Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (54 page)

visited Long Island in 1972, the island consisted of a ring of mountains 16 miles in diameter surrounding a huge hole filled by a crater lake, one of the largest lakes on any Pacific island. As discussed in Chapter 2, the nutrients
carried in such an ashfall would have stimulated crop growth and thereby
stimulated human population growth, in turn creating increased need for
wood for timber and fuel, and increased rewards for discovering the virtues
of casuarina silviculture. Finally, if one can extrapolate to New Guinea from
the time record of El Nino events demonstrated for Peru, droughts and
frost might have stressed highland societies then as a third factor.

To judge by an even bigger surge in casuarina pollen between 300 and
600 years ago, highlanders may then have expanded silviculture further un
der the stimulus of two other events: the Tibito tephra, an even bigger vol
canic ashfall and boost to soil fertility and human population than the
Ogowila tephra, also originating from Long Island and directly responsible
for the hole filled by the modern lake that I saw; and possibly the arrival
then of the Andean sweet potato in the New Guinea highlands, permitting
crop yields several times those previously available with just New Guinean
crops. After its initial appearance in the Wahgi and Baliem Valleys, casu
arina silviculture (as attested by pollen cores) reached other highland areas at various later times, and was adopted in some outlying areas only within
the 20th century. That spread of silviculture probably involved diffusion of
knowledge of the technique from its first two sites of invention, plus per
haps some later independent inventions in other areas.

I have presented New Guinea highland casuarina silviculture as an ex
ample of bottom-up problem-solving, even though there are no written
records from the highlands to tell us exactly how the technique was adopted. But it could hardly have been by any other type of problem-solving, because
New Guinea highland societies represent an ultra-democratic extreme of
bottom-up decision-making. Until the arrival of Dutch and Australian
colonial government in the 1930s, there had not been even any beginnings of political unification in any part of the highlands: merely individual villages alternating between fighting each other and joining in temporary al
liances with each other against other nearby villages. Within each village, instead of hereditary leaders or chiefs, there were just individuals, called
"big-men," who by force of personality were more influential than other individuals but still lived in a hut like everybody else's and tilled a garden like anybody else's. Decisions were (and often still are today) reached by means
of everybody in the village sitting down together and talking, and talking,
and talking. The big-men couldn't give orders, and they might or might not

succeed in persuading others to adopt their proposals. To outsiders today
(including not just me but often New Guinea government officials them
selves), that bottom-up approach to decision-making can be frustrating,
because you can't go to some designated village leader and get a quick answer to your request; you have to have the patience to endure talk-talk-talk for hours or days with every villager who has some opinion to offer.

That must have been the context in which casuarina silviculture and all
those other useful agricultural practices were adopted in the New Guinea
highlands. People in any village could see the deforestation going on around
them, could recognize the lower growth rates of their crops as gardens lost fertility after being initially cleared, and experienced the consequences of timber and fuel scarcity. New Guineans are more curious and experimental
than any other people that I have encountered. When in my early years in
New Guinea I saw someone who had acquired a pencil, which was still an
unfamiliar object then, the pencil would be tried out for myriad purposes other than writing: a hair decoration? a stabbing tool? something to chew on? a long earring? a plug through the pierced nasal septum? Whenever I
take New Guineans to work with me in areas away from their own village,
they are constantly picking up local plants, asking local people about the
plants' uses, and selecting some of the plants to bring back with them and
try growing at home. In that way, someone 1,200 years ago would have no
ticed the casuarina seedlings growing beside a stream, brought them home as yet another plant to try out, noticed the beneficial effects in a garden
— and then some other people would have observed those garden casuarinas
and tried the seedlings for themselves.

