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Antropology- Response to Diamond's Collapse

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Diamond’s Collapse
In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Jared Diamond analyzes the
potential causes societies have fallen into ruin over the course of human history. These
triggers, according to Diamond’s lecture, belong to a five point framework which he
connects to the fall of the Greenland Norse society: human impact on the environment,
climate change, relations with neighboring friendly societies, relations with hostile
societies, and how they approached problems relating to politics, the economy, and society.
Following his review of these factors, Diamond draws a correlation to our modern
society. As human beings, we collectively are on an environmentally unsustainable course,
and in order to survive, we must work together to control these threats before we meet our
own devastating end.
When asked why it is important to study history, a common answer given by
Diamond, is that it gives us the opportunity to learn from human errors in the past.”
1
It
seems, however, that we are entering new territory concerning the recent damages
inflicted on our environment, which now begin to threaten our very existence. In
“Ecological Collapses of Past Civilizations, Diamond advocates that societies in the past
actually did collapse as a result of the destruction of their environment. In the case of
Easter Island, now devoid of native flora and fauna, archaeologists have discovered that
around 300 AD, the island was a tropical forest, but land was cleared for agriculture. Trees
were used to build boats, and the local animals were hunted for sustenance. When natural
environments such as this are plentiful and provide rich and plentiful resources, human
populations can explode, and as a result, resources are very quickly depleted. Entire
forests may become completely decimated in a chain reaction of events and according to

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Diamond, “three-quarters of the human population did die out along with a possibly
indigenous system of writing.”
1
Diamond argues, using this example, that the environment
is very fragile and has the potential to bring absolute ruin upon a society.
Despite providing a multitude of examples such as the ancient Maya, Anasazi, and
Easter Islanders to support his claim that environment alone can ruin a society, Diamond
has been soundly criticized for his theories.
According to Joseph A. Tainter from the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Diamond
commits a blunder by suggesting that because “past collapses had similar causes,”
2
our
modern societies will suffer the same fate. Tainter claims that Diamond is unable to prove
that the environment is the instigator for the collapses; he forms analyses that “rest
substantially on such trite ruminations.”
2
Tainter says that previously, Diamond posited in
his book that collapses were the result of a complex conglomeration of difficulties. Yet, in
his attempt to prove a point he ignores his previous statement entirely. Although much of
Tainter’s language comes off as harsh and inflammatory, I do agree with some aspects of
his argument.
Diamond’s allegation that the factors, which caused the collapse of an ancient
society, will cause the downfall of a modern society, is a dangerous and presumptive
assumption to make. The parallel that he attempts to draw between the past and the
future, according to Kelly and Thomas, is called the Principle of Uniformitarianism, which
they define as “asserting that the processes now operating to modify the earth’s surface are
the same processes that operated long ago in the geological past.”
3
By basing his entire
argument for the collapse of Easter Island, on the suggestion that history works on a
straight trajectory, Diamond completely ignores the four other influential factors outlined

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Diamond’s Collapse In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Jared Diamond analyzes the potential causes societies have fallen into ruin over the course of human history. These triggers, according to Diamond’s lecture, belong to a five point framework which he connects to the fall of the Greenland Norse society: human impact on the environment, climate change, relations with neighboring friendly societies, relations with hostile societies, and how they approached problems relating to politics, the economy, and society. Following his review of these factors, Diamond draws a correlation to our modern society. As human beings, we collectively are on an environmentally unsustainable course, and in order to survive, we must work together to control these threats before we meet our own devastating end. When asked why it is important to study history, a common answer given by Diamond, is that it “gives us the opportunity to learn from human errors in the past.”1 It seems, however, that we are entering new territory concerning the recent damages inflicted on our environment, which now begin to threaten our very existence. In “Ecological Collapses of Past Civilizations ...
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