COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond New York: Viking, 2005. xvi, 576pp, $44.00 cloth (ISBN 0-670-03337-5)During a recent wait at a large North American airport, I saw Diamond's Collapse displayed between yet another slim paperback of Dalai Lama's inspirational wisdoms and the latest inanities produced by Dr. Phil (he of the incomparable Oprah fame). Nothing else is needed to confirm the author's megacelebrity status-but is it matched by meticulously executed scientific analysis and by highly convincing, nay irresistible, conclusions? My answer, on both accounts, is unhesitant no. Collapse is unoriginal, highly derivative recount of how a number of societies (ranging from those darlings of American anthropology, the heart-ripping Maya, to small bands of the Norse in medieval Greenland), fell apart, retreated from their forays, or simply ceased to exist. What makes it particularly irritating is that Diamond repeats the cavalier treatment of original that he used in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997): there is not a single reference in this fat book, only a section of at the volume's end.Consequently, uninitiated readers (and, given the book's airport bookstore status, a majority will be in this category) have no way to determine which of its passages are only slightly rephrased accounts of original and path-breaking studies, which are derived from secondary surveys, and which represent Diamond's own critical and fresh thinking. This is a fundamental and inexcusable flaw in a book that aspires to deliver a scientifically based punch. Indeed, the very term further readings is grossly misleading. The book was assembled from the listed books and papers; they are it, not further, as those who know the original writings will instantly recognize.The book is too long to allow any systematic critique in a short review, and so I focus on a single short chapter dealing with a topic I know well, China's environment. The chapter, Diamond writes, is an expanded version of a joint article that Jianguo (Jack) Liu and I wrote, that Jack drafted, and for which he gathered information (526). This indicates access to Chinese information-but both the gatherer and the co-signer committed to print some astonishingly inaccurate claims. None beats this one: Cropland per person is now only one hectare, barely half of the world average, and nearly as low as the value for Northwest Rwanda discussed in Chapter (365). This sentence misinforms in many ways-yet it is the very foundation on which we are asked to judge China's capacity to produce its food.For decades, China's official statistics underreported the country's extent of arable land, with numbers falling to as low as 95 million hectares. This has been finally remedied and the official count, now also used by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, is about 142 million hectares, giving China about 0.11 hectares (or just over one-tenth of a hectare) of arable land per capita. Only such a land-rich country as Canada has more than one hectare (1.4); the US has 0.6, the world averages 0.22 and Rwanda gets about 0.14. Although China's per capita availability of farmland is only about 10 percent of the total claimed by Diamond, its food production is doing quite well: China imports less than 5 percent of its grain (mostly feed grain for its pigs), and since the late 19903 it has been able to produce about as much (or even marginally more) food per capita than is available at retail level in Japan, a country that is the world's largest food importer. If Jack or Jared were aware of these facts and presented them in appropriate context, their case for collapsing China would appear in a very different light.Factual errors, misleading statements, and dubious interpretations abound. Even undergraduate student of China's history knows that the Great Leap Forward did not last from 1958 to 1965: after its mad launch in 1958 it was swiftly terminated by the world's largest (and largely Mao-made) famine that killed more than 30 million people between 1959 and 1961. …
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Aug 31, 2024
Zoë Norridge + 1
Open Access
