COLLAPSE. How societies choose to fail or survive. Jared Diamond 575pp. Allen Lane. Pounds 20.
0 713 99286 7 US: Viking. $29.95. 0 670 03337 5 Nothing lasts for ever. Most of the species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. Ecosystems in the fullness of geological time collapse with great regularity. And most social systems -from bands of thirty hunter-gatherers through to huge nation-states -have had their day in the sun and are now gone.
The Egypt of today is not the Egypt of the Old Kingdom, nor is it a simple "evolutionary" modification of ancient Egypt into its present form. The Old Kingdom collapsed -apparently through political upheaval occasioned by persistent failures of Nilotic flooding.
Yet ecosystem theorists have long tied stability and complexity together in their models. Only recently has it become fashionable in some circles to see ecosystems as poised at the edge of chaos. In this provocative view, all it takes is a nudge that crosses the threshold of tolerance and the ecosystem will unravel very quickly. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between complexity and stability: electrons are doomed to perish when and if the universe implodes, but meanwhile they just go on and on.
It's the macroscopic, complex systems that have the shorter half-lives. Complex systems like species and ecosystems; and even more complex ones like societies.
In Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond sought to explain how the human world emerged; his new work, Collapse, concerns itself with the likely fate of that world. Diamond is a physiologist and evolutionary biologist, not originally trained to grapple with complex social issues (though he has had anthropological experience through fieldwork in New Guinea and elsewhere). He runs the risk of being seen as a biological reductionist, someone who thinks that human culture and social structures are somehow to be understood in biological terms.
But this would be unfair. The connections he sees between his life's work and evaluating the collapse of societies is his understanding of the physical and biological environment: how we depend on it, and what we are doing to it. And Diamond avoids with equal agility the imputation of eco-freakery, of being obsessed with Doomsday scenarios about environmental destruction and their consequences. Some of his critics, he tells us, have even accused him of "selling out" to big business, and perhaps it is his apprehension at being seen as belonging to any particular camp that has dampened his prose: there is little passion evident here, though Collapse must be the product of deeply held convictions.
