down; several groups had alternative motives for killing him. Whoever were the perpetrators, Hutu extremists within an hour of the plane’s downing began carrying out plans evidently already prepared in detail to kill the Hutu prime minister and other moderate or at least less extreme members of the democratic opposition, and Tutsi. Once Hutu opposition had been eliminated, the extremists took over the government and radio and set out to exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsi, who still numbered about a million even after all the previous killings and escapes into exile.

The lead in the killings was initially taken by Hutu army extremists, using guns. They soon turned to efficiently organizing Hutu civilians, distributing weapons, setting up roadblocks, killing Tutsi identified at the roadblocks, broadcasting radio appeals to every Hutu to kill every “cockroach” (as Tutsi were termed), urging Tutsi to gather supposedly for protection at safe places where they could then be killed, and tracking down surviving Tutsi.”

“Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda’s total population, had been killed. A Tutsi-led rebel army termed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began military operations against the government within a day of the start of the genocide. The genocide ended in each part of Rwanda only with the arrival of that RPF army, which declared complete victory on July 18, 1994. It is generally agreed that the RPF army was disciplined and did not enlist civilians to murder, but it did carry out reprisal killings on a much smaller scale than the genocide to which it was responding (estimated number of reprisal victims, “only” 25,000 to 60,000). The RPF set up a new government, emphasized national conciliation and unity, and urged Rwandans to think of themselves as Rwandans rather than as Hutu or Tutsi. About 135,000 Rwandans were eventually imprisoned on suspicion of being guilty of genocide, but few of the prisoners have been tried or convicted. After the RPF victory, about 2,000,000 people (mostly Hutu) fled into exile in neighboring countries (especially the Congo and Tanzania), while about 750,000 former exiles (mostly Tutsi) returned to Rwanda from neighboring countries to which they had fled.”

“The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is not nearly as sharp as often portrayed. The two groups speak the same language, attended the same churches and schools and bars, lived together in the same village under the same chiefs, and worked together in the same offices. Hutu and Tutsi intermarried, and (before Belgians introduced identity cards) sometimes switched their ethnic identity. While Hutu and Tutsi look different on the average, many individuals are impossible to assign to either of the two groups based on appearance. About one-quarter of all Rwandans have both Hutu and Tutsi among their great-grandparents.”

“This intergradation gave rise to tens of thousands of personal tragedies during the 1994 killings, as Hutu tried to protect their Tutsi spouses, relatives, friends, colleagues, and patrons, or tried to buy off would-be killers of those loved ones with money. The two groups were so intertwined in Rwandan society that in 1994 doctors ended up killing their patients and vice versa, teachers killed their students and vice versa, and neighbors and office colleagues killed each other. Individual Hutu killed some Tutsi while protecting other Tutsi. We cannot avoid asking ourselves: how, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by extremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost savagery?

Especially puzzling, if one believes that there nothing more to the genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killings still took place — of Hutu by other Hutu. While the proportional death toll there, estimated as “at least 5% of the population,” may have been somewhat lower than that overall in Rwanda (11%), it still takes some explaining why a Hutu community would kill at least 5% of its members in the absence of ethnic motives. Elsewhere in Rwanda, as the 1994 genocide proceeded and as the number of Tutsi declined, Hutu turned to attacking each other.”

“Rwanda (and Burundi) was already densely populated in the 19th century before European arrival, because of its twin advantages of moderate rainfall and an altitude too high for malaria and the tsetse fly. Rwanda’s population subsequently grew, albeit with ups and downs, at an average rate of over 3% per year, for essentially the same reasons as in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania (New World crops, public health, medicine, and stable political borders). By 1990, even after the killings and mass exilings of the previous decades, Rwanda’s average population density was 760 people per square mile, higher than that of the United Kingdom (610) and approaching that of Holland (950). But the United Kingdom and Holland have highly efficient mechanized agriculture, such that only a few percent of the population working as farmers can produce much of the food for everyone else, plus some surplus food for export. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient and unmechanized; farmers depend on handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing little or no surplus that could support others.

As Rwanda’s population rose after independence, the country carried on with its traditional agricultural methods and failed to modernize, to introduce more productive crop varieties, to expand its agricultural exports, or to institute effective family planning. Instead, the growing population was accommodated just by clearing forests and draining marshes to gain new farmland, shortening fallow periods, and trying to extract two or three consecutive crops from a field within one year. When so many Tutsi fled or were killed in the 1960s and in 1973, the availability of their former lands for redistribution fanned the dream that each Hutu farmer could now, at last, have enough land to feed himself and his family comfortably. By 1985, all arable land outside of national parks was being cultivated. As both population and agricultural production increased, per-capita food production rose from 1966 to 1981 but then dropped back to the level where it had stood in the early 1960s.”

