Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

  As for the outcome of China’s current environmental problems, all one can say for sure is that things will get worse before they get better, because of time lags and the momentum of damage already under way. One big factor acting both for the worse and for the better is the anticipated increase in China’s international trade as a result of its joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), thereby lowering or abolishing tariffs and increasing exports and imports of cars, textiles, agricultural products, and many other commodities. Already, China’s export industries tend to send manufactured finished products overseas and to leave in China the pollutants involved in their manufacture; there will presumably now be more of that. Some of China’s imports, such as garbage and cars, have already been bad for the environment; there may be more of that too. On the other hand, some countries belonging to the WTO adhere to environmental standards much stricter than China’s, and that will force China to adopt those international standards as a condition of its exports being admitted by those countries. More agricultural imports may permit China to decrease its use of fertilizers, pesticides, and low-productivity cropland, while importation of oil and natural gas will let China decrease pollution from its burning of coals. A two-edged consequence of WTO membership may be that, by increasing imports and thereby decreasing Chinese domestic production, it will merely enable China to transfer environmental damage from China itself to overseas, as has already happened in the shift from domestic logging to imported timber (thereby in effect paying countries other than China to suffer the harmful consequences of deforestation).

  A pessimist will note many dangers and bad harbingers already operating in China. Among generalized dangers, economic growth rather than environmental protection or sustainability is still China’s priority. Public environmental awareness is low, in part because of China’s low investment in education, less than half that of First World countries as a proportion of gross national production. With 20% of the world’s population, China accounts for only 1% of the world’s outlay on education. A college or university education for children is beyond the means of most Chinese parents, because one year’s tuition would consume the average salary of one city worker or three rural workers. China’s existing environmental laws were largely written piecemeal, lack effective implementation and evaluation of long-term consequences, and are in need of a systems approach: for instance, there is no overall framework for protection of China’s rapidly vanishing wetlands, despite individual laws affecting them. Local officials of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) are appointed by local governments rather than by upper-level officials of the SEPA itself, so that local governments often block enforcement of national environmental laws and regulations. Prices for important environmental resources are set so low as to encourage waste: e.g., a ton of Yellow River water for use in irrigation costs only between and of a small bottle of spring water, thereby removing any financial incentive for irrigation farmers to conserve water. Land is owned by the government and is leased by farmers, but may be leased to a series of different farmers within a short time span, so that farmers lack incentive to make long-term investments in their land or to take good care of it.

  The Chinese environment also faces more specific dangers. Already under way are a big increase in the number of cars, the three megaprojects, and the rapid disappearance of wetlands, whose harmful consequences will continue to accumulate in the future. The projected decrease in Chinese household size to 2.7 people by the year 2015 will add 126 million new households (more than the total number of U.S. households), even if China’s population size itself remains constant. With growing affluence and hence growing meat and fish consumption, environmental problems from meat production and aquaculture, such as pollution from all the animal and fish droppings and eutrophication from uneaten feed for fish, will increase. Already, China is the world’s largest producer of aquaculture-grown food, and is the sole country in which more fish and aquatic foods are obtained from aquaculture than from wild fisheries. The world consequences of China’s catching up to First World levels of meat consumption exemplify the broader issue, which I already illustrated by metal consumption, of the current gap between per-capita First World and Third World consumption and production rates. China will of course not tolerate being told not to aspire to First World levels. But the world cannot sustain China and other Third World countries and current First World countries all operating at First World levels.

  Offsetting all of those dangers and discouraging signs, there are also important promising signs. Both WTO membership and the impending 2008 Olympic Games in China have spurred the Chinese government to pay more attention to environmental problems. For instance, a $6 billion “green wall” or tree belt is now under development around Beijing to protect the city against dust and sandstorms. To reduce air pollution in Beijing, its city government ordered that motor vehicles be converted to permit the use of natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas. China phased out lead in gasoline in little more than a year, something that Europe and the U.S. took many years to achieve. It recently decided to establish fuel efficiency minima for automobiles including even SUVs. New cars are required to meet exacting emission standards prevailing in Europe.

