Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (52 page)

that an Inuit would stagger into a Danish settlement, saying that he or she
was the last survivor of some Inuit settlement all of whose other members
had died of starvation.

Compared to the Inuit and all previous hunter-gatherer societies in
Greenland, the Norse enjoyed the big advantage of an additional food
source: livestock. In effect, the sole use that Native American hunters could
make of the biological productivity of Greenland's land plant communities
was by hunting the caribou (plus hares, as a minor food item) that fed on
the plants. The Norse also ate caribou and hares, but in addition they al
lowed their cows, sheep, and goats to convert the plants into milk and meat.
In that respect the Norse potentially had a much broader food base, and a
better chance of surviving, than any previous occupants of Greenland. If only the Norse, besides eating many of the wild foods used by Native
American societies in Greenland (especially caribou, migratory seals, and harbor seals), had also taken advantage of the other wild foods that Native
Americans used but that the Norse did not (especially fish, ringed seals, and
whales other than beached whales), the Norse might have survived. That
they did not hunt the ringed seals, fish, and whales which they must have
seen the Inuit hunting was their own decision. The Norse starved in the
presence of abundant unutilized food resources. Why did they make that
decision, which from our perspective of hindsight seems suicidal?

Actually, from the perspective of their own observations, values, and
previous experience, Norse decision-making was no more suicidal than is
ours today. Four sets of considerations stamped their outlook. First, it is dif
ficult to make a living in Greenland's fluctuating environment, even for modern ecologists and agricultural scientists. The Norse had the fortune or
misfortune to arrive in Greenland at a period when its climate was relatively
mild. Not having lived there for the previous thousand years, they had not
experienced a series of cold and warm cycles, and had no way to foresee the
later difficulties of maintaining livestock when Greenland's climate would
go into a cold cycle. After 20th-century Danes reintroduced sheep and cows
to Greenland, they too proceeded to make mistakes, caused soil erosion by
overstocking sheep, and quickly gave up on cows. Modern Greenland is not
self-sufficient but depends heavily on Danish foreign aid and on fishing li
cense payments from the European Union. Thus, even by today's standards,
the achievement of the medieval Norse in developing a complex mix of ac
tivities that permitted them to feed themselves for 450 years is impressive
and not at all suicidal.

Second, the Norse did not enter Greenland with their minds a blank

slate, open to considering any solution to Greenland's problems. Instead,
like all colonizing peoples throughout history, they arrived with their own
knowledge, cultural values, and preferred lifestyle, based on generations of
Norse experience in Norway and Iceland. They thought of themselves as
dairy farmers, Christians, Europeans, and specifically Norse. Their Norwe
gian forebears had successfully practiced dairy farming for 3,000 years.
Shared language, religion, and culture bound them to Norway, just as those shared attributes bound Americans and Australians to Britain for centuries.
All of Greenland's bishops were Norwegians sent out to Greenland, rather
than Norse who had grown up in Greenland. Without those shared Norwe
gian values, the Norse could not have cooperated to survive in Greenland.
In that light their investments in cows, the Nordrseta hunt, and churches are
understandable, even though on purely economic grounds those may not
have been the best use of Norse energy. The Norse were undone by the same
social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland's difficulties. That
proves to be a common theme throughout history and also in the modern
world, as we already saw in connection with Montana (Chapter 1): the val
ues to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs
over adversity. We shall return to this dilemma in Chapters 14 and 16, when we consider societies that succeeded by figuring out which of their core val
ues they could hold on to.

Third, the Norse, like other medieval European Christians, scorned pagan non-European peoples and lacked experience of how best to deal with them. Only after the age of exploration that began with Columbus's voyage in 1492 did Europeans learn Machiavellian ways of exploiting native peoples to their own advantage, even while continuing to despise them. Hence
the Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and probably behaved towards
them in ways ensuring their enmity. Many later groups of Europeans in the
Arctic similarly perished as a result of ignoring or antagonizing the Inuit,
most notably the 138 British members of the well-financed 1845 Franklin
Expedition, every single one of whom died while trying to cross areas of the
Canadian Arctic populated by Inuit. The European explorers and settlers
who succeeded best in the Arctic were those most extensively adopting Inuit
ways, like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.

