Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (6 page)

us today. Chapter 14 asks the perplexing question arising for every past so
ciety that ended up destroying itself, and that will perplex future earthlings
if we too end up destroying ourselves: how could a society fail to have seen
the dangers that seem so clear to us in retrospect? Can we say that their end
was the inhabitants' own fault, or that they were instead tragic victims of in
soluble problems? How much past environmental damage was uninten
tional and imperceptible, and how much was perversely wrought by people
acting in full awareness of the consequences? For instance, what were Easter
Islanders saying as they cut down the last tree on their island? It turns out
that group decision-making can be undone by a whole series of factors, be
ginning with failure to anticipate or perceive a problem, and proceeding through conflicts of interest that leave some members of the group to pur
sue goals good for themselves but bad for the rest of the group.

Chapter 15 considers the role of modern businesses, some of which are
among the most environmentally destructive forces today, while others pro
vide some of the most effective environmental protection. We shall examine
why some (but only some) businesses find it in their interests to be protective, and what changes would be necessary before other businesses would
find it in their interests to emulate them.

Finally, Chapter 16 summarizes the types of environmental dangers fac
ing the modern world, the commonest objections raised against claims of
their seriousness, and differences between environmental dangers today
and those faced by past societies. A major difference has to do with global
ization, which lies at the heart of the strongest reasons both for pessimism
and for optimism about our ability to solve our current environmental
problems. Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to col
lapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past.
Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote
—think of Somalia and
Afghanistan as examples—can cause trouble for prosperous societies on
other continents, and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or
destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global de
cline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly
from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from
what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote
this book.

PART ONE

MODERN MONTANA

Under Montana's Big Sky

Stan Falkow's story
m
Montana and me
■ Why begin with Montana? ■

Montana's economic history
it
Mining
■ Forests ■ Soil ■ Water ■

Native and non-native species
■ Differing visions ■

Attitudes towards regulation
■ Rick Laible's story ■

Chip Pigman's story 11 Tim Huls's story
■ John Cook's story ■

Montana, model of the world
■

When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of mi
crobiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had
bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me
how it had fitted into the story of his life:

"I was born in New York State and then moved to Rhode Island. That meant that, as a child, I knew nothing about mountains. While I was in my
early 20s, just after graduating college, I took off a couple of years from my
education to work on the night shift in a hospital autopsy room. For a
young person like myself without previous experience of death, it was very stressful. A friend who had just returned from the Korean War and had seen
a lot of stress there took one look at me and said, 'Stan, you look nervous;
you need to reduce your stress level. Try fly-fishing!'

"So I started fly-fishing to catch bass. I learned how to tie my own flies,
really got into it, and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right:
it did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation. A fellow graduate student told me
that bass weren't the only fish that one could catch by fly-fishing: I could also fly-fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So I took up trout-fishing.
My thesis supervisor loved to eat fish, and he encouraged me to go fishing:
those were the only occasions when he didn't frown at my taking time off
from work in the laboratory.

"Around the time that I turned 50, it was another stressful period of my
life, because of a difficult divorce and other things. By then, I was taking off time to go fly-fishing only three times a year. Fiftieth birthdays make many
of us reflect on what we want to do with what's left of our lives. I reflected 
on my own father's life, and I remembered that he had died at age 58.1 realized with a jolt that, if I were to live only as long as he did, I could count on
only 24 more fly-fishing trips before I died. That felt like very few times to
do something that I enjoyed so much. The realization made me start think
ing about how I could spend more of my time doing what I really liked
during the years that I had left, including fly-fishing.

"At that point, I happened to be asked to go evaluate a research labora
tory in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. I had never been to
Montana before; in fact, I had never even been west of the Mississippi River
until I was 40 years old. I flew into Missoula airport, picked up a rental car,
and began to drive south to the town of Hamilton where the lab was located. A dozen miles south of Missoula is a long straight stretch of road
where the valley floor is flat and covered with farmland, and where the snowcapped Bitterroot Mountains on the west and the Sapphire Mountains on the east rise abruptly from the valley. I was overwhelmed by the beauty
and scale of it; I had never seen anything like it before. It filled me with a sense of peace, and with an extraordinary perspective on my place in the
world.

