Are we doomed?

Jared Diamond, author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse," says that if America doesn't change its ways it'll go the way of the dodo -- no matter what Bill Gates, George Bush or Michael Crichton says.

By Oliver Broudy

Jan 8, 2005 | Most of what we read we already know. Very rarely does a book come along that changes our whole way of thinking -- not just the facts, but how the facts fit into the larger scheme of things, and what that scheme actually is. Such books do not make for easy reading. Working against the grain of accepted truth, they require a lot of grappling, but once finished the reader emerges permanently altered.

Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was such a book. In it, Diamond asked why European and Asian civilizations tended to prevail over others -- why, for instance, Francisco Pizarro, with 168 men, triumphed over 80,000 Incan warriors in 1532. Because (we are accustomed to thinking) Pizarro was an exceedingly greedy, ruthless opportunist who took advantage of the Incas' naiveté. Which is certainly true. But it is also true that he was not the world's only greedy, ruthless opportunist. More important, Diamond suggested, were the guns, germs and steel -- as well as a host of other advantages -- that Pizarro brought with him from Europe.

This suggestion is unsettling enough, as it seems to, at least in part, exculpate Pizarro from the genocide he wrought. But Diamond didn't stop there. Why, he goes on to ask, did Pizarro have these advantages, and not the other way around? The answer, we eventually learn, has less to do with military strategy or superior weapons than with things like climate and soil quality -- factors primarily notable for having nothing whatsoever to do with human agency. Diamond presented a causal explanation of human history that has virtually nothing to do with humans. And it was convincing. What's perhaps even more amazing is that the book sold more than a million copies in hardcover, eventually taking the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. Here the explanation is simpler: Diamond writes well, and engagingly.

Diamond's new book, "Collapse," looks at civilizations both ancient and modern in search of the reasons why some succeed and others fail. The answers, not surprisingly, turn out to be largely environmental. The more gripping question is why many civilizations were unable to avert destruction. In examining one civilization after another, Diamond provides a host of answers, ranging from the imperceptibility of certain problems, such as the level of salt in a particular soil, to the inability of a society to change a dangerous but learned behavior, to plain selfishness. There comes a definite point, after many chapters under the tutelage of Diamond's clinical perspective, when the reader begins to perceive the mortal outline of our own civilization. It's an alarming thought, to say the least. But, in a marked departure from his last book, Diamond leaves more room here for human agency. These dread outcomes are avoidable -- if, he suggests, we can find the strength to see past our cultural biases, our class prejudices, our distrust of big business, our loathing of one political party or the other, our fear of terrorism and so on. Only, in short, if we can see how peripheral we are to the future of our own civilization can we have any hope of saving that civilization.

Salon spoke with Diamond right after he returned from a family cruise to the Panama Canal from Costa Rica, a country that interested him because of its relative prosperity in Central America.

So, what did you discover?

It's very interesting, the contrast between Costa Rica on the one hand and Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala on the other -- all relatively poor countries and yet all five are adjacent to one another, and they were all joined in a single country, the Republic of Central America, for 20 years in the last century. Couple of reasons. In Costa Rica there were very few natives for the Spaniards to enslave. The Spaniards had to do the work themselves, and they therefore developed institutions that were not the enslaving and extracting sort, as in Guatemala and Honduras, where the populations were denser, but more based on free enterprise. So a different culture developed in Costa Rica, partially as a result of the different geography. It's an example of what economists call "reversal of fortune." Namely, the areas colonized by Europeans that were richest 500 years ago have ended up poorest today because Europeans arrived there and set up these extractive institutions.

This reminds me of the fate of the Inuit, which you discuss in your book.

The Inuit are an interesting example. The Inuit have been a success story in the past; they succeeded where a European culture, the Vikings, failed. On the other hand, it has come out within the last year that of all the peoples of the world the Inuit have the highest levels of toxic chemicals in their body tissue and in their blood -- even though they are the farthest from the sites, in Europe and North America, where toxic chemicals are produced. For example, Inuit mothers' breast milk ranks as toxic waste on the basis of its content of toxic chemicals. And the explanation is that they consume more seafood than any other people. That's just a dramatic example of globalization. Everybody affects everyone else nowadays.

Perhaps one difference between ourselves and the Inuit is that we can rely more on technology to buffer the effects of pollution. Many people these days, for instance, use Brita filters. To what extent can we and should we count on technology to protect us?

That's a really key question, and one that I've discussed with some of the most thoughtful people in the business and financial worlds. One was Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a very thoughtful person. I was really impressed by him. Nevertheless, he said -- in a diffident, self-deprecating way -- "Well, I think technology will solve our environmental problems, and so I'm not so concerned about them as I am other things." But I think that he's wrong -- I know that he's wrong.

Let me give you an example. I was born in 1937 so I remember the revolution in refrigerators that happened in my childhood, the introduction of Freon and CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons]. The refrigerator gases that were used in my childhood were things like ammonia. Of course, if they leaked they were toxic, and therefore it was hailed as a breakthrough when these supposedly nontoxic gases, the CFCs, were introduced. They were tested and under earth conditions they appeared to be perfectly benign. What people couldn't predict was that under stratospheric conditions CFCs get broken down into substances that destroy the ozone layer, and it took 20 years to get that well established. And I see that as a metaphor for why technology alone won't solve our problems, namely that there are lots of technologies out there and they have unexpected side effects.

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