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       Politics, philosophy and society
Never ask a Viking for advice

Jared Diamond's compelling study, Collapse, asks why

throughout history, whole societies suddenly disappear -

and what it means for us today

Robin McKie
Sunday January 16, 2005
The Observer

   Collapse by Jared Diamond
Buy Collapse at the Guardian bookshop

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
by Jared Diamond
Allen Lane £20, pp576

In a remote corner of south west Greenland, a group of

abandoned buildings stands at the head of a long,

mountain-rimmed fjord. Many are made of deftly hewn stone;

there are remains of barns, stores and a boathouse, and at

its heart, the township's church still stands with intact

doorways, niches and gables. Only its turf roof is

missing.

This is Hvalsey, a Viking stronghold where, according to

anthropologist Jared Diamond, medieval Scandinavian

settlers 'wrote in Latin and Old Norse, wielded iron

tools, herded farm animals, followed the latest European

fashions in clothing - and finally vanished'.

Thus, those lovingly turned stones guard a grim secret,

the fate of thousands of warrior-colonists who had made

Greenland their home for almost 500 years but who were

last heard of in 1410, when Thomas Olafsson, a ship's

captain, brought news to Norway that a Greenlander called

Kolgrim had just been burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

After that, silence. The colony was forgotten until

missionaries stumbled on Hvalsey's ruins in 1723.

The Black Death, attacks by pirates and even an invasion

by the Skraelings - the Inuit - have since been blamed for

the colony's destruction while more recent suggestions

have centred on climatic fluctuations. 'It got too cold

and they died,' as archaeologist Thomas McGovern

succinctly put it. But the true cause, says Diamond, was

far more complex and, ultimately, far more revealing than

any single, convenient explanation. Yes, climatic

deterioration probably helped destroy Norse Greenland. But

the Vikings also damned themselves. 'The Inuit survived,'

he points out. 'The Vikings' disappearance was not

inevitable.'
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And hereby hangs our tale. Throughout the 500-plus pages

of this densely argued, yet riveting treatise, Diamond, a

geographer at University of California in Los Angeles and

a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, outlines the interrelated

ecological reasons and economic causes for the

disintegration, and survival, of societies throughout

history.

Examples include the Mayans who stripped their land of

trees (deforestation figures in just about all collapses,

it transpires), triggering widespread soil erosion and

starvation, and the Easter Islanders who destroyed their

society in a fever of religious statue building and

cannibalism. ('The flesh of your mother sticks between my

teeth,' is still a popular island insult.) More recent

tragedies include the genocide in Rwanda and the impending

environmental calamities that face China and Australia.

As counterbalance, we are offered the histories of Tikopia

in the Pacific whose meagre 1.8 square miles have

supported a population of 1,200 for hundreds of years, and

Japan which has retained effective control of its forests,

environment and destiny despite its swelling population.

So why did Easter Island fail but smaller, more fragile

Tikopia succeed? Why is Japan in better shape than China?

Given the staggering environmental woes and creeping

globalisation that now beset our planet, answers to these

questions have become urgent priorities. After all, most

societies that ended up collapsing, like the Mayans or

Vikings, were among the most creative and energetic of

their times. Their people were not stupid or primitive.

Diamond highlights five key factors responsible for a

society's disintegration: climatic change, loss of trade,

attacks by neighbours, self-imposed environmental

degradation, and political intransigence. Each is

sufficient to trigger collapse, though usually two or more

are involved. The last pair on Diamond's list did for

Easter Island, for example, whose leaders let their people

cut down every tree to help construct and raise statues.

The result was soil erosion, starvation, cannibalism and,

finally, population crash.

But the Vikings, whose story forms the core of this

intriguing, though frequently labyrinthine book, did it in

style with all five of Diamond's factors figuring in their

demise. At first, their colonising went swimmingly as they

used sophisticated European technologies, including iron-

smelting, metal working and dairy farming, to tame the

land, making homes for around 5,000 of their kin.

But around 1200, Inuits arrived from present-day Canada,

challenging the Vikings - who once paid a crusade tithe in

walrus tusks and polar bear hide - for access to hunting

lands. Greenlanders also stripped their land of trees and

turf, ending up without wood to smelt nor decent fields to

plant crops.

Worse, they concentrated their efforts on raising cattle

which could barely survive Greenland winters while

ignoring the local, abundant shoals of cod and herring.

For folk of Norwegian ancestry, a taboo on fishing now

seems astonishing and could only have arisen, says

Diamond, because the Norse were determined to

differentiate themselves from Inuit fishermen or

'wretches', as they charmingly termed their neighbours.

In addition, the Norse traded tusks and hides with Norway

not for iron or wood, but useless religious artefacts,

stained glass and vestments for clergy. Hang the cost,

they were telling the world, we are European Christians

and, thank God, not Inuits. If so, they paid a terrible

price. The medieval Little Ice Age set in and the Norse

starved to death in the midst of plenty, while the Inuits

thrived. 'Yet Norse decision-making was no more suicidal

than is ours today,' says Diamond.

We, too, are stripping our environment bare. Up to 80 per

cent of the world's farmlands are now severely damaged;

more than half the planet's forests have been chopped

down; and global fisheries are being destroyed one by one.

At the same time, we are raising global temperatures

through industrial emissions, poisoning lakes and rivers

with effluent and allowing human numbers, now more than

six billion, to rise uncontrollably. Painted on a bigger

canvas, it could be the story of the Vikings or the Mayans

or the folk of Easter Island all over again.

And yet, says Diamond, such an end is not inevitable,

despite the considerable dangers that we now face. The one

advantage we have over the Vikings is our awareness of

their fate. While they had little idea they were heading

down a road to extinction, we do. It's not much to pin our

hopes on, frankly, but from the pages of this superb but

terrifying book, it would seem to be just about all that

we've got.