I belong to a social causes book club started by Britt Bravo. The women are all quite astute -- this is no wine-slinging purely social experience. It's actually a conference call, and I was astounded on Monday night to hear that almost everyone actually finished the book I chose this month, the 575-page behomoth Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond. Next time, I will look at word count before I pick a book. I can't actually believe they let me pick books, because it's a social change nonfiction book club and I keep wanting to read novels. Thank goodness for these women; they keep me honest and I am learning against my will some months. It's because of this damn book club that I grew peppers and tomatoes this summer. I blame them for my fruit flies.
This is a long and terrible lede into what I want to say. I regret I don't have time to make this post shorter and better today.
Like I said, this book is really long. I would not recommend you read it unless you are a anthropology student or an insomniac. There is a lot of verbal throat-clearing, mention of random friends' stories and at least two hundred pages of description of -- as someone said -- every cloud in Montana. However, the idea behind the book -- societies that collapse to the extent of disappearing off the face of the Earth -- is fascinating.
The image that struck me the most was Diamond's musing about the guy who cut down the last palm tree on Easter Island -- an act that contributed to the downfall of that society:
I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!" Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palm trees somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is driven by fear-mongering"?
So here you have a society that inadvertently cut down all the trees they needed to hold down the soil to grow crops, to produce food, to build shelter.
The book describes a few ancient societies that collapsed and died out and some modern countries that are not doing well -- Rwanda, China, Haiti. It's a depressing book in the way reading Google News is enough to make me want to hide under my bed every morning. It's depressing because it seems we humans can't resist overdoing a good thing when it comes to the environment.
I'm glad I didn't read this book during the height of the Gulf oil spill.
But then I got to page 484. And Jared started speaking my language. Back when I was ranting about corn sugar, I wrote:
What I'm saying is that the root of the HFCS problem is not corn growers or maybe even corn refiners (though, hello, get rid of the mercury). They're responding to the requests of food manufacturers, who are responding to focus groups and wallet share. They're all responding to us.
Farmers grow what they grow because that's what's in demand. The root of the HFCS problem is us -- the consumers -- who have taught the food industry by our buying patterns what we want.
True, we didn't know that what we wanted was made that way by stuff that might not be that great for us.
Or did we? What did we really think gave Twinkies a shelf life of 25 days?
We make cookies from scratch. We make cookies from a mix. The cookies in the little sleeve -- they sure look so much nicer. I wonder why that is?
Did we really not know?
And here's old Jared:
Our blaming of businesses also ignores the ultimate responsibility of the public for creating the conditions that let a business profit through hurting the public: e.g., for not requiring mining companies to clean up, or for continuing to buy wood products from nonsustainable logging operations. In the long run, it is the public, either directly or through its politicians, that has the power to make destructive environmental policies unprofitable and illegal, and to make sustainable environmental policies profitable.
But ... he actually has an explanation for it, whereas I am musing and staring at my navel. He writes:
My views may seem to ignore a moral imperative that businesses should follow virtuous principles, whether or not it is most profitable for them to do so. I instead prefer to recognize that, throughout human history, in all politically complex human societies in which people encounter other individuals with whom they have no ties of family or clan relationship, government regulation has arisen precisely because it was found to be necessary for the enforcement of moral principles. Invocation of moral principles is a necessary first step for eliciting virtuous behavior, but that alone is not a sufficient step.
I walked around with that paragraph for a few days, let it seep into my brain.
It fits with everything I understand about evolution, about religion, about the need of human beings to dominate everyone around them. We can wring our hands and wish we were better all on our own, or we can just legislate it so. I personally am most at peace when I'm being financially rewarded for doing the right thing. I can't imagine it feels good to get rich when you know deep down you're raping and plundering the Earth.
Nobody wants to cut down the last palm tree.
