[Marxism] Jared Diamond's limitations

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

In today's NY Times, there's a lengthy op-ed piece by Jared Diamond that
makes the same basic arguments found in his newly published book
""Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."

Here's an excerpt that really highlights what's wrong with his basic approach:

"Consider Japan. In the 1600's, the country faced its own crisis of
deforestation, paradoxically brought on by the peace and prosperity
following the Tokugawa shoguns' military triumph that ended 150 years of
civil war. The subsequent explosion of Japan's population and economy set
off rampant logging for construction of palaces and cities, and for fuel
and fertilizer.

"The shoguns responded with both negative and positive measures. They
reduced wood consumption by turning to light-timbered construction, to
fuel-efficient stoves and heaters, and to coal as a source of energy. At
the same time, they increased wood production by developing and carefully
managing plantation forests. Both the shoguns and the Japanese peasants
took a long-term view: the former expected to pass on their power to their
children, and the latter expected to pass on their land. In addition,
Japan's isolation at the time made it obvious that the country would have
to depend on its own resources and couldn't meet its needs by pillaging
other countries. Today, despite having the highest human population density
of any large developed country, Japan is more than 70 percent forested."

This reveals a basic flaw in Diamond's methodology, which is to regard a
given society as a kind of self-contained experiment with mother nature
that succeeds or fails to the extent that it respects ecological
principles. Unfortunately, when you define a society like an isolated case
study, you miss the connections that are all-important, namely the reliance
on other territories that end up as suppliers of raw materials in the
context of either feudal or capitalist colonialism.

The article hails the innovations of modern Germany and Japan and passes
judgement on the failure of Mayan society or the Pitcairn and Henderson
Islands to make the proper adjustment. It is interesting that Diamond does
not discuss Great Britain, which basically colonized the New World in an
effort to mitigate the effects of environmental despoliation, especially
deforestation, within its borders.

In a 11/8/1997 Guardian article on environmental problems in Indonesia, we
learn how self-reliant Japan actually is:

"Indonesia is vast, with 17,000 islands, hundreds of languages, the longest
coastline in the world and the largest stretches of virgin forest outside
Brazil. Having cut down almost 50 million hectares of forest in the past 25
years to sell timber cheaply to Japan, Indonesia is now industrialising the
degraded land as rapidly as possible."

To miss something like this that I turned up in Lexis-Nexis in less than
five minutes of searching reveals the inadequacy of Diamond's approach. The
only question is whether he conceals such basic data consciously or not.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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