“Each farm was divided into (on average) 10 separate parcels, so that farmers were tilling absurdly small parcels averaging only 0.09 acre in 1988 and 0.07 acre in 1993.

Because all land in the commune was already occupied, young people found it difficult to marry, leave home, acquire a farm, and set up their own household. Increasingly, young people postponed marriage and continued to live at home with their parents. For instance, in the 20- to 25-year-old age bracket, the percentage of young women living at home rose between 1988 and 1993 from 39% to 67%, and the percentage of young men rose from 71% to 100%: not a man in his early 20s lived independently of his family by 1993. That obviously contributed to the lethal family tensions that exploded in 1994. With more young people staying home, the average number of people per farm household increased.”

“The percentage of the population consuming less than 1,600 calories per day (i.e., what is considered below the famine level) was 9% in 1982, increasing to 40% in 1990.”

Hispaniola

“Both countries have lost forest cover, but Haiti has lost far more, 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 to illegal logging. Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti. I was surprised at the extent of woodlands even in the area comprising the Dominican Republic’s richest farmland, lying between its two largest cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. In Haiti and the Dominican Republic just as elsewhere in the world, the consequences of all that deforestation include loss of timber and other forest building materials, soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, sediment loads in the rivers, loss of watershed protection and hence of potential hydroelectric power, and decreased rainfall. All of those problems are more severe in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, more urgent than any of those just-mentioned consequences is the problem of the loss of wood for making charcoal, Haiti’s main fuel for cooking.”

“The Dominican Republic is also a developing country sharing Haiti’s problems, but it is more developed and the problems are less acute. Per-capita income is five times higher, and the population density and population growth rate are lower. For the past 38 years the Dominican Republic has been at least nominally a democracy without any military coup, and with some presidential elections from 1978 onwards resulting in the defeat of the incumbent and the inauguration of a challenger, along with others marred by fraud and intimidation. Within the booming economy, industries earning foreign exchange include an iron and nickel mine, until recently a gold mine, and formerly a bauxite mine; industrial free trade zones that employ 200,000 workers and export overseas; agricultural exports that include coffee, cacao, tobacco, cigars, fresh flowers, and avocados (the Dominican Republic is the world’s third largest exporter of avocados); telecommunications; and a large tourist industry. Several dozen dams generate hydroelectric power.”

“Outside powers viewed and treated Haiti and the Dominican Republic differently. To European eyes, the oversimplified image was of the Dominican Republic as Spanish-speaking, partly European society receptive to European immigrants and trade, while Haiti was seen as a Creole-speaking African society composed of ex-slaves and hostile to foreigners. With the help of invested capital from Europe and later from the U.S., the Dominican Republic began to develop a market export economy, Haiti far less so. That Dominican economy was based on cacao, tobacco, coffee, and (beginning in the 1870s) sugar plantations, which (ironically) had formerly characterized Haiti rather than the Dominican Republic.”

“Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth. Hispaniola’s highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side. The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains, and plateaus, and much thicker soils; in particular, the Cibao Valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east. Compared to the Dominican Republic, a higher percentage of Haiti’s area is mountainous, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture is much smaller, there is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery. Note the paradox: the Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils.”

“Haiti has double the Republic’s population density.”

“A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country’s development.”

“On the first day of his return to the presidency in 1986, Balaguer began issuing executive orders to close logging camps and sawmills again, and on the next day he deployed military helicopters to detect illegal logging and intrusions into national parks. Military operations resumed to capture and imprison loggers, and to remove poor squatters, plus rich agribusinesses and mansions (some of them belonging to Balaguer’s own friends), from the parks. The most notorious of those operations took place in 1992 in Los Haitises National Park, 90% of whose forest had been destroyed; the army expelled thousands of squatters. In a further such operation two years later, personally directed by Balaguer, the army drove bulldozers through luxury houses built by wealthy Dominicans within Juan B. Pérez National Park. Balaguer banned the use of fire as an agricultural method, and even passed a law (which proved difficult to enforce) that every fence post should consist of live rooted trees rather than felled timber. As two sets of measures to undermine demand for Dominican tree products and to replace them with something else, he opened the market to wood imports from Chile, Honduras, and the U.S. (thereby eliminating most demand for Dominican timber in the country’s stores); and he reduced traditional charcoal production from trees (the curse of Haiti) by contracting for liquefied natural gas imports from Venezuela, building several terminals to import that gas, subsidizing the cost of gas to the public to outcompete charcoal, and calling for the distribution without cost of propane stoves and cylinders in order to encourage people to shift from charcoal. He greatly expanded the natural reserve system, declared the country’s first two coastal national parks, added two submerged banks in the ocean to Dominican territory as humpback whale sanctuaries, protected land within 20 yards of rivers and within 60 yards of the coast, protected wetlands, signed the Rio convention on the environment, and banned hunting for 10 years. He put pressure on industries to treat their wastes, launched with limited success some efforts to control air pollution, and slapped a big tax on mining companies. Among the many environmentally damaging proposals that he opposed or blocked were projects for a road to the port of Sanchez through a national park, a north-south road over the Central Cordillera, an international airport at Santiago, a superport, and a dam at Madrigal. He refused to repair an existing road over the highlands, with the result that it became nearly unusable. In Santa Domingo he founded the Aquarium, the Botanical Garden, and the Natural History Museum and rebuilt the National Zoo, all of which have become major attractions.

