Snippets from Australia and China

Jo Hunter Adams

I'm trying something new with The Concrete Gardener: Posting once a day. I'm not sure how it will work, but please bear with me in the process! It does mean that occasionally I will post something random and disjointed, which I think might be just part of the process of learning to express the topics I am learning about better. For those of you who check Concrete Gardener regularly, I'm hoping to reciprocate with content once a day.

Today, I wanted to share two very brief snippets from Collapse (Jared Diamond) but have returned the book to the library so the stories are just what stuck from the book.



One story came from Australia-- there were two intersecting stories really:

1) When British colonialists arrived in Australia, they brought rabbits and foxes, principally to make the countryside look more like their homeland. As a result, the rabbits completely decimated the Australian landscape (for a view of this, the movie Rabbit Proof Fence is really excellent). Rabbits simply didn't belong in Australia.

2) To make most crops profitable in Australia, as things currently stand, you actually have to over-use the land. For example, to keep a sheep farm profitable, you have to have more sheep than the land can sustain. This means, over time the land is more and more depleted (as it was even before colonization. Yet at the same time, the need to export items leads to expensive transportation costs. Diamond argues that Australians may be the first people in the world who may make a conscious decision to decrease their standard of living in order to secure their future. An amazing, revolutionary thought because as a collective, I think a lot of us measure how worth by seemingly never-ending increases in standards of living.

One snippet from China.

Even though the one child policy in China dramatically reduced the growth of the population, the number of households (and thus, roughly speaking, the impact of these households) did not decrease as significantly, because the household size was decreased by the policy.

Collapse by Jared Diamond Part 3: Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Jo Hunter Adams



Diamond contrasts the Dominican Republic and Haiti, two countries largely sharing one island. Haiti is one of the most overpopulated countries of the New World, "much more so than the Dominican Republic, with barely one-third of Hispaniola's land area but nearly two-thirds of its population (about 10 million), and an average population density approaching 1,000 per square mile" (p330). Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is five times higher, although it is also not a rich country. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Why the difference?

One difference is environmental. Hispaniola's rains come mainly from the east. As a result, the Dominacn side is far richer environmentally. However, this is only part of the picture.


Trujillo

To suggest another answer answer, Diamond looks back on Hispaniola's history of imperial conquest. While France was exploiting Haitian resources, Spain neglected the Dominican Republic. Haiti did not develop commercial agriculture, and "sought mainly to extract wealth from the peasants." (p340). As a result, far more of Haiti's was "used up" without any view for sustainability or the long-term impact of actions taken on the land.

In the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo was elected president in 1930 and proceeded to become a dictator, killing all his possible opponents while claiming to act in the country's best interest. However, although he held national monopolies on most of the country's economies, he also developed the economy, infrastructure, and industries. In the 1950s, Trujillo began to lose support. In 1961, he was assassinated, apparently with CIA support.


Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier

In 1957 in Haiti, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier took power after a series of unstable political regimes. Like Trujillo, he took absolute control of the country and its citizens by force. Unlike Trujillo, however, he did not develop the economy.

After the Duvaliers in Haiti, Haitians continued to be politically unstable, and it's economy has not had an adequate opportunity to develop.


Balaguer

After Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Balaguer dominated Dominican politics. During his presidencies, his final presidency ending in 2000, according to Diamond, he rescued the country's natural reserve system. He placed strict controls on the use of resources, particularly on wood.

I was struck by the reality that a colonialism of neglect might--in this case-- be preferable to a colonialism of rabid exploitation. At times, in the African case, it seemed that when there was a strong desire to exploit natural resources, it led to greater creation of basic infrastructure. However, in Haiti resources could be "used up" without creating real infrastructure-- leading to both nothing built, and nothing to build with.

Coming Soon
The Cost of Transportation and the [human] cost of Pesticides
A look at Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Beginning the Growing Season Indoors!

Collapse by Jared Diamond Part 2: The Rwandan Genocide

Jo Hunter Adams



I was unsure of how best to read Diamond's section on the Rwandan genocide. It's really hard to write about the genocide, because it's very easy to [perhaps unintentionally] write in such a way that either minimizes the lives of those who died, minimizes the role of either Rwandans or of the French colonizers in causing the genocide, or somehow makes the genocide seem inevitable, leading to a sense of fatalism. As such, I've never really known how to write about it, and admire those who try. I give some suggestions below for further reading, on a few of the most accessible and insightful sources about the genocide.

Those South Africans that are reading, I think we always remember that while we were reveling in our new democracy, and in the incredible first elections of 1994, the genocide was beginning in Rwanda, and collectively turned a blind eye. Most people would have predicted genocide in South Africa, not Rwanda. At the same time, there were plenty of warning signs if people had been watching more closely.

