Hence the people lost their source of raw materials for building canoes, which were essential for fishing. The Easter Islanders, whose competing clan leaders built giant stone statues in order to display their prestige and to symbolize their connection with the gods, cut every last tree in their delicate environment to use in erecting these eerie monuments. The population of Mayan cities quickly began a decline that would continue for several centuries, culminating in levels 90 percent lower than at the civilization’s height in 700. Yet kings and nobles, rather than comprehending and responding to the crisis, evidently remained fixated on the short-term priorities of enriching themselves, building monuments, waging wars, and extracting sufficient food from the peasants to support their ostentatious lifestyles. A series of droughts turned problem to crisis. Their population increased dramatically, peaking in the eighth century C.E., but this resulted in the over-cutting of forests meanwhile their fragile soils were becoming depleted. The ancient Maya practiced intensive slash-and-burn horticulture, growing mostly corn. Resource depletion, habitat destruction, and population pressure combine in different ways in different circumstances but when their mutually reinforcing impacts become critical, societies are sometimes challenged beyond their ability to respond and consequently disintegrate. One theme quickly emerges: the environment plays a crucial role in each instance. Thus we should pay close attention when Jared Diamond, one of the world’s most celebrated and honored science writers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, devotes his newest and already best-selling book to the subject of how and why whole societies sometimes lose their way and descend into chaos.ĭiamond uses his considerable popular nonfiction prose-writing skills-carefully honed in the crafting of scores of articles for Natural History, Discover, Nature, and Geo-to trace the process of collapse in several ancient societies (including the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse colony) and show parallels with trends in several modern nations (Rwanda, Haiti, and Australia).
That is the rule that we learn from history, and it is a rule whose implications deserve careful thought given the fact that our own civilization-despite its global extent and unsurpassed technological prowess-is busily severing its own ecological underpinnings.
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