  China is already making a big effort to protect its outstanding biodiversity with 1,757 nature reserves covering 13% of its land area, not to mention all of its zoos, botanical gardens, wildlife breeding centers, museums, and gene and cell banks. China uses some distinctive, environmentally friendly, traditional technologies on a large scale, such as the common South Chinese practice of raising fish in irrigated rice fields. That recycles the fish droppings as natural fertilizer, increases rice production, uses fish to control insect pests and weeds, decreases herbicide and pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use, and yields more dietary protein and carbohydrate without increasing environmental damage. Encouraging signs in reafforestation are the initiation of major tree plantations in 1978, and in 1998 the national ban on logging and the start of the Natural Forest Conservation Program to reduce the risk of further destructive flooding. Since 1990, China has combatted desertification on 15,000 square miles of land by reafforestation and fixation of sand dunes. The Grain-to-Green program, begun in 2000, gives grain subsidies to farmers who convert cropland to forest or grassland, and is thereby reducing the use of environmentally sensitive steep hillsides for agriculture.

  How will it all end up? Like the rest of the world, China is lurching between accelerating environmental damage and accelerating environmental protection. China’s large population and large growing economy, and its current and historic centralization, mean that China’s lurches involve more momentum than those of any other country. The outcome will affect not just China, but the whole world as well. While I was writing this chapter, I found my own feelings lurching between despair at the mind-numbing litany of depressing details, and hope inspired by the drastic and rapidly implemented measures of environmental protection that China has already adopted. Because of China’s size and its unique form of government, top-down decision-making has operated on a far larger scale there than anywhere else, utterly dwarfing the impacts of the Dominican Republic’s President Balaguer. My best-case scenario for the future is that China’s government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that China’s interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Mining” Australia

  Australia’s significance ■ Soils ■ Water ■ Distance ■ Early history ■ Imported values ■ Trade and immigration ■ Land degradation ■ Other environmental problems ■ Signs of hope and change ■

  Mining in the literal sense—i.e., the mining of coal, iron, and so on—is a key to Australia’s economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings. In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia�
��s environmental history and to its current predicament. That’s because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time, and hence to deplete those resources. Since gold in the ground doesn’t breed more gold and one thus has no need to take account of gold renewal rates, miners extract gold from a gold lode as rapidly as is economically feasible, until the lode is exhausted. Mining minerals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources—such as forests, fish, and topsoil—that do regenerate themselves by biological reproduction or by soil formation. Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, like the gold in a gold mine.

  Australia has been and still is “mining” its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals. That is, they are being overexploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present rates, Australia’s forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable but the latter aren’t.

  While many other countries today besides Australia are mining their environments, Australia is an especially suitable choice for this final case study of past and present societies, for several reasons. It is a First World country, unlike Rwanda, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and China, but like the countries in which most of the likely readers of this book live. Among First World countries, its population and economy are much smaller and less complex than are those of the U.S., Europe, or Japan, so that the Australian situation is more easily grasped. Ecologically, the Australian environment is exceptionally fragile, the most fragile of any First World country except perhaps Iceland. As a consequence, many problems that could eventually become crippling in other First World countries and already are so in some Third World countries—such as overgrazing, salinization, soil erosion, introduced species, water shortages, and man-made droughts—have already become severe in Australia. That is, while Australia shows no prospects of collapsing like Rwanda and Haiti, it instead gives us a foretaste of problems that actually will arise elsewhere in the First World if present trends continue. Yet Australia’s prospects for solving those problems give me hope and are not depressing. Then, too, Australia has a well educated populace, a high standard of living, and relatively honest political and economic institutions by world standards. Hence Australia’s environmental problems cannot be dismissed as products of ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, desperately impoverished populace and grossly corrupt government and businesses, as one might perhaps be inclined to explain away environmental problems in some other countries.

  Still another virtue of Australia as the subject of this chapter is that it illustrates strongly the five factors whose interplay I have identified throughout this book as useful for understanding possible ecological declines or collapses of societies. Humans have had obvious massive impacts on the Australian environment. Climate change is exacerbating those impacts today. Australia’s friendly relations with Britain as a trade partner and model society have shaped Australian environmental and population policies. While modern Australia has not been invaded by outside enemies—bombed, yes, but not invaded—Australian perception of actual and potential overseas enemies has also shaped Australian environmental and population policies. Australia also displays the importance of cultural values, including some imported ones that could be viewed as inappropriate to the Australian landscape, for understanding environmental impacts. Perhaps more than any other First World citizens known to me, Australians are beginning to think radically about the central question: which of our traditional core values can we retain, and which ones instead no longer serve us well in today’s world?

