Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (101 page)

Contact
(New York: Viking, 1987), a moving account of the first encounters of high
land New Guineans with Europeans; and Tim Flannery,
Throwim Way Leg
(New
York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), a zoologist's experiences with highlanders.
Two papers by R. Michael Bourke discuss casuarina agroforestry and other agricul
tural practices maintaining soil fertility in the New Guinea highlands: "Indigenous
conservation farming practices,"
Report of the Joint ASOCON/Commonwealth Workshop,
pp. 67-71 (Jakarta: Asia Soil Conservation Network, 1991), and "Management of fallow species composition with tree planting in Papua New Guinea,"
Resource Management in Asia/Pacific Working Paper
1997/5 (Canberra: Research
School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australia National University, 1997). Three pa
pers by Simon Haberle summarize the paleobotanical evidence for reconstructing the history of casuarina agroforestry: "Paleoenvironmental changes in the eastern
highlands of Papua New Guinea"
(Archaeology in Oceania
31:1-11 (1996)); "Dating
the evidence for agricultural change in the Highlands of New Guinea: the last 2000
years"
[Australian Archaeology
no. 47:1-19 (1998)); and S. G. Haberle, G. S. Hope,
and Y. de Fretes, "Environmental change in the Baliem Valley, montane Irian Jaya,
Republic of Indonesia"
(Journal of Biogeography
18:25-40 (1991)).

Patrick Kirch and Douglas Yen described their fieldwork on Tikopia in the
monograph
Tikopia: The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesia Outlier
(Honolulu:
Bishop Museum Bulletin 238, 1982). Subsequent accounts of Tikopia by Kirch in
clude "Exchange systems and inter-island contact in the transformation of an is
land society: the Tikopia case," pp. 33-41 in Patrick Kirch, ed.,
Island Societies:
Archaeological Approaches to Evolution and Transformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986); Chapter 12 of his book
The Wet and the Dry
(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); "Tikopia social space revisited," pp. 257-274 in
J. M. Davidson et al., eds.,
Oceanic Culture History: Essays in Honour of Roger Green
(New Zealand Journal of Archaeology Special Publication, 1996); and "Microcos-mic histories: island perspectives on 'global' change"
(American Anthropologist
99:30-42 (1997)). Raymond Firth's series of books on Tikopia began with
We, the
Tikopia
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936) and
Primitive Polynesian
Economy
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1939). The extirpations of bird
populations during the earliest phase of Tikopian settlement are described by
David Steadman, Dominique Pahlavin, and Patrick Kirch, "Extinction, biogeography, and human exploitation of birds on Tikopia and Anuta, Polynesian outliers in
the Solomon Islands"
(Bishop Museum Occasional Papers
30:118-153 (1990)). For
an account of population changes and population regulation on Tikopia, see
W. D. Borrie, Raymond Firth, and James Spillius, "The population of Tikopia, 1929
and 1952"
(Population Studies
10:229-252 (1957)).

My account of forest policy in Tokugawa Japan is based on three books by Con
rad Totman:
The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan
(Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1989);
Early Modern Japan
(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); and
The Lumber Industry in Early Modern Japan
(Hono-

lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995). Chapter 5 of John Richards,
The Unending
Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World
(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003) draws on Totman's books and other sources to discuss Japanese forestry in the comparative context of other modern environmental case
studies. Luke Roberts,
Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of
Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) discusses the economy of one daimyo domain that depended heavily
on its forest. The formation and early history of Tokugawa Japan is covered in vol. 4 of the
Cambridge History of Japan,
John Whitney Hall, ed.,
Early Modern Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

The switch from deforestation to reforestation in Denmark, Switzerland, and
France is explained by Alexander Mather, "The transition from deforestation to re
forestation in Europe" pp. 35-52 in A. Angelsen and D. Kaimowitz, eds.,
Agriculture
Technologies and Tropical Deforestation
(New York: CABI Publishing, 2001). For an
account of reforestation in the Andes under the Incas, see Alex Chepstow-Lusty and
Mark Winfield, "Inca agroforestry: lessons from the past"
(Ambio
29:322-328
(1998)).

Accounts of self-sustaining small-scale modern rural societies include: for the
Swiss Alps, Robert Netting, "Of men and meadows: strategies of alpine land use"
(Anthropological Quarterly
45:132-144 (1972)); "What alpine peasants have in
common: observations on communal tenure in a Swiss village"
(Human Ecology
4:135-146 (1976)), and
Balancing on an Alp
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); for Spanish irrigation systems, T. F. Glick,
Irrigation and Society in Me
dieval Valencia
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and A. Maass
and R. L. Anderson,
And the Desert Shall Rejoice: Conflict, Growth and Justice in Arid
Environments
(Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1986); and, for Philippine irrigation systems,
R. Y. Siy Jr.,
Community Resource Management: Lessons from the Zanjera
(Quezon
City: University of Philippines Press, 1982). Those Swiss, Spanish, and Philippine
studies are compared in Chapter 3 of Elinor Ostrom's book
Governing the Com
mons
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Accounts of ecological specialization within the Indian caste system include
Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha,
This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Two papers that may serve as exam
ples of prudent resource management by ecologically specialized Indian castes in
clude Madhav Gadgil and K. C. Malhotra, "Adaptive significance of the Indian
castes system: an ecological perspective"
(Annals of Human Biology
10:465-478
(1983)), and Madhav Gadgil and Prema Iyer, "On the diversification of common-property resource use by Indian society," pp. 240-255 in F. Berkes, ed.,
Common
Property Resources: Ecology and Community-based Sustainable Development
(Lon
don: Belhaven, 1989).