Besides thereby solving their problems of wood supply and soil fertility,
New Guinea highlanders also faced a population problem as their numbers increased. That population increase became checked by practices that continued into the childhoods of many of my New Guinea friends
—especially by war, infanticide, use of forest plants for contraception and abortion, and
sexual abstinence and natural lactational amenorrhea for several years while
a baby was being nursed. New Guinea societies thereby avoided the fates
that Easter Island, Mangareva, the Maya, the Anasazi, and many other soci
eties suffered through deforestation and population growth. Highlanders
managed to operate sustainably for tens of thousands of years before the origins of agriculture, and then for another 7,000 years after the origins of
agriculture, despite climate changes and human environmental impacts constantly creating altered conditions.

Today, New Guineans are facing a new population explosion because of

the success of public health measures, introduction of new crops, and the end or decrease of intertribal warfare. Population control by infanticide is no longer socially acceptable as a solution. But New Guineans already
adapted in the past to such big changes as the extinction of the Pleistocene
megafauna, glacial melting and warming temperatures at the end of the Ice
Ages, the development of agriculture, massive deforestation, volcanic tephra
fallouts, El Nino events, the arrival of the sweet potato, and the arrival of Europeans. Will they now also be able to adapt to the changed conditions
producing their current population explosion?

Tikopia, a tiny, isolated, tropical island in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, is another success story of bottom-up management (map, p. 84). With a total
area of just 1.8 square miles, it supports 1,200 people, which works out to a
population density of 800 people per square mile of farmable land. That's a dense population for a traditional society without modern agricultural
techniques. Nevertheless, the island has been occupied continuously for al
most 3,000 years.

The nearest land of any sort to Tikopia is the even-tinier (one-seventh of a square mile) island of Anuta 85 miles distant, inhabited by only 170 peo
ple. The nearest larger islands, Vanua Lava and Vanikoro in the Vanuatu and Solomon Archipelagoes respectively, are 140 miles distant and still only 100
square miles each in area. In the words of the anthropologist Raymond
Firth, who lived on Tikopia for a year in 1928-29 and returned for subse
quent visits, "It's hard for anyone who has not actually lived on the island to realize its isolation from the rest of the world. It is so small that one is rarely
out of sight or sound of the sea. [The maximum distance from the center of
the island to the coast is three-quarters of a mile.] The native concept of
space bears a distinct relation to this. They find it almost impossible to con
ceive of any really large land mass.
...
I was once asked seriously by a group
of them, 'Friend, is there any land where the sound of the sea is not heard?'
Their confinement has another less obvious result. For all kinds of spatial
reference they use the expressions
inland
and
to seawards.
Thus an axe lying
on the floor of a house is localized in this way, and I have even heard a man
direct the attention of another in saying: 'There is a spot of mud on your
seaward cheek.' Day by day, month after month, nothing breaks the level line of a clear horizon, and there is no faint haze to tell of the existence of
any other land."

In Tikopia's traditional small canoes, the open-ocean voyage over the

cyclone-prone Southwest Pacific to any of those nearest-neighbor islands
was dangerous, although Tikopians considered it a great adventure. The ca
noes' small sizes and the infrequency of the voyages severely limited the
quantity of goods that could be imported, so that in practice the only economically significant imports were stone for making tools, and unmarried
young people from Anuta as marriage partners. Because Tikopia rock is of
poor quality for making tools (just as we saw for Mangareva and Henderson
Islands in Chapter 3), obsidian, volcanic glass, basalt, and chert were im
ported from Vanua Lava and Vanikoro, with some of that imported stone
in turn originating from much more distant islands in the Bismarck,
Solomon, and Samoan Archipelagoes. Other imports consisted of luxury
goods: shells for ornaments, bows and arrows, and (formerly) pottery.

There could be no question of importing staple foods in amounts suffi
cient to contribute meaningfully to Tikopian subsistence. In particular,
Tikopians had to produce and store enough surplus food to be able to avoid
starvation during the annual dry season of May and June, and after cyclones
that at unpredictable intervals destroy gardens. (Tikopia lies in the Pacific's
main cyclone belt, with on the average 20 cyclones per decade.) Hence sur
viving on Tikopia required solving two problems for 3,000 years: How
could a food supply sufficient for 1,200 people be produced reliably? And
how could the population be prevented from increasing to a higher level
that would be impossible to sustain?