As Balaguer’s final political act at the age of 94, he teamed up with President-elect Mejia to block President Fernández’s plan to reduce and weaken the natural reserve system. Balaguer and Mejia achieved that goal.”

Australia

“Ecologically, the Australian environment is exceptionally fragile, the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland.”

“Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. That’s because Australian soils are mostly so old that they have become leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years. The oldest surviving rocks in the Earth’s crust, nearly four billion years old, are in the Murchison Range of Western Australia.

Soils that have been leached of nutrients can have their nutrient levels renewed by three major processes, all of which have been deficient in Australia compared to other continents. First, nutrients can be renewed by volcanic eruptions spewing fresh material from within the Earth onto the Earth’s surface. While this has been a major factor in creating fertile soils in many countries, such as Java, Japan, and Hawaii, only a few small areas of eastern Australia have had volcanic activity within the last hundred million years. Second, advances and retreats of glaciers strip, dig up, grind up, and redeposit the Earth’s crust, and those soils redeposited by glaciers (or else blown by the wind from glacial redeposits) tend to be fertile. Almost half of North America’s area, about 7 million square miles, has been glaciated within the last million years, but less than 1% of the Australian mainland: just about 20 square miles in the southeastern Alps, plus a thousand square miles of the Australian offshore island of Tasmania. Finally, slow uplift of crust also brings up new soils and has contributed to the fertility of large parts of North America, India, and Europe. However, again only a few small areas of Australia have been uplifted within the last hundred million years, mainly in the Great Dividing Range of southeastern Australia and in the area of South Australia around Adelaide.”

“An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwestern Australia, part of Australia’s so-called wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas, where wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients must be added artificially as fertilizer. In effect, the Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which (just as in a real flowerpot) the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate, and where the nutrients have to be supplied.

As a result of the extra expenses for Australian agriculture due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, with modern globalization, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents.”

“They are not only low in nutrients but also high in salt, from three causes. In southwestern Australia’s wheat belt the salt in the ground arises from its having been carried inland over the course of millions of years by sea breezes off the adjacent Indian Ocean. In southeastern Australia, Australia’s other area of most productive farmland rivaling the wheat belt, the basin of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray and Darling Rivers, lies at low elevations and has been repeatedly inundated by the sea and then drained again, leaving much of the salt behind. Still another low-lying basin in Australia’s inland was formerly filled by a freshwater lake that did not drain to the sea, became salty by evaporation (like Utah’s Great Salt Lake and Israel’s and Jordan’s Dead Sea), and eventually dried out, leaving behind salt deposits that became carried by winds to other parts of eastern Australia.”

“Over most of Australia, however, rainfall depends upon the so-called ENSO (the El Niño Southern Os-cillation), which means that rain is unpredictable from year to year within a decade, and is even more unpredictable from decade to decade.”

“In most of Australia’s farmlands the rainfall is sufficient to raise crops to maturity in only a fraction of all years: not more than half of all years at most locations, and in some agricultural areas only in two years out of 10. That contributes to making Australian agriculture expensive and uneconomic: the farmer goes to the expense of plowing and sowing, and then in half or more of years there is no resulting crop.”

“Until 1783, that pressure on the available jail space was relieved by sending convicts as indentured servants to North America, which was also being settled by voluntary emigrants seeking improvement of their economic lot or else religious freedom.

But the American Revolution cut off that escape valve, forcing Britain to seek some other place to dump its convicts. Initially, the two leading candidate locations under consideration were either 400 miles up the Gambia River in tropical West Africa, or else in desert at the mouth of the Orange River on the boundary between modern South Africa and Namibia. It was the impossibility of both of those proposals, evident on sober reflection, that led to the fallback choice of Australia’s Botany Bay near the site of modern Sydney, known at the time only from Captain Cook’s visit in 1770.”

“Wool was Australia’s main export from about 1820 to 1950, because its low bulk and high value overcame the tyranny-of-distance problem preventing bulkier potential Australian exports from competing in overseas markets.”

“The U.S. explicitly forbids the importation of kangaroo meat because we find the beasts cute, and because a congressman’s wife heard that kangaroos are endangered.”

