BOOKS
The View From the Mountain
Can we avoid the mistakes of the Maya and Easter Islanders and save civilization as we know it?
By John Horgan
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By Jared Diamond; Viking, $29.95
In the week before Jared Diamond’s 500-plus-page book thudded onto my doorstep, I watched a DVD of the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, and my fellow Americans re-elected a president who has not exactly made environmental protection a priority. So I was all too prepared for Collapse, an exhaustive analysis of the myriad ways in which human societies great and small, past and present, have fallen apart through poor stewardship of nature.
What I was not prepared for was how gripping Diamond’s book would be. To be honest, I usually open treatises on our environmental sins with a sense of glum duty rather than anticipation. I also worried that Diamond’s scope might be so vast that his narrative would end up resembling a committee-written report of the National Academy of Sciences. He examines a wide range of societies, including ancient cultures such as the Maya, Norse Greenlanders, and premodern Japanese, and modern nations such as Haiti and China. But Diamond writes with infectious passion, and he enlivens his case histories by drawing upon his extensive personal travels.
In a chapter on Easter Island, known for its eerie stone heads, he recalls standing in a quarry that was littered with tools and half-carved heads, as if the “workers had suddenly quit for mysterious reasons, thrown down their tools, and stomped out.” Now a wasteland, the 66-square-mile island was once cloaked with a lush forest that yielded fuel, shelter, canoes, and food for Polynesians who arrived more than a millennium ago. For several centuries the island supported competing chiefdoms, which consumed precious resources as they vied to erect ever larger stone heads. Eventually the islanders destroyed the forest that sustained them and descended into a nightmare of warfare, starvation, and cannibalism.
To those who deny such a disaster could happen today, Diamond cites such countries as Rwanda. The ethnic conflict between the Tutsi and the Hutu, he argues, was only the proximate cause of the savagery that erupted there in 1994, killing almost a million people. The ultimate cause was that the population surged too rapidly for the soil-depleted, overgrazed land, leading to a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Lest we first-worlders still feel insulated from these catastrophes, Diamond points out that disintegrating societies rarely confine their crises to their own lands: They export them in the form of desperate emigrants, civil wars that spill over their borders, or terrorism. He also marshals evidence showing that we Americans are consuming Earth’s resources faster than they can be replaced: We have sucked water supplies dry in the West, lost farmland in the Great Plains to climate change, and driven cod almost extinct in the Atlantic Ocean’s Grand Banks. In Montana the landscape has been ravaged by mining and logging, and the state’s economy would implode if it were not propped up by federal aid.
Rather than demonizing businesses, though, Diamond tries to explain their motives. So we hear not only from environmentalists in Montana but also from ranchers, dairy farmers, and loggers struggling to make a living on the land they love. He also offers examples of societies—such as in Tonga and Japan—that have recognized the dangers of overexploiting nature and have acted to avoid it.
Diamond calls himself a “cautious optimist” who believes we will find ways to live within our means. But he poses questions that should give us all pause: What was the Easter Islander who felled the last palm tree thinking? Was he aware of the tragedy his people had brought upon themselves? Will our descendants ask the same questions about us? By writing this book Diamond has ensured that, unlike the Easter Islanders, we cannot plead ignorance.
MOVIES
Aliens of the Deep
A Walt Disney Picture; a James Cameron Film
Opens nationwide January 28, 2005
disney.go.com/disneypictures/aliensofthedeep
Courtesy of Disney Enterprises Inc./Walden Media LLC The deep-sea octopus Grimpoteuthis has been dubbed Dumbo after its large fins. |
Aliens of the Deep stars the unearthly life-forms that swim through the dark world 20,000 to 35,000 feet below sea level, as well as the scientists who descend in bubblelike submersibles to study them. A delicately veined jellyfish drifts across the screen like a bridal veil; a large lumpy fish with feet like small toe socks leers out at the audience; and 6-foot-tall tube worms with blood-red plumes cluster around hydrothermal vents that spew superheated water from the ocean floor.
Cameron’s interest in deep-sea diving began in 1995 while he was working on his movie Titanic. But it is now clear that his ambitions extend far beyond the old earthbound ocean. Deep-sea exploration, he suggests, is good practice for a daunting future quest: the search for extraterrestrial life in the vast ocean that may sit beneath several miles of ice on Europa. If such an interplanetary mission occurs anytime soon, expect a bodice-ripping blockbuster from Cameron set not among the seafaring human hordes but in a city of space turtles 500 million miles from Earth.
—Josie Glausiusz
ART
ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show
September 17–19, 2004
Mink Building, Harlem, New York City
artbots.org/2004
Artists are famous for being unpredictable and temperamental. Machines, typically, are not. But the robots on display at the third annual ArtBots Talent Show in New York City last September were fully endowed with an artistic sensibility. As I entered a street-level loft in Harlem, a trio of enormous, loosely conjoined white balloons, called Thoughts Go by Air, began a slow descent toward my head. I Courtesy of Rob Gonsalves and Georgina Lewis
William Tremblay’s valve-powered Bionic Log has a five-foot limb span.