Our main source of information about the traditional Tikopian lifestyle
comes from Firth's observations, one of the classic studies of anthropology.
While Tikopia had been "discovered" by Europeans already in 1606, its iso
lation ensured that European influence remained negligible until the 1800s,
the first visit by missionaries did not take place until 1857, and the first con
versions of islanders to Christianity did not begin until after 1900. Hence
Firth in 1928-29 had a better opportunity than subsequent visiting anthro
pologists to observe a culture that still contained many of its traditional ele
ments, although already then in the process of change.

Sustainability of food production on Tikopia is promoted by some of
the environmental factors discussed in Chapter 2 as tending to make soci
eties on some Pacific islands more sustainable, and less susceptible to environmental degradation, than societies on other islands. Working in favor of
sustainability on Tikopia are its high rainfall, moderate latitude, and loca
tion in the zone of high volcanic ash fallout (from volcanoes on other
islands) and high fallout of Asian dust. Those factors constitute a geographi
cal stroke of good luck for the Tikopians: favorable conditions for which

they personally could claim no credit. The remainder of their good fortune
must be credited to what they have done for themselves. Virtually the whole
island is micromanaged for continuous and sustainable food production, instead of the slash-and-burn agriculture prevalent on many other Pacific
islands. Almost every plant species on Tikopia is used by people in one way or another: even grass is used as a mulch in gardens, and wild trees are used
as food sources in times of famine.

As you approach Tikopia from the sea, the island appears to be covered
with tall, multi-storied, original rainforest, like that mantling uninhabited
Pacific islands. Only when you land and go among the trees do you realize
that true rainforest is confined to a few patches on the steepest cliffs, and
that the rest of the island is devoted to food production. Most of the island's area is covered with an orchard whose tallest trees are native or introduced
tree species producing edible nuts or fruit or other useful products, of
which the most important are coconuts, breadfruit, and sago palms yielding
a starchy pith. Less numerous but still valuable canopy trees are the native
almond
(Canarium harveyi),
the nut-bearing
Burckella ovovata,
the Tahi
tian chestnut
Inocarpus fagiferus,
the cut-nut
Barringtonia procera,
and the
tropical almond
Terminalia catappa.
Smaller useful trees in the middle story
include the betelnut palm with narcotic-containing nuts, the vi-apple
Spon-
dias dulcis,
and the medium-sized mami tree
Antiaris toxicara,
which fits
well into this orchard and whose bark was used for cloth, instead of the paper mulberry used on other Polynesian islands. The understory below
these tree layers is in effect a garden for growing yams, bananas, and the giant swamp taro
Cyrtosperma chamissonis,
most of whose varieties require
swampy conditions but of which Tikopians grow a genetic clone specifically
adapted to dry conditions in their well-drained hillside orchards. This
whole multi-story orchard in unique in the Pacific in its structural mimicry of a rainforest, except that its plants are all edible whereas most rainforest
trees are inedible.

In addition to these extensive orchards, there are two other types of small areas that are open and treeless but also used for food production.
One is a small freshwater swamp, devoted to growing the usual moisture-
adapted form of giant swamp taro instead of the distinctive dry-adapted
clone grown on hillsides. The other consists of fields devoted to short-
fallow, labor-intensive, nearly continuous production of three root crops: taro, yams, and now the South American-introduced crop manioc, which
has largely replaced native yams. These fields require almost constant labor

input for weeding, plus mulching with grass and brushwood to prevent crop plants from drying out.

The main food products of these orchards, swamps, and fields are
starchy plant foods. For their protein, in the absence of domestic animals larger than chickens and dogs, traditional Tikopians relied to a minor ex
tent on ducks and fish obtained from the island's one brackish lake, and to a major extent on fish and shellfish from the sea. Sustainable exploitation of
seafood resulted from taboos administered by chiefs, whose permission was
required to catch or eat fish; the taboos therefore had the effect of prevent
ing overfishing.