Before leaving these examples of success or failure in the past, let us mention some more examples of failure. I have discussed five failures in detail, because they seem to me to be the best understood cases. However, there are many other past societies,
some of them well known, that may also have overexploited their resources, some
times to the point of decline or collapse. I do not discuss them at length in this
book, because they are subject to more uncertainties and debate than the cases that
I do discuss in detail. However, just to make the record more complete, I shall now briefly mention nine of them, proceeding geographically through the New and then
the Old World:

Native Americans of the California Channel Islands off Los Angeles overexploited different species of shellfish in succession, as shown by shells in their middens. The oldest middens contain mostly the shells of the largest species that
lives closest to shore and would have been easiest to bring up by diving. With time
in the archaeological record, the middens show that the individuals harvested of
that species became smaller and smaller, until people switched to harvesting the
next-smaller species that lived farther offshore in deeper water. Again, the individu
als harvested of that species decreased in size with time. Thus, each species in turn
was overharvested until it became uneconomic to exploit, whereupon people fell
back upon the next species, which was less desirable and more difficult to harvest.
See Terry Jones, ed.,
Essays on the Prehistory of Maritime California
(Davis, Calif.:
Center for Archaeological Research, 1992); and L. Mark Raab, "An optimal foraging
analysis of prehistoric shellfish collecting on San Clemente Island, California"
{Journal of Ethnobiology
12:63-80 (1992)). Another food source presumably over-
harvested by Native Americans on the same islands was a flightless species of sea duck called
Chendytes lawesi,
which must have been easy to kill because it was
flightless, and which was eventually exterminated after human settlement of the Channel Islands. The abalone industry in modern Southern California met a similar fate: when I first moved to Los Angeles in 1966, one could still buy abalone in
the supermarkets and harvest it on the coast, but abalone disappeared from Los
Angeles menus during my lifetime here because of overharvesting.

The largest Native American city in North America was Cahokia, which arose
outside St. Louis and some of whose enormous mounds have survived as tourist at
tractions. With the arrival in the Mississippi Valley of a productive new variety of
corn, the Mississippian Mound Builder culture arose there and in the U.S. Southeast. Cahokia reached its peak in the 1200s and then collapsed long before the ar
rival of Europeans. The cause of Cahokia's collapse is debated, but deforestation,
resulting in erosion and the filling up of oxbow lakes with sediment, may have
played a role. See Neal Lopinot and William Woods, "Wood exploitation and the
collapse of Cahokia," pp. 206-231 in C. Margaret Scarry, ed.,
Foraging and Farming in the Eastern Woodlands
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993); Timothy Pauketat and Thomas Emerson, eds.,
Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mis-

sissippian World
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and George Milner,
The Cahokia Chiefdom: The Archaeology of a Mississippian Society
(Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998). In the remainder of the U.S. Southeast, chief
doms of Mound Builder societies rose and fell; exhaustion of soil nutrients may
have played a role.

The first state-level society on the coast of Peru was that of the Moche, famous
for their realistic pottery, especially their portrait vessels. Moche society collapsed by
around
a.d.
800, apparently because of some combination of El Nino events, de
struction of irrigation works by flooding, and drought (see Brian Fagan's 1999 book,
cited under Further Readings for the Prologue, for discussion and references).

One of the empires or cultural horizons of the Andean Highlands that preceded the Incas was the Tiwanaku Empire, in whose collapse drought may have played a
role. See Alan Kolata,
Tiwanaku
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Alan Kolata, ed.,
Ti
wanaku and Its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996); and Michael Binford et al.,
"Climate variation and the rise and fall of an Andean civilization"
{Quaternary Re
search
47:235-248 (1997)).

Ancient Greece went through cycles of environmental problems and recovery,
at intervals of about 400 years. In each cycle, human population built up, forests
were cut down, hillsides were terraced to reduce erosion, and dams were built to
minimize siltation in the valley bottoms. Eventually in each cycle, the terraces and
dams became overwhelmed, and the region had to be abandoned or suffered a
drastic decrease in population and in societal complexity, until the landscape had
recovered sufficiently to permit a further population buildup. One of those col
lapses coincided with the fall of Mycenean Greece, the Greek society that was cele
brated by Homer and that fought the Trojan War. Mycenean Greece possessed
writing (the Linear B script), but with the collapse of Mycenean society that writing
disappeared, and Greece became non-literate until the return of literacy (now
based on the alphabet) around 800
b.c.
(see Charles Redman's 1999 book, cited un
der Further Readings for the Prologue, for discussion and references).

What we think of as civilization began around 10,000 years ago in the part of
Southwest Asia known as the Fertile Crescent, and encompassing parts of modern
Iran, Iraq, Syria, southeastern Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine. The Fertile Crescent was where the world's oldest agriculture arose, and where metal
lurgy, writing, and state societies first developed. Thus, peoples of the Fertile Crescent enjoyed their head start of thousands of years over the rest of the world. Why,
after leading the world for so long, did the Fertile Crescent decline, to the point
where today it is poor except for its oil reserves and the name "Fertile Crescent" is a
cruel joke? Iraq is now anything but the leader in world agriculture. Much of the explanation has to do with deforestation in the low-rainfall environment of the
Fertile Crescent, and salinization that permanently ruined some of the world's old-