REBUTTAL OF NEW YORK TIMES' CRITIQUE OF JARED DIAMOND'S "COLLAPSE"

REBUTTAL OF NEW YORK TIMES CRITIQUE OF JARED DIAMOND'S "COLLAPSE"

This essay reacts to New York Times book critic Gregg Easterbrook's 2005 opinion on Jared Diamond's books, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed.   Find it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/collapse-how-the-world-ends.html?_r=0 

With obvious admiration for Diamond's eruditon and cogency, Easterbrook nevertheless concludes that the books' warning that we are likely headed for our doom is "probably wrong".   The only problem is that he doesn’t back up this counterassertion well—or, well, hardly at all.

He does hint that things could change for the better, although the scenarios he chooses to illustrate (e.g., the supposed halt of deforestation in the U.S., and the possibillity of finding elbow room on other planets) are shaky at best.  The halt of deforestation, in light of the continued loss of topsoil (globally, around 12 billion tons per year), is certainly not assured at all.  We still make our houses out of wood; we still write on paper, our population is mushrooming (not to mention that the most ecologically crippling lifestyle of all—the highly consumptive Western one—is the model to which the rest of the world aspires).  When the topsoil we have is exhausted (and so are we), what scruple will deter us from lopping down what is left of the forests for fuel and shelter?  Has Easterbrook been to Oregon, or toWashington State, or Alaska, where they still are clear-cutting, as we speak, the last of the old growth forests?  Has he ignored the conflagrations claiming huge tracts of the forest most prone to fire:  immature, crowded woods of the type that abound in post-agricultural and post-logging lands?  Or the loss of vast stands of Canadian conifers to pernicious beetles following the world’s warmth as it heads inexorably north?  Why does Easterbrook gloss over the fact that what allows us to leave some tracts of land untilled is so-called "high-yield" farming, which is also highly toxic and erosive?  Does he doubt that the present administration is selling off public lands to its cronies to do with as they will?  Has he counted the megatons of flora and fauna eliminated as urban sprawl and Big Ag have overflowed great tracts of land—habitat  that once supported tall grass and immense trees? 

Easterbrook has exactly this to say about the possibly rosy future: "Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space.  If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten."  As a counter to this crass bit of naïve magic-bullet rhetoric, I offer the following quote from a Zapara shaman, Gloria Ushigua:  "We have visited communities that are affected by the oil companies.  The people are sick, the water is polluted, they are hungry because the animals and fish have gone away, and the children have disease on their skin."….To give the poisonous and degratory practices of petroleum exploitation the blessing of our potential salvation is a slap in the face to every person, animal and vegetable ever to suffer its ill effects.  And to pin our hopes on escape is to ignore the obvious implication:  if we export our "culture" anywhere at all, what is to stop us from wreaking havok there as we have on Earth?  Easterbrook's is a keenly disturbing vision—the glory of scorched-earth empire spreading like a disease across the cosmos.  A much more gut-level issue, a bit closer to home, surfaces with the question:  how happy is a people who treat their environment, and therefore themselves, so shabbily?  Well, ask the Zapara people, because Easterbrook seems to be asking oil tycoons.

As for Diamond, I strenuously doubt that the books' author is merely worried about the issues at hand.  One does not write more than 1,000 pages on a subject out of worry.  ….The characterization of Diamond's concerns as "worry" and the blatantly flippant title of Easterbrook's critique ("There Goes the Neighborhood"), trivialize and minimize the obvious depth and urgency (not to mention the apocalyptic scope) of the works in question and the issues they lay out. 

Just to belabor the odd association between Easterbrook, technology, petroleum, and salvation: he avers at one point, arguing for the possibility of the Developing World's living standards' reaching Western levels (Diamond doubts this), that "(a) century ago rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure."  Through this shining

example—again, a crass one, given the once and future devastation caused by fossil fuels—Mr. E. reveals himself both as a person who equates quality of life with high levels of petroleum consumption, and himself as The Rationalist in the present debate.  His oily blinders, as he tries to goop them over our eyes, deflect us from, as Neil Young put it, "the needle and the damage done".

Easterbrook distrusts Diamond's use of deceased island cultures to exemplify our own probable future, arguing that islands are more vulnerable than continents, because "a stressed species may have no place to retreat to".  He presses the point even though Diamond does analyze the Maya and Anasazi cultures, both continental—even though, if one stands far back enough, "continents," surrounded as they are by those great oceans, are nothing more than huge islands...and the more bloated our human numbers, the more far reaching the consequences of our technology and lifestyle, the smaller they are becoming.  Why must he see the difference as most crucial?  Could not the Easter Islands, Pitcairn, Henderson, and Greenland be the canaries to our coal mine?  I hear Easterbrook saying, "These canaries are so small.  Let's go deeper into this mine!"…In a real mine, he'd be talking to himself, because the miners would have left him to suck fumes and enjoy the cave-in.   Unfortunately, he is speaking from the pages of the New York Times, and I wonder how many its readers know how screwed we all will be if the war between profit and Nature reaches its grim and certain conclusion.  