“Until about 20 years ago, the Australian government not only subsidized land clearance but actually required it of lease holders. (Much agricultural and in Australia is not owned outright by farmers, as in the U.S., but is owned by the government and leased to farmers.) Leaseholders were given tax deductions for agricultural machinery and labor involved in land clearance, were assigned quotas of land to clear as a condition of retaining their lease, and forfeited the lease if they did not fulfill those quotas. Farmers and businesses were able to make a profit just by buying or leasing land covered with native vegetation and unsuitable for sustained agriculture, clearing that vegetation, planting one or two wheat crops that exhausted the soil, and then abandoning the property.”

“In the 1950 many Australians, including government leaders, looked fearfully at Australia’s much more populous Asian neighbors, especially Indonesia with its 200 million people. Australians were also strongly influenced by their World War I experience of being menaced and bombed by populous but more distant Japan. Many Australians concluded that their country suffered from a dangerous problem of being greatly underpopulated compared to those Asian neighbors, and that it would become a tempting target for Indonesian expansion unless it quickly filled all that empty space. Hence the 1950s and 1960s brought a crash program to attract immigrants as a matter of public policy.”

Good vs. Bad Corporations

“I discovered to my astonishment that these species are much more numerous inside the Chevron area than anywhere else that I have visited on the island of New Guinea except for a few remote uninhabited areas. The only place that I have seen tree kangaroos in the wild in Papa New Guinea, in my 40 years there, is within a few miles of Chevron camps; elsewhere, they are the first mammal to become shot out by hunters, and those few surviving learn to be active only at night, but I saw them active during the day in the Kutubu area. Pesquet’s Parrot, the New Guinea Harpy Eagle, birds of paradise, hornbills, and large pigeons are common in the immediate vicinity of the oil camps, and I have seen Pesquet’s Parrots perching on the camp communications towers. That’s because there is an absolute prohibition against Chevron employees and contractors hunting any animal or fishing by any means in the project area, and because the forest is intact. The birds and animals sense that and become tame. In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.”

“As one Chevron employee explained it to me, “We recognized that in Papua New Guinea no natural resource project could be successful in the long run without the support of the local landowners and villagers. They would disrupt the project and shut it down, as they did in Bougainville, if they perceived environmental harm affecting their land and food sources. The central government lacked the ability to prevent disruptions by landowners, so we needed to take prudent steps to minimize harm and maintain a good relationship with the local people.””

“Big oil companies like ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP sell their fuel to consumers at gas stations, thereby permitting consumers enraged by the Exxon Valdez disaster to boycott gas stations selling Exxon fuel. But gold passes from the mine to the consumer via a long supply chain that includes refiners, warehouses, jewelry manufacturers in India, and European wholesalers before arriving at a retail jewelry store. Take a look at your gold wedding ring: you don’t have the faintest idea where the gold came from, whether it was mined last year or stockpiled for the last 20 years, what company mined it, and what their environmental practices were. For copper the situation is even more obscure: there is an extra intermediate step of a smelter, and you don’t even realize that you are buying some copper when you buy a car or phone. That long supply chain prevents copper and gold mining companies from counting on consumer willingness to pay for cleaner mines.”

Conclusion

“My friends in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, now carry a portable small chemical toilet in their car because travel can be so prolonged and slow; they once set off to go out of town on a holiday weekend but gave up and returned home after 17 hours, when they had advanced only three miles through the traffic jam.”

“One of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.”

“At its peak around a thousand years ago, it was the world’s most extensive city, among the most populous ones, and the capital of the largest and most powerful empire in Southeast Asia (the Khmer Empire). Its temples, such as Angkor Wat, include the largest religious monuments of the pre-modern world. Along with China’s Great Wall, Angkor’s large size makes it one of the ancient constructions most readily visible from space.

Yet, by the 19th century there remained only about eight small villages dispersed over the central area formerly covered by this vast city. Cambodia today has become Southeast Asia’s poorest country.”

“Any people with any hint of usefulness for anything other than being a farm laborer — people wearing eyeglasses, people able to speak a second language besides Khmer, people with education — were killed. In a radical remaking of Cambodian society that dwarfed even the remakings of North Korea and Albania and sought to turn back the clock a thousand years to the days of Angkor, cities were evacuated; money, religion, markets, private property, and businesses were abolished; hospitals, schools, and stores were closed; no books or newspapers could be published; and everyone had to wear black clothes, eat in communal kitchens, and be a rice farmer.”

“At its maximum extent, the empire controlled one-third of mainland Southeast Asia. While its heartland was the basin of the Lower Mekong River in Cambodia, it expanded to encompass much of the territory of the adjacent modern countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand between latitudes 9 and 20 degrees north.”