SUICIDAL SOCIETIES

Jared Diamond's view of the demise of human civilizations "stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society's collapse," writes Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. "Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal civilization of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of smallpox. … The disappearance of the Norse settlements [in southwestern Greenland] is usually blamed on the Little Ice Age"—according to "the 'It got too cold, and they died' argument."

But Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, the sequel to his Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, rejects the blame-the-catastrophe reflex and continues his argument that a civilization's fate depends mostly on how it adapts to its climate and uses its natural resources. (Guns looked at triumphant civilizations; Collapse looks at doomed ones.)

Diamond uses the Norse settlements in Greenland as one of his case studies. The Norse staked out a grassy (in the summer) parcel off the North Atlantic coast and established a thriving society of a few thousand people from the 1000s to the 1400s. But the Norse, says Diamond, abused their ecosystem. They cleared out too many trees for space and lumber, depleting the forests faster than they could be replenished. They built homes out of huge slabs of earth, devastating the topsoil, which was delicate to begin with in the Arctic climate. They spent too much time hunting walruses for ivory and too little time hunting seals for blubber and other practical uses. So the Norse gradually starved themselves to death. By the early 1400s, they had vanished. The same thing happened at Easter Island, a once lush landscape that, in the hands of the people that built those towering stone heads, too quickly became "a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock," Gladwell says.

I wish Gladwell had mentioned Edward Gibbon, perhaps the most famous historian to perform an autopsy on a civilization with his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I'll get around to reading one of these days, or years.) I don't know if Diamond deals with Gibbon; I wonder what he would make of Gibbon's diagnosis. Meanwhile, I'm wary of Diamond's perspective on religion as a fatal flaw; religion, he says (as I gather from Gladwell), makes societies do irrational things like waste precious resources on elaborate cathedrals, as the Norse did in Greenland. But could not religion also be the basis of a harmonious relationship with nature, if it induces an awe for the Creator that enhances our regard for, and relationship with, creation?

Related:
Andaman aborigines survive tsunami, shoot arrows at relief choppers, from the Associated Press
Smithsonian on the Aztecs and settlements in Pike County, Illinois

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

TRIPOLI, Libya* - Tucked away in a whitewashed, Italian-colonial building set in a quiet compound on the edge of Tripoli, the largely forgotten World Center for Green Book Studies is looking for a little respect. The center was established more than two decades ago to propagate the ideas of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, which are contained in a slim volume bound in green, the color of Islam and of Colonel Qaddafi's 35-year-old revolution. The center has turned out more than 140 serious studies on the book's 21,000 words. But few people outside the country - and a dwindling number in Libya itself - take the book seriously anymore, so, like many other things here, the center is trying to change. The book, still heralded on billboards here like the latest best seller, lays out Colonel Qaddafi's "Third Universal Theory," covering governance, economics and society. It is padded with observations that vary from the obvious … [to] the incoherent.

DELTONA, Fla.* - It is a safe guess that all of Florida was ready to relegate 2004, with its freakishly active hurricane season, to the history books. But Deltona was especially eager. The town, a sprawling bedroom community between Orlando and Daytona Beach, suffered through three of the state's four hurricanes and still has plenty of blue-tarped roofs and disfigured trees to prove it. A week before the first storm, six teenagers and young adults were bludgeoned to death with baseball bats in a quiet neighborhood here, a crime that was provoked, investigators said, by the disappearance of a video game system. Then, on Dec. 13, a sinkhole began opening along a busy thoroughfare, possibly an aftereffect of the hurricanes and their pounding rain. This sinkhole, a quintessentially Florida phenomenon that is now 225 feet wide and 50 feet deep, brought sightseers, traffic nightmares, more unwanted publicity ("Next up: A plague of locusts, frogs, hail and lice," a columnist for The Orlando Sentinel quipped) and new longing for a fresh start.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• "In the twenty-first century, a state governor represents the last vestige of the 'divine right of kings,' because he has absolute power over life and death,"

writes Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and the new book The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, which is excerpted in the current New York Review of Books. Prejean takes issue with the gubernatorial record of George W. Bush, who wrote in his autobiography that his methods of reviewing death penalty cases for possible pardon was "fail-safe" when it came to determining guilt and innocence. Journalists' investigations have since cast doubt on that claim. There is little new information in Prejean's factual summaries, but her recollections of her personal visits with Karla Faye Tucker and others are unique. One wonders if Prejean jeopardizes her aim to provoke more in-depth discussion of death penalty by settling for a personal critique of Bush in these pages. I suspect her book gets broader elsewhere, and that the NYRB selected the portion that best suits its unofficial mission to confirm the prejudices of its faithful while arousing minimal original reaction. Excerpt

• Helen Tangires gives new meaning to the term "market forces." Her (relatively) new book Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America is a detailed study of the architecture and civic space in which food was sold in the 1800s, says Margaretta Lovell in the online journal Common-place. It was during that era that food markets made the transition from "low sheds with overhanging protective eaves and open sides … owned by the city" to "large, architect-designed, private, multi-story enclosed buildings … on private land," Lovell says in summary. The former expressed an egalitarian ethos; the latter, in Tangires' reading, reflect capitalist, private sector, middle-class ideals. Open-air markets came to be regarded not as an essential corner of the public square, but an annoyance for trolley cars. I'm not as prepared to read all sorts of dire implications for American democracy into this phenomenon as Tangires apparently is, but this review will be on my mind the next time I eat at a food court in a mall. Article

Also from Common-place: The politics of electricity

• Let's get this straight: James Boswell wrote a biography of the inimitable Samuel Johnson in the 18th century, and then, four years ago, Adam Sisman wrote a biography of Boswell. If someone writes a biography of Sisman, I'm giving up. Boswell had good reason, three centuries ago, to follow Johnson's every move; Johnson was a brilliant lexicographer, poet, and coiner of numerous wry aphorisms. But Smithsonian magazine says there's also good reason to write about Boswell—"a contradictory, needy and sometimes infuriating man who drank too much, talked too much and preserved many of his indiscretions in writing." These are the words of admirer Tom Huntington, who embarked on "a sort of literary pilgrimage" to Scotland to visit Boswell's estate and nondescript tomb, and reflect on Boswell's "deeply conflicted" feelings about his homeland. Essay

Related:Rethinking the Celts from BBC History magazine

• We've heard from all the pundits about the red-blue divide in America, so why not bend an ear to Dave Barry? "I thought that, in today's column, I would heal the nation," Barry begins, in an apt spoof of sanctimonious op-ed columnists. He defines red states as "states where 'foreign cuisine' pretty much means Pizza Hut" and blue states as "states that believe they are smarter than the red states, despite the fact that it takes the average blue-state resident 15 minutes to order a single cup of coffee." He proposes cultural exchange programs between the two regions, insisting that "if the red states and blue states made a sincere effort to get to know each other, they'd discover that, beneath their surface differences, there are a lot of deep underlying differences." Still, we can all agree on two things, Barry says—we hate filling out tax forms and we love to sue. Column

Related:
Why we aren't red and blue, but purple, from my personal notebook
Dave Barry retiring? Steve Martin's ode to a humorist

• Miscellaneous:Foreign Policy ranks rich nations according to Commitment to Development - Scientists say 'will to live' is a myth, from the New York Times - 60 Minutes on gargantuan Google - The problem with gift cards, from Slate—The Christian Science Monitor on exurban Arizona
 
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.