Easterbrook criticizes Diamond's use of "pretechnology" populations….By using technology as the element of contrast, he reminds us to support the point he is criticizing. Exactly that—our technology—has given us the gods' power to actually lay waste to the natural systems that created and sustain us.  He hopes that the same technology, that absolute power that has corrupted us so absolutely, will save us in the end, by providing us with an escape hatch, merely: the Holy Spaceship To Somewhere.  Here is his tacit acknowledgement that our technology is powerless to reverse the destruction it has wreaked; a biosphere 6 billion years in the making cannot be resurrected with some fertilizer and a few ‘dozers....Wait, does his plan to escape to the stars by spaceship include ALL 25 billion people projected to exist on Planet Earth, all the poor and destitute which by then will have become the vast majority?  Or just literary critics who have sucked up to the petroleum lobby? 

Easterbrook may not  have to state his case very clearly, because in a scenario which few would enjoy thinking about, the resolution of which would require major lifestyle sacrifices on all sides, all he needs are vague refutations and a bone or two to throw at the NY Times’ reading public: e.g., what we need to do is "manage social pressure….and provide everyone with jobs".  HA!  We are failing miserably at that already.  I can only imagine what life will be like when billions more homo sapiens sapiens come along, and that much more of our topsoil (not to mention air and water) is lost and tainted.  What "jobs" will there be (just curious) if our crops have nothing but rocks and clay in which to grow? 

The critic cites a figure by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, that only 9 percent of vertebrates are "in danger" (a comfortable minority of us vertebrates), whereas Diamond believes that a "large fraction" will be gone in the next fifty years.  I am sure that the folks at IUCN mean well, but surely—given the damage already done by our civilization to our neighboring flora and fauna, that is a very conservative estimate about which I have three responses. 

One is that this number addresses the danger to species—in other words, if anyone, anywhere, can find just one specimen of a certain organism, no matter how large its numbers may have originally been—not extinct.  If a few breeding pairs exist in zoos, the "vertebrate" is not extinct; But in a local sense, that animal may indeed be gone forever, even if it’s still hanging on in other parts of its range.  Thus, I can say with assurance that, here in the Midwest, the bear, the puma, the elk, the buffalo and the wolf are all extinct in their wild state.  Others, like badgers, are sighted only rarely whereas they were once common.  The remaining exemplars of the massasagua rattlesnake in Illinois are being rounded up by scientists to try to avoid their complete extinction.  My home county of Champaign, Illinois, used to be an upland marsh, a shallow bowl of swampwater rising up from the prairie, until they dug ditches into the sides of the bowl to drain it and make it all farmland.  Mineral-rich glacial deposits, plus 18,000 years of duck poop, made that an attractive proposition.  The duck hunters were, evidently, not consulted, even though, in 1880, a decent shot was able to take one hundred ducks per hour—ONE HUNDRED DUCKS—PER HOUR!  They were thicker than the thieves in a fossil-fuel industry boardroom.  Compared to this incredibly fertile ecosystem, the few ducks we might be lucky to see on a given day are clear evidence that we are living in a desert.  

Another, much more sobering measure of the health of the biosphere might be to gage the number of individual organisms that would be present right now if not for us.  If we stacked all the corpses into a macabre mountain of death, how much would that mountain weigh?  If we count every single organism, down to all the tiny soil denizens quietly suffocated beneath the asphalt, the numbers would be staggering, even sickening:  How many quintillions of pounds of plants and animals have we exterminated already?  One menacing ‘clue’ is the cleanliness of windshields in summertime: bug guts used to be a major deal during any trip, especially through the country.  It was truly gross.  But now the lack of bugs is just chilling, especially when you consider that all the animals that used to eat the bugs that used to smear all the windshields so liberally are now dead, starved. 

Or we could talk topsoil loss.  11-15 billion tons of it erode off of farmed fields yearly. A local clue for me is that the pioneers of my home state of Illinois extensively logged the southern hills, allowing 2 to 3 feet of topsoil to run into the rivers, and that some farmers, plying their trade on formerly ultra-thick, ultra-rich post-glacial soil, are seeing bald spots where the clay is clearly visible.

My second response is that the IUCN's figures are surely based on some linear model of extinction—if we continue mathematically at the present rate, and so on—but that the demise of life on Earth as we know it, if it does occur,  will surely do so with exponential speed once certain key elements are sufficiently weakened…thus the word "Collapse" in the title of Mr. Diamond's book.  Such a soothing estimate must ignore the intense interdependence of all life on the planet.  If ants and only ants went extinct as a class of insects, some claim, the rest of the world's life, opposable thumbs or no, would be wiped out in very short order.  To what degree this is true I do not know, but interdependent food and resource webs point to a chain reaction collapse when compromised.  Imagine this: pernicious microbes in ascendency, too much CO₂, too little 0₂, ozone holes, keystone species destroyed, the level of toxins too high and nutrients too low, erosion at crisis levels, human population reaching critical mass, per capita consumption rising indefinitely, neglected nuclear plants going into meltdown, etc., etc.  The whole game of Jenga could come crashing down without any help from meteors,volcanoes or even missiles—just us, hello, homo sapiens sapiens here, doing our clichéd business-as-usual thing (although missiles and business-as-usual are disturbingly close bedfellows).  A linear study assumes that only the forces currently at work will continue to degrade the numbers estimated, but Nature demands that interdependent and exponentially chain reacting elements be factored in.   