Finally, power in Norse Greenland was concentrated at the top, in the
hands of the chiefs and clergy. They owned most of the land (including all
the best farms), owned the boats, and controlled the trade with Europe. They chose to devote much of that trade to importing goods that brought

prestige to them: luxury goods for the wealthiest households, vestments and
jewelry for the clergy, and bells and stained glass for the churches. Among the uses to which they allocated their few boats were the Nordrseta hunt, in
order to acquire the luxury exports (such as ivory and polar bear hides)
with which to pay for those imports. Chiefs had two motives for running
large sheep herds that could damage the land by overgrazing: wool was
Greenland's other principal export with which to pay for imports; and independent farmers on overgrazed land were more likely to be forced into ten
ancy, and thereby to become a chief's followers in his competition with
other chiefs. There were many innovations that might have improved the
material conditions of the Norse, such as importing more iron and fewer
luxuries, allocating more boat time to Markland journeys for obtaining iron
and timber, and copying (from the Inuit) or inventing different boats and
different hunting techniques. But those innovations could have threatened
the power, prestige, and narrow interests of the chiefs. In the tightly con
trolled, interdependent society of Norse Greenland, the chiefs were in a po
sition to prevent others from trying out such innovations.

Thus, Norse society's structure created a conflict between the short-term
interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a
whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society's values were at the root of its strengths as
well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a
unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe's
most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to
brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer
than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America. Ul
timately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last
right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to
starve.

CHAPTER
9

Opposite Paths to Success

Bottom up, top down
s
New Guinea highlands
■ Tikopia ■
Tokugawa problems ■ Tokugawa solutions ■ Why Japan succeeded ■

Other successes
■

T

he preceding chapters have described six past societies whose failure
to solve the environmental problems that they created or encountered contributed to their eventual collapse: Easter Island, Pitcairn Island,
Henderson Island, the Anasazi, the Classic Lowland Maya, and the Green
land Norse. I dwelt on their failures because they offer us many lessons. However, it's certainly not the case that all past societies were doomed to
environmental disaster: the Icelanders have survived in a difficult environ
ment for over 1,100 years, and many other societies have persisted for thou
sands of years. Those success stories also hold lessons for us, as well as
hope and inspiration. They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the
bottom-up and the top-down approach.

This recognition stems especially from the work of archaeologist Patrick Kirch on Pacific islands of different sizes, with different societal outcomes.
The occupation of tiny Tikopia Island (1.8 square miles) was still sustain
able after 3,000 years; medium-size Mangaia (27 square miles) underwent a
deforestation-triggered collapse, similar to that of Easter Island; and the
largest of the three islands, Tonga (288 square miles), has been operating
more or less sustainably for 3,200 years. Why did the small island and the
large island ultimately succeed in mastering their environmental problems,
while the medium-sized island failed? Kirch argues that the small island and
the large island adopted opposite approaches to success, and that neither
approach was feasible on the medium-sized island.

Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a
bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland
is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that
they are affected by developments throughout the island, and share a sense
of identity and common interests with other inhabitants. Hence everybody

realizes that they will benefit from sound environmental measures that they
and their neighbors adopt. That's bottom-up management, in which people
work together to solve their own problems.

Most of us have experience of such bottom-up management in our
neighborhoods where we live or work. For instance, all homeowners on the
Los Angeles street where I live belong to a neighborhood homeowners' as
sociation, whose purpose is to keep the neighborhood safe, harmonious,
and attractive for our own benefit. All of us elect the association's directors
each year, discuss policy at an annual meeting, and provide the association's
budget by means of an annual dues payment. With that money, the associa
tion maintains flower gardens at road intersections, requires homeowners not to cut down trees without good cause, reviews building plans to ensure
that ugly or oversized houses aren't built, resolves disputes between neigh
bors, and lobbies city officials on matters affecting the whole neighbor
hood. As another example, I mentioned in Chapter 1 that landowners living
near Hamilton in Montana's Bitterroot Valley have banded together to op
erate the Teller Wildlife Refuge, and have thereby contributed to improving
their own land values, lifestyle, and fishing and hunting opportunities, even
though that in itself does not solve the problems of the United States or of the world.

The opposite approach is the top-down approach suited to a large soci
ety with centralized political organization, like Polynesian Tonga. Tonga is
much too large for any individual peasant farmer to be familiar with the
whole archipelago or even just with any single one of its large islands. Some
problem might be going on in a distant part of the archipelago that could
ultimately prove fatal to the farmer's lifestyle, but of which he initially has no knowledge. Even if he did know about it, he might dismiss it with the
standard ISEP excuse ("It's someone else's problem"), because he might
think that it made no difference to him or else its effects would just lie far
off in the future. Conversely, a farmer might be inclined to gloss over prob
lems in his own area (e.g., deforestation) because he assumes that there are plenty of trees somewhere else, but in fact he doesn't know.

Yet Tonga is still large enough for a centralized government under a
paramount chief or king to have arisen. That king does have an overview over the whole archipelago, unlike local farmers. Also unlike the farmers, the king may be motivated to attend to the long-term interests of the whole
archipelago, because the king derives his wealth from the whole archipelago,
he is the latest in a line of rulers that has been there for a long time, and he
expects his descendants to rule Tonga forever. Thus, the king or central au-