Collapse

Not so much a review of Jared Diamond's Collapse as a long, somewhat ill-organized blog post Inspired By Actual Book Reading. Follow on below the fold....

So first off -- should you buy it? You should probably buy Guns, Germs, and Steel first, because that was better. But if you liked Guns and The Third Chimpanzee (and I did) the main section -- a history of collapsed societies -- of Collapse will give you more of the classic Jared Diamond you know and love. On the downside, as I've learned over the years, he often gets a bit sloppy with the details. But there's compelling, sweeping narrative and you'll learn lots of interesting things and you can read books by real specialists if you want to learn more. The more bloggable portion of the book concerns the prospects for similar environmental destruction-driven collapses in the contemporary world. Here a simple problem of book organization comes up. The contemporary situation turns out to not be very analagous with most of the ones Diamond discusses. Our technology is very different, and the world is now highly interconnected whereas Diamond's cases were all unusually isolated societies living in more isolated times. That said, we do have things to worry about, and that's what I'll talk about now.

FOOD: Diamond makes some effort to convince us that natural increase in global population may lead to a crisis wherein there isn't enough food. Since I imagine this book will be the subject of many attempted debunkings by rightwingers of various sorts, I'm going to assume that someone paid to do such things will write up the appropriate debunking of this suggestion. Diamond's numbers don't add up and he doesn't seem to totally grasp the economics of food production. It's undoubtedly the case that we can't have 9 billion people all eating like contemporary Americans (or even contemporary Europeans), but that just goes to show that it won't happen, not that we'll all starve. Michael Lind had a discussion of this somewhere and suggested synthetic beef, which sounded fanciful, but unlike Lind I wouldn't consider it a huge tragedy if this didn't work out.

DEFORESTATION: Much more compellingly, Diamond's historical examples show that trends toward deforestation could cause an actual collapse of agricultural productivity (further down the road) which would be much worse than a mere increase in the number of people. Deforestation wouldn't devastate the contemporary world to the degree it devastated Easter Island or Greenland since we're less wood-based then we used to be, but we still do use an awful lot of wood (and paper) and it turns out that deforestation has catastrophic impacts on soil and a whole bunch of other stuff. The good news is that at the intellectual level this is well-understood. You need to identify your especially valuable wooded-areas (old growth forests and so forth) turn them into national parks, and then actually enforce the rules. Then, with the rest of your timber supply, you need to assign some proper property rights such that a multiplicity of companies either actually owns the land or else holds it in a very long-term lease. When Diamond is discussing how property rights can lead to effective forest-management he puts a lot of weight on the idea of turning the land over to your heirs, but as Alex Tabbarok has explained you don't even need to bring the kids into it.

Managed properly, a wooded area can produce timber products in a sustainable way, just as you can sustainably farm all other sorts of agricultural products. The trick is to create situations where the incentives are right. Oftentimes, they aren't right, but as with lax enforcement of park rules, this is a governance problem not an intellectual difficulty. How you overcome the governance issue, I couldn't quite say, but at least we know what we should be doing.

OVERFISHING: Fisheries management has a similar "tragedy of the commons" dynamic to forest management. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as clear how you un-common the commons here since the ocean isn't well-suited to fences and so forth. I don't know what more to say about this (and Diamond doesn't have much to add).

ENERGY: The really big problem here is energy. I would like to see the following things happen over the course of the 21st century:

• Developed world economies continue to grow modestly in real per capital terms.
• China and India continue to grow rapidly in real per capita terms.
• The rest of the developing world manages to get on the sort of path China and India are on.

The reasons for hoping this will happen are extremely compelling. Rapid economic growth in China and India has taken a largish bite out of the phenomenon of severe poverty, and the only really effective way to see larger bites taken is to see the trend both continue and expand to other parts of the world. But all of this implies a very large increase in future oil use. Unfortunately, while there's certainly oil out there we can drill that we aren't drilling yet, most of it will be much harder to get at than the oil we're drilling right now (that's why we aren't drilling it already). At some point, the easy oil of the Middle East will run out, much as the easy oil of Pennsylvania ran out a while back and many of our best Texas fields have gone dry. It's not at all clear that the sort of global economic growth we need to combat severe poverty is compatible with a large increase in the price of oil.

Much hope is being placed on a transition to hydrogen cars at some point in the future, but the electricity here will have to come from somewhere. Even with a significant increase in the proportion of electricity coming from wind and solar power, this still implies a large increase in the use of other power sources. Oil plants (obviously) won't help us with the oil problem. Bringing many more coal plants online will make global warm much worse. Nuclear waste needs to be put somewhere. The problem is a very serious one. Compared to some other things, I don't think Diamond takes it as seriously as he should, perhaps because he doesn't seem to think that faster economic growth in poor countries is a compelling aim. But you should find this goal compelling. The true environmental problem is how to make greater prosperity for the world's four billion poorer people compatible with not absolutely wrecking everything everywhere. Energy is the area where this is hardest. Growth requires a cheap source of energy, and the environment requires that energy source not to be coal. Praying for cold fusion does not strike me as an appealing option.