The Choice

Huls Farm and Gardar Farm seem to be models of successful agricultural enterprise. Both have lush settings, good grass, and imposing barns that house 200 head of cattle, and they are owned by respected community leaders. They also face significant difficulties: their high-latitude locations make for short growing seasons, and a changing climate signals greater problems to come.

The two farms form the center of an anecdote that comes at the beginning of Jared Diamond's Collapse, and the story's O. Henry ending, stealthily arrived at, encapsulates the book's message. Huls, Diamond reveals, is a still-expanding fifth-generation farm in Montana's Bitterroot Valley; Gardar, despite its apparent prosperity, was abandoned 500 years ago when Greenland's Norse society collapsed amid starvation and civic unrest.

One might draw from this parallel a pessimistic conclusion about Montana's environmental future, but Diamond is no pessimist. The fall of Greenland's Norse society was not inevitable: its inhabitants could have saved themselves but, trapped by tradition and blinded by prejudice, declined to take the necessary steps. The collapse of Gardar Farm thus serves not as a warning of imminent apocalypse but as evidence that if modern society can learn from the failures of its predecessors, it can avoid their fate.

MONUMENTAL ERRORS

Many readers who approach Collapse will have been led there by Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond's last book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historical account of how and why Europeans and their descendants gathered the lion's share of the world's resources. The new book should not disappoint them; indeed, for those interested in our collective future, Collapse should be required reading. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, it is a stunningly erudite tour of societies past and present. Diamond focuses on how their conditions and their decisions led (or might lead) to either sustainability or disastrous overexploitation--in the hope that such history will serve as a guide to contemporary decision-making. And despite the abundance of bad news, Diamond's overall message is one of cautious optimism.

Collapse is really three books in one. (This phrase itself is a Diamondism, since the author frequently guides the reader through a challenging text by making lists: environmental problems 1 through 12, a five-point framework of major factors contributing to collapse, the five kinds of failure in group decision-making.) The book's first part, which should be read carefully, consists of a prologue that sets out a plan for the book, followed by a description of contemporary Montana, a splendid warm-up for the rest of the account. Indeed, the Rocky Mountain West, where the Wise Use movement so often collides with passionate conservationists, provides an ideal setting for an introduction to contemporary environmental issues. Here readers see much more of the author than they saw in Guns. Diamond uses his deep personal familiarity with the environment and the individuals who inhabit it to add depth and color to his scholarly analysis. His Montana friends (many of whom I know and like) range from third-generation ranchers to well-off urbanites drawn there by a love of fly-fishing--convincing and authentic voices in the reasoned but troubled debate about the land and how it serves them.

Book two begins with Easter Island, where Diamond's idea for the project was probably born. The island's famous moai monoliths have inspired fascination and speculation among generations of travelers and scholars. How were these massive structures transported from the hillside quarry where they were made to massive seaside platforms many miles away? And what is the connection between that history and Easter Island's barren, treeless landscape of today? Diamond answers by way of a true-life detective story, one in which the heroes are anthropologists, paleontologists, and palynologists (who study the structure and dispersal of pollen). By analyzing the bones of extinct birds and mammals, the charcoal remains of old fires, and pollen sequences (the layers of pollen deposited in lake bottoms), they have determined the basic outlines of Easter Island's history, recounted by Diamond in masterly fashion.

The first inhabitants of the remote, windy place arrived from other islands around 900. The population, divided into a dozen chiefdoms and supported by intensive agriculture, soon rose to 15,000 or more. The moai were built to honor the opposing chieftans, and as clan rivalries intensified the statues became larger and more magnificent. Pollen samples from the lower layers of the few bodies of water on Easter show that when the settlers first arrived, abundant large palms, related to the Chilean wine palm, dominated the forest and there was an extensive understory of smaller trees. The islanders chopped down these palms, fashioning them into canoes to hunt porpoises (the bones of which have been found in the remains of kitchen refuse piles) or into rollers to transport the giant moai. Some economists have argued that the Polynesians' past experience with faster-regenerating palm forests on other islands left them unprepared for the slow recovery of the giant Easter Island palms. But the competitive zeal of the chieftains for statuary self-promotion is also part of the explanation. Whatever their motive, the result was the most disastrous logging operation ever undertaken.