Quotes from Collapse, by Jared Diamond

- ‘How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing?’ (3)

- ‘In fact, both extreme sides in this controversy – the racists and the believers in a past Eden – are committing the error or viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from (whether inferior or superior to) modern First World peoples. Managing environmental resources sustainably has always been difficult, ever since Homo sapiens developed modern inventiveness, efficiency, and hunting skills by around 50,000 years ago. Beginning with the first human colonization of the Australian continent around 46,000 years ago, and the subsequent prompt extinction of most of Australia’s former giant marsupials and other large animals, every human colonization of a land mass formerly lacking humans… has been followed by a wave of extinction of large animals that had evolved without fear of humans and were easy to kill, or else succumbed to human-associated habitat changes, introduced pest species, and diseases.’ (9)

- ‘The societies that ended up collapsing were (like the Mara) among the most creative and (for a time) advanced and successful or their times… They were people like us, facing problems broadly similar to those that we now face.’ (10)

- ‘Hence the reasons why only certain societies suffered environmental collapses might in principle involve either exceptional imprudence of their people, exceptional fragility of some aspects of their environment, or both.’ (11)

- ‘It would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthageby Rome in 146 BC is an ancient one. It’s obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice.’ (15)

- ‘My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to solve the world’s environmental problems.’ (17)

- ‘every farmer growing hay adds at least 200 pounds of fertilizer to each acre of land’ (53)

- ‘Most of our American timber comes from Canada !’ (67)

- ‘If it were not for the fact that Easter’s abundant big stones are overshadowed by its even bigger stone platforms and statues, tourists would remember Easter as the island of stone chicken houses.’ (91)

- ‘the statues do not look out to sea.’ (95)

- ‘Deforestation [on Easter] must have begun some time after human arrival by AD 900, and must have been completed by 1722… The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct.’ (107)

- Factors that affect deforestation on Pacific islands (116):

            Deforestation is more severe on:

                        Dry islands than wet islands

                        Cold high-latitude islands than warm equatorial islands

                        Old volcanic

- ‘When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could run for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase.’ (119)

- ‘To modern seafaring peoples, who sail their canoes five days just to buy their cigarettes, the journeys are a part of normal life.’ (130)

- ‘Henderson’s population of originally a few dozen survived for several generations, possibly a century or more, after all contact with Mangareva and Pitcairn was lost.’ (132)

- ‘The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880’s.’ (136)

- ‘The Anasazi collapse and other southwestern collapses offer us not only a gripping story but also an instructive one for the purposes of this book, illustrating well our themes of human environmental impact and climate change intersecting, environmental and population problems spilling over into warfare, the strengths but also the dangers of complex non-self-sufficient societies dependent on imports and exports, and societies collapsing swiftly after attaining peak population numbers and power.’ (137)

- ‘Those midden studies identified deforestation as the other one (besides water management) of the two major environmental problems caused by the growing population that had developed in Chaco Canyon by around AD 1000.’ [Anasazi civilization collapsed by AD 1200] (147)

- ‘That explosion of environmental and population problems in the form of civil unrest and warfare is a frequent theme in this book, both for past societies (the Easter Islanders, Mangarevans, Maya, and Tikopians) and for modern societies (Rwanda, Haiti, and others).’ (151)

- ‘[Cannibalism] was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries. The practice took two forms: eating either the bodies of enemies killed in war, or else eating one’s own relatives who had died of natural causes.’ (151)

- ‘By analogy with historically witnessed abandonments of other problems during a drought in the 1670’s, probably many people starved to death, some people killed each other, and the survivors fled to other areas of the Southwest.’ (153)

- ‘Was Chaco Canyon abandoned because of human impact on the environment, or because of drought? The answer is: it was abandoned for both reasons.’ (156)

- ‘Viking settlers of Continental Europe and the British Isles eventually merged with local populations and played a role in forming several nation-states, notably Russia, England, and France.’ (178)

- ‘The modern English language owes ‘awkward’, ‘die’, ‘egg’, ‘skirt’, and dozens of other everyday words to the Scandinavian invaders.’ (184)

- ‘The reason why William was able to defeat the English king Harold at Hastings on England ’s southwest coast on October 14 was that Harold and his soldiers were exhausted. They had marched 220 miles south in less than three weeks after defeating the last Viking invading army and killing their king at Stamford Bridge on September 25. Thereafter, the Scandinavian kingdoms evolved into normal states trading with other European states and only occasionally engaging in wars, rather than constantly raiding.’ (185)

