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Progress Traps
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond. New York: Viking, 2005.
A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright. Toronto: Anansi, 2004.
Reviewed by Kent Peacock
For a very long time, environmental Cassandras have been warning of the danger that humanity will commit ecocide if we fail to learn from the mistakes made by those many civilizations whose ruins now lie crumbling in the sun. Such warnings have rarely penetrated the mainstream of thought, but now two books on the perils of environmental demise are simultaneously on bestseller lists.
Ronald Wright's acerbic Short History of Progress, delivered as the 2004 CBC Massey lectures, is the short version, while Jared Diamond's hefty Collapse supplies a generous helping of historical and scientific detail, thoughtful analysis and helpful suggestions. Both are wellwritten: Wright bristles with pithy apothegms, while Diamond, although less self-consciously literary, is always clear. It is hard to resist filling this review with quotes from Wright, especially his metaphors: "the wrecks of our failed experiments [in civilization] lie in deserts and jungles like fallen airliners whose flight recorders can tell us what went wrong." And those recorders warn us that "our present behavior is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance."
Wright frames the problem studied by both books with the series of questions posed by artist Paul Gauguin: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" The first two questions can be answered, in part, by history, paleoanthropology and earth science. We are restless anthropoids nurtured in the luxurious hothouse of Africa, toughened and honed to a fighting edge by the Ice Ages. We now enjoy an extraordinary global population boom made possible partly by the fruits of our linguistic and technological ingenuity, and partly by an uncharacteristically benign spell in Earth's climate. But, like fast-growing teenagers, we don't always quite know how to cope with the consequences of our own growing strengths. As Wright has it, we are Ice Age hunters "only halfevolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise."
Both authors document the effects...