The biggest difference between Huls Farm and Gardar Farm is in their current
status. Huls Farm, a family enterprise owned by five siblings and their spouses
in the Bitterroot Valley of the western U.S. state of Montana, is currently
prospering, while Ravalli County in which Huls Farm lies boasts one of the
highest population growth rates of any American county. Tim, Trudy, and Dan Huls,
who are among Huls Farm's owners, personally took me on a tour of their
high-tech new barn, and patiently explained to me the attractions and
vicissitudes of dairy farming in Montana. It is inconceivable that the United
States in general, and Huls Farm in particular, will collapse in the foreseeable
future. But Gardar Farm, the former manor farm of the Norse bishop of
southwestern Greenland, was abandoned over 500 years ago. Greenland Norse
society collapsed completely: its thousands of inhabitants starved to death,
were killed in civil unrest or in war against an enemy, or emigrated, until
nobody remained alive. While the strongly built stone walls of Gardar barn and
nearby Gardar Cathedral are still standing, so that I was able to count the
individual cow stalls, there is no owner to tell me today of Gardar's former
attractions and vicissitudes. Yet when Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland were at
their peak, their decline seemed as inconceivable as does the decline of Huls
Farm and the U.S. today.
Let me make clear: in drawing these parallels between Huls and Gardar Farms,
I am not claiming that Huls Farm and American society are doomed to decline. At
present, the truth is quite the opposite: Huls Farm is in the process of
expanding, its advanced new technology is being studied for adoption by
neighboring farms, and the United States is now the most powerful country in the
world. Nor am I claiming that farms or societies in general are prone to
collapse: while some have indeed collapsed like Gardar, others have survived
uninterruptedly for thousands of years. Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar
Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly
brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most
advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that
should not be underestimated. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those
that undermined Gardar Farm and Norse Greenland, and that many other past
societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the
Greenland Norse), and others succeeded (like the Japanese and Tikopians). The
past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may
keep on succeeding.
Norse Greenland is just one of many past societies that collapsed or vanished,
leaving behind monumental ruins such as those that Shelley imagined in his poem "Ozymandias." By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population
size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for
an extended time. The phenomenon of collapses is thus an extreme form of several
milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the
decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse.
Some of those milder types of decline include the normal minor rises and falls
of fortune, and minor political/economic/social restructurings, of any
individual society; one society's conquest by a close neighbor, or its decline
linked to the neighbor's rise, without change in the total population size or
complexity of the whole region; and the replacement or overthrow of one
governing elite by another. By those standards, most people would consider the
following past societies to have been famous victims of full- fledged collapses
rather than of just minor declines: the Anasazi and Cahokia within the
boundaries of the modern U.S., the Maya cities in Central America, Moche and
Tiwanaku societies in South America, Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete in Europe,
Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat and the Harappan Indus Valley cities in
Asia, and Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean (map, pp. 4–5).
From Collapse by Jared Diamond. Copyright Jared Diamond
2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced
without written permission from the publisher.
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