Tikopians still had to fall back on two types of emergency food supply to
get them over the annual dry season when crop production was low, and the
occasional cyclone that could destroy gardens and orchard crops. One type consisted of fermenting surplus breadfruit in pits to produce a starchy paste
that can be stored for two or three years. The other type consisted of ex
ploiting the small remaining stands of original rainforest to harvest fruits, nuts, and other edible plant parts that were not preferred foods but could
save people from otherwise starving. In 1976, while I was visiting another
Polynesian island called Rennell, I asked Rennell Islanders about the edi
bility of fruit from each of the dozens of Rennell species of forest trees. There proved to be three answers: some trees were said to have "edible"
fruit; some trees were said to have "inedible" fruit; and other trees had fruit "eaten only at the time of the
hungi kenge."
Never having heard of a
hungi
kenge,
I inquired about it. I was told that it was the biggest cyclone in living
memory, which had destroyed Rennell's gardens around 1910 and reduced
people to the point of starvation, from which they saved themselves by eat
ing forest fruits that they didn't especially like and normally wouldn't eat.
On Tikopia, with its two cyclones in the average year, such fruits must be
even more important than on Rennell.

Those are the ways in which Tikopians assure themselves of a sustain
able food supply. The other prerequisite for sustainable occupation of Tikopia is a stable, non-increasing population. During Firth's visit in
1928-29 he counted the island's population to be 1,278 people. From 1929
to 1952 the population increased at 1.4% per year, which is a modest rate of
increase that would surely have been exceeded during the generations fol
lowing the first settlement of Tikopia around 3,000 years ago. Even suppos
ing, however, that Tikopia's initial population growth rate was also only 1.4% per year, and that the initial settlement had been by a canoe holding

25 people, then the population of the 1.8-square-mile island would have
built up to the absurd total of 25 million people after a thousand years, or to 25 million trillion people by 1929. Obviously that's impossible: the population could not have continued to grow at that rate, because it would already
have reached its modern level of 1,278 people within only 283 years after
human arrival. How was Tikopia's population held constant after 283 years?

Firth learned of six methods of population regulation still operating on
the island in 1929, and a seventh that had operated in the past. Most readers
of this book will also have practiced one or more of those methods, such
as contraception or abortion, and our decisions to do so may have been implicitly influenced by considerations of human population pressure or
family resources. On Tikopia, however, people are explicit in saying that their motive for contraception and other regulatory behaviors is to prevent
the island from becoming overpopulated, and to prevent the family from having more children than the family's land could support. For instance,
Tikopia chiefs each year carry out a ritual in which they preach an ideal of
Zero Population Growth for the island, unaware that an organization founded with that name (but subsequently renamed) and devoted to that
goal has also arisen in the First World. Tikopia parents feel that it is wrong for them to continue to give birth to children of their own once their eldest son has reached marriageable age, or to have more children than a number variously given as four children, or one boy and a girl, or one boy and one
or two girls.

Of traditional Tikopia's seven methods of population regulation, the simplest was contraception by coitus interruptus. Another method was
abortion, induced by pressing on the belly, or placing hot stones on the
belly, of a pregnant woman near term. Alternatively, infanticide was carried
out by burying alive, smothering, or turning a newborn infant on its face.
Younger sons of families poor in land remained celibate, and many among
the resulting surplus of marriageable women also remained celibate rather
than enter into polygamous marriages. (Celibacy on Tikopia means not
having children, and does not preclude having sex by coitus interruptus and
then resorting to abortion or infanticide if necessary.) Still another method was suicide, of which there were seven known cases by hanging (six men
and one woman) and 12 (all of them women) by swimming out to sea be
tween 1929 and 1952. Much commoner than such explicit suicide was "vir
tual suicide" by setting out on dangerous overseas voyages, which claimed
the lives of 81 men and three women between 1929 and 1952. Such sea voy
aging accounted for more than one-third of all deaths of young bachelors.