Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (55 page)

Whether sea voyaging constituted virtual suicide or just reckless behavior
on the part of young men undoubtedly varied from case to case, but the
bleak prospects of younger sons in poor families on a crowded island dur
ing a famine were probably often a consideration. For instance, Firth learned in 1929 that a Tikopian man named Pa Nukumara, the younger
brother of a chief still alive then, had gone to sea with two of his own sons
during a severe drought and famine, with the express intent of dying quickly, instead of slowly starving to death on shore.

The seventh method of population regulation was not operating during
Firth's visits but was reported to him by oral traditions. Sometime in the
1600s or early 1700s, to judge by accounts of the number of elapsed genera
tions since the events, Tikopia's former large saltwater bay became converted into the current brackish lake by the closing-off of a sandbar across its mouth. That resulted in the death of the bay's former rich shellfish beds
and a drastic decrease in its fish populations, hence in starvation for the
Nga Ariki clan living on that part of Tikopia at that time. The clan reacted
to acquire more land and coastline for itself by attacking and exterminating
the Nga Ravenga clan. A generation or two later, the Nga Ariki also attacked
the remaining Nga Faea clan, who fled the island in canoes (thereby com
mitting virtual suicide) rather than await their deaths by murder on land.
These oral memories are confirmed by archaeological evidence of the bay's
closing and of the village sites.

Most of these seven methods for keeping Tikopia's population constant
have disappeared or declined under European influence during the 20th
century. The British colonial government of the Solomons forbade sea voy
aging and warfare, while Christian missions preached against abortion, infanticide, and suicide. As a result, Tikopia's population grew from its 1929 level of 1,278 people to 1,753 people by 1952, when two destructive cy
clones within the span of 13 months destroyed half of Tikopia's crops and caused widespread famine. The British Solomon Islands' colonial govern
ment responded to the immediate crisis by sending food, and then dealt
with the long-term problem by permitting or encouraging Tikopians to re
lieve their overpopulation by resettling onto less populated Solomon islands.
Today, Tikopia's chiefs limit the number of Tikopians who are permitted to
reside on their island to 1,115 people, close to the population size that was
traditionally maintained by infanticide, suicide, and other now-unacceptable
means.

How and when did Tikopia's remarkable sustainable economy arise? Archaeological excavations by Patrick Kirch and Douglas Yen show that it was

not invented all at once but developed over the course of nearly 3,000 years. The island was first settled around 900
b.c.
by Lapita people ancestral to the
modern Polynesians, as described in Chapter 2. Those first settlers made a
heavy impact on the island's environment. Remains of charcoal at archaeo
logical sites show that they cleared forest by burning it. They feasted on breeding colonies of seabirds, land birds, and fruit bats, and on fish, shellfish, and sea turtles. Within a thousand years, the Tikopian populations of
five bird species (Abbott's Booby, Audubon's Shearwater, Banded Rail,
Common Megapode, and Sooty Tern) were extirpated, to be followed later
by the Red-footed Booby. Also in that first millennium, archaeological mid
dens reveal the virtual elimination of fruit bats, a three-fold decrease in fish
and bird bones, a 10-fold decrease in shellfish, and a decrease in the maxi
mum size of giant clams and turban shells (presumably because people were preferentially harvesting the largest individuals).

Around 100
b.c.,
the economy began to change as those initial food
sources disappeared or were depleted. Over the course of the next thousand
years, charcoal accumulation ceased, and remains of native almonds
(Ca-
narium harveyi)
appeared, in archaeological sites, indicating that Tikopians
were abandoning slash-and-burn agriculture in favor of maintaining or
chards with nut trees. To compensate for the drastic declines in birds and seafood, people shifted to intensive husbandry of pigs, which came to ac
count for nearly half of all protein consumed. An abrupt change in economy
and artifacts around
a.d.
1200 marks the arrival of Polynesians from the
east, whose distinctive cultural features had been forming in the area of Fiji,
Samoa, and Tonga among descendants of the Lapita migration that had ini
tially also colonized Tikopia. It was those Polynesians who brought with
them the technique of fermenting and storing breadfruit in pits.

A momentous decision taken consciously around
a.d.
1600, and re
corded in oral traditions but also attested archaeologically, was the killing of
every pig on the island, to be replaced as protein sources by an increase
in consumption of fish, shellfish, and turtles. According to Tikopians' ac
counts, their ancestors had made that decision because pigs raided and
rooted up gardens, competed with humans for food, were an inefficient
means to feed humans (it takes about 10 pounds of vegetables edible to hu
mans to produce just one pound of pork), and had become a luxury food
for the chiefs. With that elimination of pigs, and the transformation of
Tikopia's bay into a brackish lake around the same time, Tikopia's economy
achieved essentially the form in which it existed when Europeans first began
to take up residence in the 1800s. Thus, until colonial government and

Christian mission influence became important in the 20th century, Tikopi-ans had been virtually self-supporting on their micromanaged remote little
speck of land for three millennia.

Tikopians today are divided among four clans each headed by a heredi
tary chief, who holds more power than does a non-hereditary big-man of
the New Guinea highlands. Nevertheless, the evolution of Tikopian subsis
tence is better described by the bottom-up metaphor than by the top-down metaphor. One can walk all the way around the coastline of Tikopia in un
der half a day, so that every Tikopian is familiar with the entire island. The
population is small enough that every Tikopian resident on the island can
also know all other residents individually. While every piece of land has a
name and is owned by some patrilineal kinship group, each house owns
pieces of land in different parts of the island. If a garden is not being used at
the moment, anyone can temporarily plant crops in that garden without
asking the owner's permission. Anyone can fish on any reef, regardless of
whether it happens to be in front of someone else's house. When a cyclone
or drought arrives, it affects the entire island. Thus, despite differences among Tikopians in their clan affiliation and in how much land their kinship group owns, they all face the same problems and are at the mercy of
the same dangers. Tikopia's isolation and small size have demanded collective decision-making ever since the island was settled. Anthropologist Ray
mond Firth entitled his first book
We, the Tikopia
because he often heard
that phrase
("Matou nga Tikopia")
from Tikopians explaining their society
to him.

