The end is not necessarily nigh

One of the enduring beliefs of many in the environmental movement is that the technologies required to halt climate change, develop an environmentally sustainable global society and maintain economic growth are already readily available.

Whether it is the Stern Review's claims that a one per cent investment of global GDP will head off a global economic depression or reports, such as a recent McKinsey study, that argue that simple energy efficiency measures could virtually stabilise carbon emissions on their own, the message remains that it is political and social intransigence rather than the lack of necessary tools that is resulting in runaway global warming.

This fact is either hugely encouraging or dispiriting depending on your faith in humanity's adaptability. But it also means that the most important question facing political and business leaders today is if the renewable energy technologies and environmentally sustainable agricultural and business practices are largely available, why are we largely failing to adopt the measures needed to head off catastrophe?

This is the question that dominates Jared Diamond's 2005 book Collapse - Why Societies Choose to Fail as he assesses societies from the past and present and asks why, when the option of survival was in all cases possible and some cases painfully obvious, did they descend into chaos and destruction?

His painstakingly researched case studies take a journey through history's most famous collapsed societies exploring how the Easter Islanders came to clear their isolated island of the forests that kept them alive; how the once thriving Mayans descended into wars and drought; and how the Greenland Norse succumbed as their neighbours, the Inuit, continued to prosper.

But the book is more than a series of historical vignettes and Diamond also investigates more recent societal collapses, such as the genocide in Rwanda, and dangerously unsustainable societies such as China and Australia.

Each of these case studies are explored at length and at times Diamond betrays his academic background with rather dry passages on soil characteristics, water tables and archaeological details, but whenever these sections threaten to alienate readers without a science or history PhD, he delivers a neat layman's terms explanation that serves to remind you that it is these underlying environmental factors that inevitably prompted societal collapse.

It is in these moments that Diamond is at his most effective, wondering what was going through the head of the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree on the island; musing on how the Greenland Norse died out while watching the Inuit clearly demonstrating the technologies and lifestyles required to survive in the same environment; or exploring how in the Rwandan village of Kanama the genocide of the early 90s was not motivated by ethnic tensions as many external observers believed, but rather by tensions over land that led members of the same ethnic group to kill one another.

These numerous case studies all explore the common theme of how societal collapse is often avoidable – a message that is painfully pertinent given the ecologically unsustainable nature of many modern societies. And it is the delivery of this message that forms Collapse's denoument. The case studies fill most of the book but are just a precursor for a powerful conclusion where Diamond summarises the practical lessons arising from these past and present disasters.

He concludes that there are many reasons why societies make disastrous decisions, including a lack of foresight; poor governance that ensures people can get away with doing things that are in their personal interest but not in the interest of the society; a lack of flexibility that leaves societies that no longer work in a changing environment; and perhaps most importantly a refusal to acknowledge a problem even exists.

This state of denial is summarised, Diamond argues, by the findings of pollsters surveying residents living in a river valley below a large dam. Their studies have shown that as you move up the valley concerns about the risk of the dam being breached steadily climb, until you get to just a few miles below the dam, but from there concern levels plummet to zero by the time you reach the dam.

As Diamond observes "the only way of preserving one's sanity when looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst". It is the same state of psychological denial that characterises many people's refusal to accept the hazards posed by climate change and other environmental threats.

Having assessed the reasons for societal collapse Diamond turns his attention to what can be done to develop environmentally sustainable societies and it is here that he reels off a series of chapters that should become a set text for every green executive or CSR officer tasked with selling the benefits of green business models to their peers and customers.

In particular, he assesses the commercial case for sustainable business practices, recounting visits to two contrasting oil fields in New Guinea, one an environmental disaster zone operated by the Indonensian national oil company Pertamina and the other a shining example of corporate responsibility run by Chevron.

Diamond explores why a for-profit oil company should pay such close attention to the environment and finds that in this case the company has identified numerous commercial reasons for responsible behaviour, including mitigating the risk of high profile and costly accidents, future regulations, and opposition from local communities, and increasing the chance of winning contracts from increasingly environmentally conscious customers.

It is such realisations that underpin a positive conclusion to an otherwise sobering read. As Diamond observes we may be on an unsustainable path where natural resources are being painfully stretched and a global population aspiring to middle class lifestyles cannot be indefinitely supported. But "we are not beset by insoluble problems", we can choose to adopt social practices that head off the potential collapse.

"While we do face big risks the most serious ones are not those beyond our control, such as a possible collision with an asteroid of a size that hits the Earth every hundred million years or so," he argues. "Instead they are ones that we are generating ourselves. Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are in control of them and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them."

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