Diamond focuses on the notion of overpopulation in his chapter on the genocide. He also looks at the genocide from the lens of an agricultural community that was almost completely Hutu. He explains how the land has a much higher population density than all of Africa. Historically, people supported themselves by subsistence farming but increasingly, population density pressured out this way of life. [as a side note, many people who study the genocide emphasize the role of unemployment, people with absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go to improve their situation, were hanging around in Kigali]

One of the most shocking things about the genocide was that family members killed eachother. Diamond presents the context of small plots of land being seemingly infinitely divided, making each plot too small for subsistence. He explains this as causing increasing tension amongst family members, as disagreements evolved about how the land should be divided.

The snapshot is not complete, and Diamond does not claim it to be so. Those who read this chapter only may feel that genocide was inevitable or that no-one was to blame/no-one was responsible. Nevertheless, I think it was valuable in two ways: it emphasizes the ways in which a basic need for certain resources can create deep tensions that would otherwise not have been an issue. It also emphasizes that genocide was not just about Hutus killing Tutsis, which I and others strongly agree with but which was not always adequately conveyed in media portrayals.

The challenge in reading about the genocide is the questions that evolve:
1) What are our responsibilities in similar circumstances as random people in America or South Africa; is it arrogant to believe we have a role to play as part of a global human community?
2) Do our actions contribute to a similar lack of resources somewhere in the world, or on our doorstep?

Please do comment and think about this with me, because I know I have only raised the issues in a superficial way.

Further Reading on the Rwandan genocide:
We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed WIth Our Families by Philip Gourevitch.
When Victims Become Killers by Mahmood Mamdani

Also watch: Sometimes in April

Coming soon

Collapse Part 3
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Preparing for Spring in Boston

Insights from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond Part 1

Jo Hunter Adams

This is the first of three posts about Collapse by Jared Diamond. The question I asked myself when reading this book was "how are the choices we are making similar to the mistaken choices that other societies made, and what can we do about it?"



By the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse is a view of societies that have failed because of the way their resources were managed. Like Guns, Germs and Steel the scope huge but the message is straightforward. He argues that it is not all that shocking that states used up all their resources, and that it is conceivable that many of today's societies, particularly in the west, may similarly use up all their resources, even though they are not nearly as limited by the landscape as many of the ancient societies he describes.

Rather than giving a full review, which is available elsewhere, I will choose some key themes and explore these further.

Diamond starts off with a snapshot of Montana, a society for whom there seemed to be a long-term, successful economic foundation in agriculture and minerals. As the chapter moves forward, you begin see cracks in this picture. One major thing I learned was that regulation of mining has traditionally been very limited in the U.S., and a mining company can declare bankrupcy rather than clean up their mess (a cost borne by the state). He pointed out that it was not only that this kind of approach was possible, but that the culture of the industry made this an acceptable option.

This was contrasted with the obligations placed on an international oil company in Indonesia, where safety and the conservation of the natural landscape are paramount for the government. Why? because, if the company cuts down a tree, they must pay compensation for that tree. If that tree was a likely habitat of an endangered birds, the cost is greater. As a result, there is an ongoing incentive to keep operations efficient, and to organize in such a way that minimal damage is done to the surrounding environment.

Many of you have heard of the mystery of the stone heads on Easter Island-- weighing up to 80 tons and transported miles across the island to where they now stand. The bigger mystery is why the people of Easter Island were all but extinct a few hundred years later.

The question evoked by this story is powerful: what was the person cutting down the island's last tree thinking? Why did they do that, knowing that their ability to get to neighboring islands depended on carving trees into kayaks, and knowing that topsoil needed to be grounded by trees. Easter island could not draw on the resources of other islands because of it's isolation. Today, Diamond argues, the whole modern world, as a unit, has something in common with Easter Island. Like those on Easter Island, there is no other planet were earthlings can run if things get worse in our world.

Did you know that there was a Norse settlement in Greenland before the Inuits arrived? Everyone in a settlement died one winter because resources were so scarce. The Inuits and the Norse had a bad relationship, and while the Inuits seemed to adapt their lifestyles to use a few of the Norse tools, the Norse did not use any Inuit tools or strategies for surviving the winter. The Norse lifestyle was carefully adapted to fit the harsh winter, and they lived in Greenland for many hundreds of years, yet these adaptations were within certain bounds. This meant that, when trees and shrubs were depleted, they were left with very few options. Despite the fact that cows could only live outdoors for three months of the year, the Norse prized cows so much that they kept cows even though it meant that resources would be depleted and the cows really couldn't contribute as much as sheep in that landscape. They relied heavily on wood for keeping warm, so once the trees had all been cut down they could not keep warm. Contrasted against the Inuit, who lived in Igloos and burnt whale blubber and so were not faced with the same constraints. The Inuit were also able to go out in kayaks to hunt whales, because kayaks were made with stretched seal skin.

Yet the Norse never considered adopting any of these means of survival. It struck me because I can totally imagine sitting there in the cold thinking "how can I keep warm and fed" but limiting my view to my lifestyle and what was acceptable and normal in my corner of Greenland.

--
Check back soon for Part 2, tomorrow.

Also coming soon
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Preparing for the growing season in Boston