Jared Diamond: Collapse

It has taken me a while to getting round to reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. A truly depressing book, which should be compulsory reading for all politicians, and in particular to all aid agencies dealing with poverty in developing countries; and very well written. While I may not agree with some of the detail, or all his interpretations, overwhelmingly, Diamond makes the case for putting human populations and over-exploitation of resources, right at the top of the international agenda.

I was intrigued by the omission of two areas of collapse. The first was the collapse of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s. It was a recent, exceptionally well-documented population collapse, which probably gives insight into the collapse of Greenland's European population 600 years earlier. And the second omission was the Levant, or Middle East as it has become to be known. (As an aside, the Middle East has moved westwards in time, to replace the Near East, which seems to have fallen into the Mediterranean Sea).

The present conflicts in Lebanon and Palestine, and adjacent countries are examples of societies in collapse, every bit as much as any of the others cited by Diamond. Slender natural resources, with rural populations inevitably lead to conflict. As Diamond points out, the only societies that can exist at high densities, with few resources, have to become highly industrialised, and high tech, in order to keep out of poverty. Before the immigration of the Jewish diaspora into Palestine, the area was barely able to support the existing populations, but the introduction of thousands of ex-patriates, together with the introduction of externally generated wealth has led to growing tensions, partly because a widening wealth gap.

Conventionally these are identified as religious tensions, but just as Diamond points out in Rwanda, where ethnic cleansing was claimed to be the motive for the violence, the reality was far more Malthusian than at first appears. The wealthy, heavily subsidised jewish state is surrounded by poverty stricken populations with virtually no natural resource, or other means of generating wealth. The inevitable consequence is a collapse into civil war, and without outside intervention, the final result could well be the total collapse of infrastructure and society.

This is a lesson to all societies that do not have the resources to support themselves. And even those that do.