- ‘With any historical expansion, one can ask whether it was triggered by ‘push’ (population pressure and lack of opportunities at home), ‘pull’ (good opportunities and empty areas to colonize overseas), or both.’ (185)

- ‘When immigrants from overseas colonize a new homeland, the lifestyle that they establish usually incorporates features of the lifestyle that they had practiced in their land of origin – a ‘cultural capital’ of knowledge, beliefs, subsistence methods, and social organization.’ (187)

- ‘Shared identity enabled a few thousand Greenlanders to cooperate with each other, withstand hardships, and maintain their existence in a harsh environment for four centuries. As we shall see, it also prevented them from learning from the Inuit, and from modifying their identity in ways that might have permitted them to survive beyond four centuries.’ (193)

- ‘[In Greenland] horses were kept as work animals, but there was a Christian religious ban against eating them.’ (222)

- ‘I have lived through such ‘first-contact situations’, as they are called, and I found them dangerous and utterly terrifying. In such situations the ‘natives’ initially regard the Europeans as trespassers and correctly perceive that any intruder may bring threats to their health, lives, and land ownership. Neither side knows what the other will do, both sides are tense and frightened, both are uncertain whether to flee or to start shooting, and both are scrutinizing the other side for a gesture that could hint the other might panic and shoot first.’ (265)

- ‘the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.’ (275)

- ‘Small societies occupying a small island or homeland can adopt a bottom-up approach to environmental management. Because the homeland is small, all of its inhabitants are familiar with the entire island, know that they are affected by development throughout the island, and share a sense of identity and common interests with other inhabitants.’ (277)

- ‘[On Pacific island of Tikopia ] 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 preventing overfishing.’ (289)

- ‘it takes about ten pounds of vegetables edible to humans to produce just one pound of pork.’ (292)

- ‘If a garden is not being used at the moment, anyone can temporarily plant crops in that garden without asking the owner’s permission.’ (293)

- ‘Europe’s total area of forest, after declining steadily ever since the origins of European agriculture 9,000 years ago, have [sic] actually been increasing since around 1800.’ (294)

- ‘[ Japan ] has the highest population of any large First World country, with nearly 1,000 people per square mile of total area, of 5,000 people per square mile of farmland. Despite the high population, almost 80% of Japan ’s area consists of sparsely populated forested mountains.’ (294)

- ‘part of the solution of Japan and other First World countries of resources depletion today is to cause resource depletion elsewhere.’ (300)

- ‘Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda’s total population, had been killed.’ (317)

- Rwanda is and was the most densely populated country in Africa. (313)

- ‘In the 1930’s the Belgians required everybody to start carrying an identity card classifying themselves as Hutu or Tutsi.’ (314)

- ‘When one composes crime rates for people of age 21-25 among different parts of Rwanda, most of the regional differences prove to be correlated statistically with population density and per-capita availability of calories: high population densities and worse starvation were associated with more crime.’ (325)

- ‘Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but one 1% of Haiti .’ (329)

- ‘The natural reserve system of the Dominican Republic is relatively the most comprehensive and largest in the Americas, encompassing 32% of the country’s land… Behind the reserve system stands a vigorous indigenous conservation movement with many non-governmental organizations staffed by Dominicans themselves, rather than foisted on the country by foreign advisors.’ (332)

- ‘ Haiti used to be much richer and more powerful than its neighbor.’ (333)

- ‘For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as ‘environmental determinism’, the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies’ responses also make a difference.’ (333)

- ‘In 1804, having sold its North American holdings to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase, France gave up and abandoned Hispaniola. Not surprisingly, French Hispaniola’s former slaves… killed many of Haiti’s whites, destroyed the plantations and their infrastructure in order to make it impossible to rebuild the plantation slave system, and divided the plantations into small family farms.’ (335)

- ‘[Dominican President] Trujilla’s foresters adopted the environmentally sound measure or leaving some mature trees standing as sources of seed for natural reforestation.’ (343)

- ‘[Dominican President] Balaguer recognized the country’s urgent need for maintaining forested watersheds in order to meet the Republic’s energy requirements through hydroelectric power, and to ensure a supply of water sufficient for industrial and domestic needs… he took drastic action by banning all commercial logging in the country, and by closing all of the country’s sawmills.’ (343)

- ‘We may subconsciously expect people to be homogenously ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior.’ (348)

- ‘overseas trips by Dominicans, visits to the country by tourists, and television make people well aware of the higher standard of living in Puerto Rico and the United States… The country is becoming increasingly dedicated to a consumerism that is not currently supported by the economy and resources of the Dominican Republic .’ (351)