  A final reason for my choosing Australia for this chapter is that it’s a country that I love, of which I have long experience, and which I can describe both from firsthand knowledge and sympathetically. I first visited Australia in 1964, en route to New Guinea. Since then I have returned dozens of times, including for a sabbatical at Australian National University in Australia’s capital city of Canberra. During that sabbatical I bonded to and imprinted on Australia’s beautiful eucalyptus woodlands, which continue to fill me with a sense of peace and wonder as do just two other of the world’s habitats, Montana coniferous forest and New Guinea rainforest. Australia and Britain are the only countries to which I have seriously considered emigrating. Thus, after beginning this book’s series of case studies with the Montana environment that I learned to love as a teenager, I wanted to close the series with another that I came to love later in my life.

  For purposes of understanding modern human impacts on the Australian environment, three features of that environment are particularly important: Australian soils, especially their nutrient and salt levels; availability of freshwater; and distances, both within Australia and also between Australia and its overseas trading partners and potential enemies.

  When one starts to think of Australian environmental problems, the first thing that comes to mind is water shortage and deserts. In fact, Australia’s soils have caused even bigger problems than has its water availability. Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. That’s because Australian soils are mostly so old that they have become leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years. The oldest surviving rocks in the Earth’s crust, nearly four billion years old, are in the Murchison Range of Western Australia.

  Soils that have been leached of nutrients can have their nutrient levels renewed by three major processes, all of which have been deficient in Australia compared to other continents. First, nutrients can be renewed by volcanic eruptions spewing fresh material from within the Earth onto the Earth’s surface. While this has been a major factor in creating fertile soils in many countries, such as Java, Japan, and Hawaii, only a few small areas of eastern Australia have had volcanic activity within the last hundred million years. Second, advances and retreats of glaciers strip, dig up, grind up, and redeposit the Earth’s crust, and those soils redeposited by glaciers (or else blown by the wind from glacial redeposits) tend to be fertile. Almost half of North America’s area, about 7 million square miles, has been glaciated within the last million years, but less than 1% of the Australian mainland: just about 20 square miles in the southeastern Alps, plus a thousand square miles of the Australian offshore island of Tasmania. Finally, slow uplift of crust also brings up new soils and has contributed to the fertility of large parts of North America, India, and Europe. However, again only a few small areas of Australia have been uplifted within the last hundred million years, mainly in the Great Dividing Range of southeastern Australia and in the area of South Australia around Adelaide (map, p. 386). As we shall see, those small fractions of the Australian landscape that have recently had their soils renewed by volcanism, glaciation, or uplift are exceptions to Australia’s otherwise prevalent pattern of unproductive soils, and contribute disproportionately today to modern Australia’s agricultural productivity.

  The low average productivity of Australian soils has had major economic consequences for Australian agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Such nutrients as were present in arable soils at the onset of European agriculture quickly became exhausted. In effect, Australia’s first farmers were inadvertently mining their soils for nutrients. Thereafter, nutrients have had to be supplied artificially in the form of fertilizer, thus increasing agricultural production costs compared to those in more fertile soils overseas. Low soil productivity means low growth rates and low average yields of crops. Hence a larger area of land has to be cultivated in Australia than elsewhere to obtain equivalent crop yields, so that fuel costs for agricultural machinery such as tractors and sowers and harvesters (approximately
proportional to the area of land that must be covered by the machines) also tend to be relatively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwestern Australia, part of Australia’s so-called wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas, where wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and essentially all nutrients must be added artificially as fertilizer. In effect, the Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which (just as in a real flowerpot) the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate, and where the nutrients have to be supplied.

  As a result of the extra expenses for Australian agriculture due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added costs of that overseas transport. For example, with modern globalization, it is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice concentrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon compared to their Australian equivalents. Conversely, in some specialized “niche markets”—i.e., crops and animal products with high added value beyond ordinary growing costs, such as wine—Australian farmers compete successfully in overseas markets.