Aniruddha Bahal January 31, 2005

Tags: sociology , change , evolution , envionment , genocide

href="/tag/trade">trade partners, plus questions of societal responses."

The scope lets Diamond to explore the collapse of ancient civilizations like the Mayan and the Anasazi (amongst others), and at the same time give us insights into Rwanda’s 1990s genocide, China’s burgeoning environmental problems, Australia’s mining industry, and wind it all up with analyses of why societies take disastrous decisions and how we can learn from the mistakes of our ancestors, an advantage which past civilizations never had. Says Diamond, "Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten."

Sometimes even experiences in our own lifetime are forgotten. Says Diamond, "For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf Oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas guzzling cars, but then we forgot the experience and are now embracing SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events."

Diamond, best known for his bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which came out in 1999 and was almost a short history of everything human for the last 13,000 years (origin of empires, guns, crops, and writing). The book weaved broad disciplines into his writing—from linguistics to animal behaviour to genetics—and provided a fresh look to human history.

Diamond, in his latest endeavour, spells vividly the looming environment crises and tells us how most of these are self-induced. Diamond tells us why the state of Montana in the US is an environment nightmare waiting to happen, and in the same breath answers why the Vikings, who once colonized Greenland, starved there and subsequently fled it.

While the bulk of the chapters in the book discuss why or how past societies deal with and succeed or fail in solving their environment problems, the last chapter spells out the environmental problems facing modern societies and the time frame we have to solve them. Diamond lists 12 problems, the first four consisting of destruction or losses of natural resources (the extractive industries), the next three consist of harmful things that we produce or move around and the last two are population issues.

The first four problems are the destruction of natural habitats like forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the ocean bottom, converting of these natural habitiats into "human-made" environs viz farmlands, pastures, roads, golf courses etc, overfishing (instead of relying on naturally existing protein we are then forced to grow animal protein in the form of domestic livestock), loss of genetic diversity and the changing of the whole food chain beneath them, and soil erosion by wind and water at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation.

The next three problems are one’s involving energy, freshwater and the photosynthetic capacity. In all these there’s a natural ceiling: viz, there’s only so much available. Oil, natural gas and coal are depleting and new reserves would be costlier to extract. Throughout the world freshwater, underground aquifers are being depleted many times faster than they can be replenished and desalinization is a very costly alternative. Also, though it might seem at first sight that sunlight is infinite. Says Diamond, "At any given temperature and rainfall the plant growth that can be supported by the sunlight falling on an acre is limited by the geometry and biochemistry of the plants, even if they take up sunlight so efficiently that not a single photon of light passes through the plants unabsorbed to reach the ground." A study in 1986, incidentally, estimated that humans had already used (crops, tree plantations, and golf courses), or diverted or wasted (e.g. light falling on buildings or roads) about half of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity and are projected to be utilizing most of it by the middle of this century.

The next three problems identified by Diamond involve the harmful things that we generate, or move around: the toxic chemicals in the form of pesticides, insecticides or industrial waste, plastics, detergents etc that we swallow in our food and water and absorb through our skin, the alien species that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to one where they are not, and the human activities that produce gases that escape into the atmosphere where they contribute, amongst other things, to the ozone layer depletion and global warming.

Lastly, the burgeoning human population which is expected to keep on increasing for the next 70 years before it stabilizes. Increasing, overall, the per capita consumption as well as waste generation. On an average each citizen of the US, Japan and Europe consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels and puts out 32 times more waste than do inhabitants of the third world.

Of course, with third world citizens aspiring for first world living standards and a significant number of third world denizens immigrating to first world economies, the total human impact on the environment is increasing. Says Diamond, "Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World living standard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would double our human impact on the world."

Needless to stay, there would be severe complications when the third world citizens realize that it’s impossible to attain first world standards of living for themselves and the first world itself refuses to scale down its own high consumption patterns. Warns Diamond about the 12 problems: "If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all."

One of the more interesting elements about the book is the chapter on China. At 1.3 billion people it has the world’s highest production of steel, cement, aquacultured food and television sets. It stands near the top in its production of electricity and consumption of timber and is now building the world’s biggest dam.

The per capita consumption of meat, eggs and milk has increased four-fold between 1978-2001 resulting in much more agricultural waste. China’s transportation rate and vehicle fleet has grown explosively. Between 1957 and 1997 the length of railroads, motor roads and airline routes increased by 2.5, 10, and 108 times respectively. The number of cars between 1980 -2001 increased 130 times! By 2010 China would be the world’s third largest vehicle manufacturing industry after the US and Japan.

All this production and development, increased population and therefore increased consumption has brought with it its share of environment degradation. About 75 per cent of Chinese lakes, and almost all coastal seas are polluted. Red tides have increased to almost 100 per year, from only one in every five years in the 1960s. Between 1972 and 1997 there were flow stoppages on the lower Yellow River (China’s second longest river) in 20 out of 25 years, and the number of days without any flow increased from 10 days in 1988 to the astonishing total of 230 days in 1997!

China’s forests cover only 16 per cent of the land (compared to 74 % for Japan). The deforestation contributes to China’s soil erosion and floods. The 1998 floods affected 240 million people, or one-fifth of the population.

Ninety per cent of China’s grasslands have been severely degraded.
Grass production has come down by 40 per cent since the 1950s. Says Diamond, "All that degradation of grassland has implications extending beyond the mere usefulness to China of grassland for food production, because China’s grasslands of the Tibetan plateau are the headwaters for the major rivers of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as well as China." In China itself the degradation has increased the frequency and severity of floods on China’s rivers and has also increased the frequency of dust storms in eastern China, around the Beijing area.

The health costs for various environmental degradations on humans is telling. The average blood lead levels are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high. There are about 300,000 deaths per year and $ 54 billion of health costs are attributed to air pollution. Smoking deaths amount to about 730,000 per year and are rising. China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of tobacco and is home to 320 million smokers who smoke an average of 1,800 cigarettes per year per person!

Says Diamond about China, "On the one hand, China’s leaders have been able to solve problems on a scale scarcely possible for European and American leaders: for instance, by mandating a one-child policy to reduce population growth, and by ending logging nationally in 1998. On the other hand, China’s leaders have also succeeded in creating messes on a scale scarcely possible for European and American leaders: for instance, by the chaotic transition of the Great Leap Forward, and by dismantling the national education system in the Cultural Revolution."

Incidentally , much like India, with 20 per cent of the world’s population, China accounts for just 1 per cent of the world’s outlay on education.

Of course, China’s size, huge population , economy and large area also guarantee that its environment problems will not remain its alone but will spill over to the rest of the planet which is sharing the same resources. ventually, the hope is that China’s leaders might realise, as Diamond says, that its environmental problems pose an even bigger threat than its population growth. They might then conclude that China’s interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.

At the end of the book, as an Indian, one almost wishes that Diamond had taken a similar scalpel to India and processed our own dark spots with the microprocessor in his brain. Collapse is a must read for all literate people on the planet.