- ‘every [NGO] staff member I met was a Dominican.’ (352)

- ‘The universities are staffed by few well-trained scientists, so that they in turn cannot educate a cadre of well-trained students.’ (352)

- ‘[ Haiti ] abolished its army without descending into a constant morass of secession movements and local militias.’ (354)

- ‘ China ’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact.’ (373)

- ‘With 20% of the world’s population, China accounts for only 1% of the world’s outlay on education.’ (375)

- ‘ Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rate, and the lowest productivity. That’s because Australian soils are mostly so old that they have been leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years.’ (380)

- ‘In effect, the Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which… the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate.’ (381)

- ‘58% of [ Australia ’s] population [is] concentrated in just five large cities… Increasingly, Australians don’t depend on or really live in the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.’ (387)

- ‘The American Revolution cut off that escape valve, forcing Britain to seek some other place to dump its convicts [ Australia ].’ (388)

- ‘Some kangaroo species are indeed endangered, but ironically the species actually harvested for meat are abundant pest animals in Australia .’ (391)

- ‘ Australia is the world’s leading exporter of coal. It has the world’s largest reserves of uranium, lead, silver, zinc, titanium, and tantalum.’ (396)

- ‘As for freshwater itself, Australia is the continent with the least of it.’ (407)

- Generals often plan for a coming war as if it will be like the previous war, especially if that previous war was one in which their side was victorious.’ (424)

- ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say as he was doing it?... At the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, the species had long ago ceased to be of any economic significance.’ (426)

- ‘Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.’ – Barbara Tuchman (431)

- ‘As Irving Janis pointed out in his book ‘Groupthink’, the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions, such as a premature sense of ostensible unanimity, suppression of personal doubts and expression of contrary views, and the group leader (Kennedy) guiding the discussion is such a way as to minimize disagreement. The subsequent Cuba Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to be free-wheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoid his overly influencing the discussion himself.’ (439)

- ‘cleaning up pollution is usually far more expensive than preventing pollution.’ (447)

- ‘[The metal mining] industry is currently the leading toxic polluter in the US , responsible for nearly half of reported industrial pollution.’ (452)

- ‘the ratio of waste dirt to metal is typically 400 for a copper mine, and 5,000,000 for a gold mine.’ (460)

- ‘Take a look at your gold wedding ring: you don’t have the faintest idea where the gold came from.’ (464)

- ‘Individual consumers are eight steps removed from the hard rock mining companies that extract minerals, making a direct boycott of a dirty mining company virtually impossible.’ (467)

- ‘If we want coal and copper, we have to recognize the environmental costs of extracting them as a legitimate necessary cost of hardrock mining, as legitimate as the costs of the bulldozer that digs the pit of the smelter that smelts the ore.’ (468)

- ‘Fish now account for 40% of all protein consumed in the Third World and are the main animal protein source for a billion Asians.’ (479)

- ‘Three-quarters of the world’s population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by 2010.’ (479)

- ‘In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make destructive environmental policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.’ (484)

- ‘More than half of the world’s original area of forest has already been converted to other uses, and at present rates one-quarter of the forest that remain will become converted within the next half-century.’ (487)

- ‘An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands than of its forests has already been destroyed, damaged, or converted. Consequences for us arise from wetlands’ importance in maintaining the quality of our water supplies and the existence of commercially important fresh waster fisheries, while even ocean fisheries depend on mangrove wetlands to provide habitat for the juvenile phase of many fish species.’ (487)

- ‘Past societies that overfished include Easter Island, Mangareva, and Henderson .’ (488)

- ‘On average, each citizen of the US, Western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants of the Third World.’ (495)

- ‘There are many ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third Worldinhabitants adopting First World living standards.’ (495)

- ‘The symbol of the state of California … is the California Golden Bear, but it is now extinct.’ (503)

- ‘Environmental messes cost us huge sums in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing the messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well.’ (503?)

- ‘80% of the world’s population still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level.’ (508)

- 10 most populous countries, in 2005 order: China , India , America , Indonesia , Brazil , Pakistan , Russia , Japan , Bangladesh , Nigeria . (511)

- ‘Over the last 30 years a sustained effort by the US government has reduced levels of the six major air pollutants nationally by 25%, even though our energy consumption and population increased by 40% and our vehicle miles driven increased by 150%.’ (523)

- ‘The world would not even have to decrease its current consumption of timber or seafood: those rates could be sustained or even increased, if the world’s forests and fisheries were properly managed.’ (525)