Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Read Online Free

succeed or to fail today. Yes, there are differences be tween the situation we face today and that faced by past peoples, but there are still enough similarities for us to be able to learn from the past.
    Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke histori cal assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. In many or most cases, historians and archaeolo gists have been uncovering overwhelming evidence that this assumption (about Eden-like environmentalism) is wrong. By invoking this assumption to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their envi ronmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people.
    That's the controversy about past ecological collapses. As for the complications, of course it's not true that all societies are doomed to collapse because of environmental damage: in the past some societies did while others didn't; the real question is why only some societies proved fragile, and what distin guished those that collapsed from those that didn't. Some societies that I shall discuss, such as the Icelanders and Tikopians, succeeded in solving ex tremely difficult environmental problems, have thereby been able to persist  for a long time, and are still going strong today. For example, when Norwe gian colonists of Iceland first encountered an environment superficially similar to that of Norway but in reality very different, they inadvertently de stroyed 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 produc tive after 3,000 years of human occupation. Thus, this book is not an uninterrupted series of depressing stories of failure, but also includes success stories inspiring imitation and optimism.
    In addition, I don't know of any case in which a society's collapse can be attributed solely to environmental damage: there are always other contributing factors. When I began to plan this book, I didn't appreciate those complications, and I naively thought that the book would just be about environmental damage. Eventually, I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to under stand 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 soci ety. The fifth set of factors—the society's responses to its environmental problems—always proves significant. Let's consider these five sets of factors one by one, in a sequence not implying any primacy of cause but just conve nience of presentation.
    A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment, as already discussed. The extent and reversibility of that damage depend partly on properties of people (e.g., how many trees they cut down per acre per year), and partly on properties of the environment (e.g., properties determining how many seedlings germinate per acre, and how rapidly saplings grow, per year). Those environmental properties are referred to either as fragility (susceptibility to damage) or as resilience (po tential for recovery from damage), and one can