Which leads to my third response: the underwhelmingly tame and calming “only nine percent of vertebrates are in danger” may or may not be true at the moment, but other scientists and organizations thereof give state-of-the-biosphere speeches that are not nearly so reassuring.  These Chicken Littles state unequivocally that we are in the midst of a man-made mass extinction event, with the rate of extinction 100 or more times faster than Nature’s extinctions as they occur without our help.  Although, if I walk out into a cornfield, and compare the number of organisms present there compared to how many there once were on the prairie—well, I’m with the Chicken Littles.  I am horrified, aghast, desparing.  A whole ‘nother article, as well as some very sad and angry poetry, would be required to describe the enormity of the loss of life once a field is hit by plow, mega-tractor tires, seed, artificial fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides.

Easterbrook finds the enormity of the overpopulation crisis painted by Diamond to be very disturbing, if only because easy fixes would elude us.  "How," he wonders, "would Diamond prevent (overpopulation)?  He does not say."  The lack of easy answers means we should not even investigate this topic?  Preposterous that someone should point out a problem with no readily available answer!  What a waste of 1,000 pages, huh?

According to Easterbrook himself, though,  "Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced sterilization" are the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak…."People cannot be wished away.".  But nor can the weight of the world, Mr. Easterbrook, which in terms of noxious burdens is becoming greater every day.  What we can do, as at least a first step, is to look the truth in the eye instead of dangling carrots in front of readers' noses while the garden soil runs off in the other direction.  We must be convinced of the dire and massive nature of our mess, or sheer inertia will propel us forward into self-genocide.  

The answer is simple, really: to use our knowledge and technology to counter, as much as we possibly can, the forces of degradation, pollution and overpopulation which we have so haplessly set in motion.  Obviously, adapting new (or old) forms of farming that build up the soil, developing a chemistry of detoxification, facillitating birth control, and proliferating education (which has a halting effect on population growth) seem a little more possible and closer to home at this point than escaping to the stars…don't they?  Shouldn't they?  Can we really figure out how to reach Saturn and describe a supernova, but be so clueless about creating solutions here on Earth?  To destroy is easier than to create, it is true, but if all that is green and good is at stake, and if we truly have the will, can the way be far behind?   As we downplay the looming cataclysm, we facillitate it, as certain cancers flourish because they disable the immune system, stifling the alarm and thereby the response.  Let's not dance the zombie dance, too much is at stake.  We are not talking just about the future, but all futures, the Fate of one and all.  To alter this Fate demands more truth, courage, determination, and sophistication than our New York Times Book Critic can stomach.

Maybe Easterbrook feels that he is being positive and optimistic, but isn't looking reality in the face without flinching more positive—and more effective?  Ask the cancer survivors.  To deny reality is another way of saying, "This is hopeless.  The best we can do here is fool ourselves."  This attitude seems to me to reflect a very low opinion of people and what good they can do given the naked truth.

The "cultural" ideas (free will, etc.), which Easterbrook lauds in his article as part and parcel of our Western superiority, will not save us as he implies—not, at least, if our most powerful and popular media outlets are poo-pooing us doomsayers based on vain hopes and spacey dreams.  I certainly see no savior, either, in the abdication of the mass media's original dream and mission: to look long and hard at any potentially dangerous issue.  What Jared Diamond's books discuss is The Issue of all issues, and how great is the contrast between Its dire urgency and the offhand plea for business-as-usual by 'critics' seeking to lull us into a false security?  Whom, I wonder, does this false sense of security serve?

That’s a whole other article.  But we can surmise a few things about exactly whom Gregg Easterbrook serves.  He’s not steward of Mother Nature’s, that much is clear.  Judging from his thought, he has ties or at least extremely positive feelings about the petroleum and space-pod manufacturing industries, to the point where he names them our only potential savior from this little non-problem of global extinction.  Easterbrook is a fellow of the Brookings Institute, long labeled as “liberal,” but with personnel who have a history of staffing Republican administrations.  Since when are Nixon, Reagan and Bush staffers liberal?  Did they see the light at a Ralph Nader tent meeting?  Read an article here http://fair.org/extra/brookings-the-establishments-think-tank/ about Brookings’ bias, if you wish, but I think Gregg Easterbrook, the Brookings fellow, and his chalk-on-tissue-paper ‘critique’ of Jared Diamond’s works, is a living piece of evidence as to the rightward lean of this ‘liberal’ think tank.  Still, labels of conservative versus liberal are not terribly useful; the point is—who makes the best points?  Compare Diamond’s exhaustively researched tomes to Easterbrook’s diffident poo-pooing and PR for Space Pods, Inc., and it’s clear who has the tighter grip on reality.

Copywrite 2005 by James F. Kotowski