Tikopia's chiefs do serve as the overlords of clan lands and canoes, and
they redistribute resources. By Polynesian standards, however, Tikopia is
among the least stratified chiefdoms with the weakest chiefs. Chiefs and
their families produce their own food and dig in their own gardens and or
chards, as do commoners. In Firth's words, "Ultimately the mode of pro
duction is inherent in the social tradition, of which the chief is merely
the prime agent and interpreter. He and his people share the same values: an ideology of kinship, ritual, and morality reinforced by legend and my
thology. The chief is to a considerable extent a custodian of this tradi
tion, but he is not alone in this. His elders, his fellow chiefs, the people of his
clan, and even the members of his family are all imbued with the same values, and advise and criticize his actions." Thus, that role of Tikopian chiefs represents much less top-down management than does the role of the lead
ers of the remaining society that we shall now discuss.

I

Our other success story resembles Tikopia in that it too involves a densely
populated island society isolated from the outside world, with few economically significant imports, and with a long history of a self-sufficient
and sustainable lifestyle. But the resemblance ends there, because this island
has a population 100,000 times larger than Tikopia's, a powerful central government, an industrial First World economy, a highly stratified .society
presided over by a rich powerful elite, and a big role of top-down initiatives in solving environmental problems. Our case study is of Japan before 1868.

Japan's long history of scientific forest management is not well known to
Europeans and Americans. Instead, professional foresters think of the techniques of forest management widespread today as having begun to develop
in German principalities in the 1500s, and having spread from there to
much of the rest of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. As a result, Europe's to
tal area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European
agriculture 9,000 years ago, has actually been increasing since around 1800.
When I first visited Germany in 1959,1 was astonished to discover the ex
tent of neatly laid-out forest plantations covering much of the country, because I had thought of Germany as industrialized, populous, and urban.

But it turns out that Japan, independently of and simultaneously with
Germany, also developed top-down forest management. That too is surpris
ing, because Japan, like Germany, is industrialized, populous, and urban. It
has the highest population density of any large First World country, with
nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, or 5,000 people per square
mile of farmland. Despite that high population, almost 80% of Japan's area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains (Plate 20), while most
people and agriculture are crammed into the plains that make up only one-fifth of the country. Those forests are so well protected and managed that
their extent is still increasing, even though they are being utilized as valuable
sources of timber. Because of that forest mantle, the Japanese often refer to their island nation as "the green archipelago." While the mantle superficially
resembles a primeval forest, in fact most of Japan's accessible original forests
were cut by 300 years ago and became replaced with regrowth forest and plantations as tightly micromanaged as those of Germany and Tikopia.

Japanese forest policies arose as a response to an environmental and
population crisis paradoxically brought on by peace and prosperity. For al
most 150 years beginning in 1467, Japan was convulsed by civil wars as the
ruling coalition of powerful houses that had emerged from the earlier disin
tegration of the emperor's power in turn collapsed, and as control passed
instead to dozens of autonomous warrior barons (called
daimyo),
who

fought each other. The wars were finally ended by the military victories of a warrior named Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his successor Tokugawa Ieyasu. In
1615 Ieyasu's storming of the Toyotomi family stronghold at Osaka, and the
deaths by suicide of the remaining Toyotomis, marked the wars' end.

Already in 1603, the emperor had invested Ieyasu with the hereditary ti
tle of
shogun,
the chief of the warrior estate. From then on, the shogun
based at his capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo) exercised the real power,
while the emperor at the old capital of Kyoto remained a figurehead. A
quarter of Japan's area was directly administered by the shogun, the remain
ing three-quarters being administered by the 250 daimyo whom the shogun
ruled with a firm hand. Military force became the shogun's monopoly.
Daimyo could no longer fight each other, and they even needed the shogun's
permission to marry, to modify their castles, or to pass on their property in inheritance to a son. The years from 1603 to 1867 in Japan are called the
Tokugawa era, during which a series of Tokugawa shoguns kept Japan free
of war and foreign influence.

Peace and prosperity allowed Japan's population and economy to explode. Within a century of the wars' end, population doubled because of a
fortunate combination of factors: peaceful conditions, relative freedom
from the disease epidemics afflicting Europe at the time (due to Japan's ban on foreign travel or visitors: see below), and increased agricultural productivity as the result of the arrival of two productive new crops (potatoes and sweet potatoes), marsh reclamation, improved flood control, and increased
production of irrigated rice. While the population as a whole thus grew,
cities grew even faster, to the point where Edo became the world's most
populous city by 1720. Throughout Japan, peace and a strong centralized
government brought a uniform currency and uniform system of weights
and measures, the end of toll and customs barriers, road construction, and
improved coastal shipping, all of which contributed to a trade boom within
Japan.

But Japan's trade with the rest of the world was cut to almost nothing.
Portuguese navigators bent on trade and conquest, having rounded Africa
to reach India in 1498, advanced to the Moluccas in 1512, China in 1514,
and Japan in 1543. Those first European visitors to Japan were just a pair of
shipwrecked sailors, but they caused unsettling changes by introducing
guns, and even bigger changes when they were followed by Catholic mis
sionaries six years later. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese, including some
daimyo, became converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, rival Jesuit and
Franciscan missionaries began competing with each other, and stories