(music playing)
JARED DIAMOND: What does it mean
for a society to collapse?
Collapse is one of those words
where you know it
when it's happening,
even if you don't define it.
But if one wants
to define collapse,
I would say a big decrease
in population numbers,
or in standard of living
over a large area
for a long time.
That's my working definition
of societal collapse.
In my book, "Collapse,"
my subtitle was
"How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed."
The point there is that collapse
is not inevitable.
Yes, if a country faces
environmental problems
or other problems,
it doesn't necessarily
roll over and play dead.
Instead, what counts is how
a society responds.
Some societies respond
successfully to problems
such as environmental problems.
Some societies fail to respond.
And therefore,
when you discuss collapse,
you don't just discuss
the problem.
You also have to discuss
how the society did or did not
respond to the problem.
An interesting question is
whether one has had in the past
larger-scale collapses,
not of just one society,
but of linked collapses
of many societies.
Yes, and I can think of,
immediately, two examples.
One is what's called
the classic Maya...
lowland Maya collapse.
The most advanced
Native American society
in the New World before Columbus
was the Maya of
the Yucatan Peninsula,
and adjacent Guatemala
and Honduras.
The lowland Maya collapsed.
Their cities became abandoned
in the 800s and 900s.
And this was not
just a single city,
but every city in
the lowland Maya area
was abandoned or had a drastic
decrease in population
with the exception of a city
or cities on a lake,
suggesting that the collapse had
something to do with water.
And probably the collapse was
related to a drought.
So that's a regional collapse.
Another regional collapse
is eastern Polynesia.
There's that famous island,
Pitcairn Island,
famous because the
Bounty mutineers fled there
and found it uninhabited.
But Pitcairn had been
settled by Polynesians,
along with nearby islands
Henderson and Mangareva.
All three collapsed.
The Mangareva collapse may have
triggered the Pitcairn collapse,
which certainly triggered
the Henderson collapse.
The Henderson islanders were on
an island without big trees.
They depended, for trade
and for marriage partners,
on Pitcairn and Mangareva.
But when Mangareva declined,
and then when Pitcairn
was abandoned,
the Henderson islanders no
longer had sources of big trees.
They couldn't get away
themselves.
They were trapped on this island
where they managed to carry on
for maybe a century.
50 people in isolation for
a century and, eventually,
they died out somehow.
But, basically, they died out
because Pitcairn died out
because Mangareva declined.
Those are two examples
of linked collapses.
And today, of course,
what we face
is the risk of world
linked collapse
for all world societies.
What is the impact of a societal
collapse on other societies?
Well, ask any American president
or secretary of state
in the last 40 years,
"What is the impact
of the collapse of Somalia
or Afghanistan
on the United States?"
50 years ago,
American secretaries of state
used to play a game
in which they asked,
"What country in the world
is most irrelevant
to United States' interest?"
Such that American troops are
never going to get sent there.
And American secretaries
of state said,
"Well, probably the countries
most irrelevant
"to American interests
are going to be
"Somalia and Afghanistan,
"because Afghanistan
is landlocked
"and Somalia is desert.
"They're desperately
poor countries
"far from the United States,
"so they have no effect
on the United States
and we'll never
send troops there."
Of course, we've had troops
constantly in Afghanistan
for a decade or two,
and we've had troops in Somalia.
This illustrates that today,
in this globalized world,
every country potentially
affects every other country.
And, therefore, you can get a
collapse anywheres in the world
triggered by a collapse
somewheres else.
The environment has played a big
role in collapses in the past.
Many of the famous collapses,
the Maya collapse,
the Easter Island collapse,
the collapse of Angkor-based
empire in Southeast Asia,
the disappearance
of the Greenland Norse,
had environmental causes--
a deterioration in the
environment either due
to natural climate change
or moreover due to people
unconsciously overexploiting
the environment,
destroying resources
of forest and fisheries
on which they depended,
with the result that
the society undermined itself,
or that if climate was changing,
that the one-two punch
of climate change
and society actions
undermined the society.
Are we globally approaching
a moment of collapse today?
Come back 30 years from now
and you'll get the answer
to that question.
We are facing big problems today
that, if they continue,
would lead us to collapse.
Are we going to collapse?
Well, it depends.
It depends upon what people
decide to do.
It depends on how people vote.
It depends upon
people's policies,
what they do about
climate change,
inequality around the world,
resource competition.
Are we going to collapse?
I'd say the chances are
49% that we will
and 51% percent that we
will not collapse.
But come back in the year 2050,
and you'll get the answer.
I would say there is one thing
that is new in the world today,
and that is, for the first time
in world history,
we have the possibility
of a global collapse
of human societies.
We never had that
possibility before
because the world
wasn't globalized.
In the past,
when the Maya civilization,
the most advanced civilization
in the New World,
collapsed in the 800s and 900s,
they didn't know about it
in the Inca Empire of Peru.
Or it didn't exist then.
Then didn't know about
in the Andes of Peru.
They probably didn't know about
it in the Valley of Mexico.
They certainly didn't know about
it in Europe.
Today, though, with connections
around the world,
when one society gets
in trouble,
other societies around the world
get in trouble.
And so, what is new
in the world today
is the possibility
of a worldwide collapse,
a possibility that we've never
had before in the past.
But it's not inevitable.
We talked before about choices,
how societies choose to fail
or to succeed.
The world now faces a choice
about whether it will
fail or succeed.
I hope, for the sake of my sons,
that we'll succeed.
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