The Vanishing

In “Collapse,” Jared Diamond shows how societies destroy themselves.

By Malcolm Gladwell
December 27, 2004 The New Yorker A thousand years ago, a group of
Vikings led by Erik the Red set sail from Norway for the vast Arctic
landmass west of Scandinavia which came to be known as Greenland. It
was largely uninhabitable—a forbidding expanse of snow and ice.
But along the southwestern coast there were two deep fjords
protected from the harsh winds and saltwater spray of the North
Atlantic Ocean, and as the Norse sailed upriver they saw grassy slopes
flowering with buttercups, dandelions, and bluebells, and thick forests
of willow and birch and alder.

Two colonies were formed, three hundred miles apart, known as the
Eastern and Western Settlements.
The Norse raised sheep, goats, and cattle. They turned the grassy
slopes into pastureland.

 They hunted seal and caribou.

 They built a string of parish churches and a magnificent cathedral,
the remains of which are still standing.
 They traded actively with mainland Europe, and tithed regularly to
the Roman Catholic Church.

The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economically viable,

fully integrated communities, numbering at their peak five thousand
people. They lasted for four hundred and fifty years—and then they
vanished.
The story of the Eastern and Western Settlements of Greenland is told
in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed”.

Diamond teaches geography at U.C.L.A. and is well known for his best-
seller “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. In “Guns,
Germs, and Steel,” Diamond looked at environmental and structural
factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world.

In “Collapse,” he continues that approach, only this time he looks at

history’s losers—like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American
Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans.

We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture
and politics and economics help shape the course of history.
But Diamond isn’t particularly interested in any of those things—or, at
least, he’s interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him
is the far more important question, which is a society’s relationship to
its climate and geography and resources and neighbors.

“Collapse” is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth’s

ecosystem—soil, trees, and water—because societies fail, in Diamond’s
view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland
settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the
predominant northern-European civic model of the time—devout,
structured, and reasonably orderly.

In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement
dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in
Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand
Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson
as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on
three consecutive Sundays.
The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse
thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were
the verdant farmland of southern Norway.

They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow
hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down
the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To
make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out
of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home
consumed about ten acres of grassland.
But Greenland’s ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of
pressure.
The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly,
which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil
constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep
soil resilient in the face of strong winds.

“The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or

burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at
holding soil than is grass,” he writes. “With the trees and shrubs gone,
livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which
regenerates only slowly in Greenland’s climate. Once the grass cover is
broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the
strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to
the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles
from an entire valley.”
Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank;
without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long
winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting
fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock—particularly

cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural
resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans,
beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of
burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from
the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most
reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter.

But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit—they called them
skraelings, “wretches”—and preferred to practice their own brand of
European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have
been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order
to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent
boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all,
had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able
to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows,
bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen’s
robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its
three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the
end, the Norse starved to death.
Diamond’s argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional
explanations for a society’s collapse.

Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. The aboriginal

civilization of the Americas was decimated by the sudden arrival of
smallpox. European Jewry was destroyed by Nazism. Similarly, the
disappearance of the Norse settlements is usually blamed on the Little
Ice Age, which descended on Greenland in the early fourteen-
hundreds, ending several centuries of relative warmth. (One
archeologist refers to this as the “It got too cold, and they died”
argument.) What all these explanations have in common is the idea that
civilizations are destroyed by forces outside their control, by acts of
God.

But look, Diamond says, at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a

thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that
continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees,
which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support
as many as thirty thousand people.

Today, it’s a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock.

What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island’s forest
cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one
by one, until they were all gone. “I have often asked myself, ‘What did
the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was
doing it?’
” Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the
conclusions of “Collapse.” Those trees were felled by rational actors—
who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would
result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of “Collapse”
is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit
suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades,
standby passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

This doesn’t mean that acts of God don’t play a role. It did get colder in
Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn’t get so cold that
the island became
uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the
Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food
supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that
the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing
environmental conditions.
Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish
remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons
of debris from the Vatnahverfifarm and found only three fish bones;
another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the
garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this
be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running into
a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a
shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to
excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about
where all those missing fishbones might be hiding,” he writes.
“Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within
a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land
subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fishbones for
fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no
fishbones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the
simple reason that the Norse didn’t eat fish. For one reason or
another, they had a cultural taboo against it.
Given the difficulty that the Norse had in putting food on the table, this
was insane. Eating fish would have substantially reduced the ecological
demands of the Norse settlements. The Norse would have needed
fewer livestock and less pastureland.
Fishing is not nearly as labor-intensive as raising cattle or hunting
caribou, so eating fish would have freed time and energy for other
activities. It would have diversified their diet.

Why did the Norse choose not to eat fish? Because they weren’t

thinking about their biological survival. They were thinking about their

cultural survival. Food taboos are one of the idiosyncrasies that define

a community. Not eating fish served the same function as building

lavish churches, and doggedly replicating the untenable agricultural
practices of their land of origin. It was part of what it meant to be
Norse, and if you are going to establish a community in a harsh and
forbidding environment all those little idiosyncrasies which define and
cement a culture are of paramount importance. “The Norse were
undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master
Greenland’s difficulties,” Diamond writes.

“The values to which people cling most stubbornly under

inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the
source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.”

He goes on:
To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the
Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them,
however, concerned with their social survival as much as their
biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches,
to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity
in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. ”

Diamond’s That was the lesson taken from the two world
distinction wars and the nuclear age that followed: we
between social and would survive as a species only if we learned
biological survival to get along and resolve our disputes
is a critical one, peacefully. The fact is, though, that we can be
because too often law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant and
we blur the two, or inventive and committed to freedom and true
assume that to our own values and still behave in ways that
biological survival are biologically suicidal. The two kinds of
is contingent on survival are separate.
the strength of our
civilizational When archeologists looked through the ruins of
values.
the Western Settlement, they found plenty of
the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland—crucifixes,
bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that the end came
too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the
archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found
the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final
winter, had given up on the future.

They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in
the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs,
and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning
that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of
course. Right up until they starved to death,

the Norse never

lost sight of what
they stood for.