Jared Diamond published a book in 2005 titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book made such an impression on the Power-Elite* that it has its own Wikipedia page.
Diamond presents the book as a series of case studies where he explains how the following four factors interacted to cause certain societies first expand and then to collapse:
- Climate
- Interactions with neighbors including collapse of essential trading
partners
- Environmental issues
- Society's response to external stresses
The centerpiece of the book is the discussion of the Norsemen who first settled Iceland and then Greenland.
Climate
The first successful settlements on Greenland coincided with a many hundred-year-period of historically much-warmer-than-average temperatures. Difficulties compounded when the temperatures reverted back to the mean.
Neighbors
The settlers were not self-sufficient. They traded narwhale tusks (ivory) for iron, wine and other items that were not economical for them to produce for themselves. To this day, there are no commercial vineyards on Greenland!
The Norsemen, Vikings, were pugnacious and did not have cordial relationships with the neighboring indigenous peoples. Diamond makes that point that since indigenous people lived there before the Norsemen and still had settlements on Greenland long afterward, albeit very small settlements and widely scattered, the Norsemen SHOULD have been able to hang on since they also had agriculture to supplement the hunter-fisher-gatherer technologies of the indigenous peoples.
Environmental issues
Trees grow very slowly in harsh climates and can easily be over-harvested for roofing beams and for firewood.
Responses to external stresses
The discovery of elephant tusks and the development of trade routes hugely reduced the demand (and prices) for narwhale ivory. Forays into the west (Labrador, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, New England) for iron and berries suitable for making wine produced meager amounts of materials at the expense of exposing the men of the settlement to attacks by natives.
One response which remains baffling to anthropologists is that there is no (as in ZERO) evidence that the colonies consumed any seafood. Not a single fish scale or clam-shell. The North Atlantic around Greenland is one of the most productive fisheries in the world and (apparently) the Norsemen did not take advantage of that source of rich, oily fish.
Fast Forward to Today
Climate
Everything is all about the climate. You cannot escape it. "Man Made Climate Change" is going to make humans and all of the plants and animals on earth go extinct...or so we are led to believe.
Interactions with neighbors
Donald Trump pushes the Power-Elites' buttons. He is a Viking. He is pugnacious. He does not craft nice-nice, win-win, roll-over-and-wag-tail treaties with other countries. His default is to negotiate from strength.
Environmental Issues
The Power-Elite pay lip-service to environmental issues like overuse of fertilizers and agricultural pesticides but pay poor-people to carpet-bomb their personal lawns and parks with toxic chemicals to make them story-book green and bug-free. Of course, that poor dude who speaks Spanish is the guy who soaks in pesticides and fertilizer all day long.
Responses to Stresses
For whatever, irrational reasons the colonists of Greenland would not eat fish even though it was abundant, high-quality food. Those are the same reasons, word-for-word, that we are given for eating bugs.
Summary
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond looks a lot like the playbook used by the Power-Elite and probably provided some of the framework or paradigm for how they perceive how events interact and unfold.
*Power-Elite: If it helps to have a human face visualize Bill Gates and/or Mark Zuckerberg although much of the Power-Elite are anonymous bureaucrats.
ERJ, I have not read Diamond's book. However, I will note a couple of factors that have also been noted:
ReplyDelete1) Inability to adapt: Beyond just not eating seafood (which seems odd, being Norse and all), they tried to live like Europeans in a non-European environment. One of the things noted is that they never adapted the barbed harpoons of the Inuit; thus they reduced their overall ability to retain potential catches of seal or whale. They also lived...well, like Europeans with European structures.
2) Dependence - Ultimately, the Greenland colony was dependent on resources outside of their control to survive - as you noted iron, but even things like wood (salvage rights for wood was a thing in neighboring Iceland). They either had to be supported by another country or reach out themselves to bring in all the resources they would need. Labrador was probably an attempt at that, but likely there were not enough people and it was not commercially viable.
If anything, the Greenland experiment argues for adaptation and overcoming any challenge as well as a high degree of self sufficiency. As modern society is dependent on energy, it suggests, for example, that we should be exploiting every energy resource we have available to us.
Not finding evidence is not the same as proof.
ReplyDeleteGiven the Norse were seafarers, it would be of interest to see what the people who remained in Iceland and Norway ate.
If the parent culture ate fish, it would seem extremely unlikely the emigrants did not.
Diamond is a tool, his schtick is to use academic bafflegarble to make idiocy sound erudite.
ReplyDeleteThe true ending of the Norse settlements was due to the ice sheets closing off any fishing or trade.
ReplyDeleteThe local natives were genetically selected to handle cold weather, unlike the Norse. So when it got warm in Greenland they moved northward.
And the natives weren't exactly very friendly. The two cultures did not get along at all. From the start.
He chose the most extreme example to make his case. During the little ice age the Thames froze in winter and doubled as a skating rink. No societal collapse.
ReplyDeleteA analogy is gringos moving to central America.
ReplyDeleteI have spent many short term trips to central America and watched gringos moving to the area and then "needing solar panels for A/C and refrigerators.
Something no local had..
Then you have to get a expensive truck shipped in and pay hugh import fees
Locals use the local busses at a small fraction of the cost of vehicle ownership.
I have been asked " is it cheap to live down there? Yes if you live like everyone around you, NO if you have to import your American lifestyle.
I read Jared Diamond's earlier work, "Guns, Germs and Steel" which was quite good. "Collapse" on the other hand was dull, repetitive and flawed. More like a poor doctoral thesis on a narrow subject with limited evidence.
ReplyDelete"Donald Trump pushes the Power-Elites' buttons. He is a Viking. He is pugnacious. He does not craft nice-nice, win-win, roll-over-and-wag-tail treaties with other countries. His default is to negotiate from strength."
ReplyDeleteYou bitch about "power elites" then say the above about a self proclaimed dictator aspirant. Talk about mixed messages.
Congratulations Joe, we've got our selves a liberal troll (but I repeated my self) fretting about how a dictator is going to ruin his Democracy.
DeleteMichael
I like to think of this as a "big tent" blog.
DeleteThere are very few venues where cross-over visitors feel welcome. If he/she reads the blog, maybe some of the "conservative (lower-case "c")" message will get traction.
Dude, I supervised Union represented employees. I have the skin of a minotaur.
LOL a Minotaur LOL.
DeleteA reference I never expected beyond D&D or maybe 45 blog as he's always doing Roman and that Era history.
A wide education you have friend.
Michael
Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel is facing increased academic scrutiny for shoddy work and support for Collapse is also collapsing. His theses may be valid but he didn't prove it.
ReplyDeleteI never really saw those books as "academic" in the sense of passing muster at the Master's level but as "easy reads" for non-anthropologists who needed a broad background.
DeleteI had to read Guns Germs and Steel as part of a graduate level history and philosophy of science course. My professors regarded it as an example of the Marxist school of historiography.
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