The Long and the Short of It - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 330

What Drives Societies to Make Decisions That Prove to
Be Fatal for the Sustainability of Their Environments?
As I began to work my way through writing this topic, I became more and more apprehens-
ive. How would I finish it? It was a task I felt ill equipped to tackle. However, I remembered
Jared Diamond's 2005 topic Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . It is an ex-
cellent work that should be on the bookshelf of every head of state in the world and every
executive of large corporations and on the curriculum for the final year of every school sys-
tem. Come to think of it, perhaps it should be in every home.
Diamond describes the rise and fall of a number of prehistoric and historic societies
that existed in very different ecological environments. Despite this diversity, he found eight
self-inflicted common threads that eroded the ability of the environment to sustain each so-
ciety. The eight traits were “[1.] deforestation and habitat destruction, [2.] soil problems
(erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), [3.] water management issues, [4.] overhunt-
ing, [5.] overfishing, [6.] effects of introduced species on native species, [7.] human popu-
lation growth, and [8.] increased per-capita impact of people”. These will sound very famil-
iar to anyone who has browsed IPCC reports. Consequential food shortages and starvation
resulted when too many people competed for dwindling resources. This brought wars, the
collapse of political control and the demise of each of the studied societies. Diamond con-
sidered that the eight traits still face us today, but to make them fully up to date, he added
four more. They are (1) climate change brought on by the anthropogenic emission of Green
House Gases (GHGs), (2) the environmental accumulation of toxic chemicals, (3) energy
shortages and (4) “the full utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity”.
What is really intriguing for our purpose is that Diamond went on to search for explan-
ations as to why each society undertook disastrous activities and made fateful decisions. He
found four themes:
1. Sometimes, societies appeared to have failed to anticipate a problem before it ar-
rived - perhaps because they had no prior experience of the problem or the ser-