"When I arrived at the lab, I ran into a former student of mine who was
working there and knew about my interest in fly-fishing. He suggested that I
come back the next year to do some experiments at the lab, and also to go
fly-fishing for trout, for which the Bitterroot River is famous. So I returned
the next summer with the intention of spending two weeks, and I ended up
staying a month. The summer after that, I came intending to stay a month
and ended up staying for the whole summer, at the end of which my wife
and I bought a house in the valley. We have been coming back ever since,
spending a large part of each year in Montana. Every time I return to the
Bitterroot, when I enter it on that stretch of road south of Missoula, that
first sight of the valley fills me again with that same feeling of tranquility
and grandeur, and that same perspective on my relation to the universe. It's easier to preserve that sense in Montana than anywhere else."

That's what the beauty of Montana does to people: both to those who had
grown up in places completely unlike it, like Stan Falkow and me; to other
friends, like John Cook, who grew up in other mountainous areas of the
American West but still found themselves drawn to Montana; and to still
other friends, like the Hirschy family, who did grow up in Montana and
chose to stay there.

Like Stan Falkow, I was born in the northeastern U.S. (Boston) and had
never been west of the Mississippi until the age of 15, when my parents took
me to spend a few weeks of the summer in the Big Hole Basin just south of
the Bitterroot Valley (map, p. 31). My father was a pediatrician who had
taken care of a ranchers' child, Johnny Eliel, afflicted by a rare disease for
which his family pediatrician in Montana had recommended that he go to
Boston for specialty treatment. Johnny was a great-grandson of Fred
Hirschy Sr., a Swiss immigrant who became one of the pioneer ranchers in
the Big Hole in the 1890s. His son Fred Jr., by the time of my visit 69 years old, was still running the family ranch, along with his grown sons Dick and
Jack Hirschy and his daughters Jill Hirschy Eliel (Johnny's mother) and Joyce
Hirschy McDowell. Johnny did well under my father's treatment, and so his
parents and grandparents invited our family to come visit them.

Also like Stan Falkow, I was immediately overwhelmed by the Big Hole's
setting: a broad flat valley floor covered with meadows and meandering
creeks, but surrounded by a wall of seasonally snow-covered mountains rising abruptly on every horizon. Montana calls itself the "Big Sky State." It's
really true. In most other places where I've lived, either one's view of the
lower parts of the sky is obscured by buildings, as in cities; or else there are
mountains but the terrain is rugged and the valleys are narrow, so one sees
only a slice of the sky, as in New Guinea and the Alps; or else there is a broad
expanse of sky but it's less interesting, because there is no ring of distinctive
mountains on the horizon
—as on the plains of Iowa and Nebraska. Three
years later, while I was a student in college, I came back for the summer to
Dick Hirschy's ranch with two college friends and my sister, and we all
worked for the Hirschys on the hay harvest, I driving a scatterrake, my sister
a buckrake, and my two friends stacking hay.

After that summer of 1956, it was a long time before I returned to Montana. I spent my summers in other places that were beautiful in other ways,
such as New Guinea and the Andes, but I couldn't forget Montana or the
Hirschys. Finally, in 1998 I happened to receive an invitation from a private
non-profit foundation called the Teller Wildlife Refuge in the Bitterroot
Valley. It was an opportunity to bring my own twin sons to Montana, at an
age only a few years younger than the age at which I had first visited the
state, and to introduce them to fly-fishing for trout. My boys took to it; one
°f them is now learning to be a fishing guide. I reconnected to Montana and
revisited my rancher boss Dick Hirschy and his brother and sisters, who
^w
ere now in their 70s and 80s, still working hard all year round, just as
when I had first met them 45 years previously. Since that reconnection, my 
wife and sons and I have been visiting Montana every year
—drawn to it ul
timately by the same unforgettable beauty of its big sky that drew or kept
my other friends there (Plates 1-3).

That big sky grew on me. After living for so many years elsewhere, I found that it took me several visits to Montana to get used to the panorama of the sky above, the mountain ring around, and the valley floor below
—to appreciate that I really could enjoy that panorama as a daily setting for part
of my life—and to discover that I could open myself up to it, pull myself
away from it, and still know that I could return to it. Los Angeles has its own
practical advantages for me and my family as a year-round base of work,
school, and residence, but Montana is infinitely more beautiful and (as Stan
Falkow said) peaceful. To me, the most beautiful view in the world is the
view down to the Big Hole's meadows and up to the snowcapped peaks of
the Continental Divide, as seen from the porch of Jill and John Eliel's ranch
house.

Montana in general, and the Bitterroot Valley in its southwest, are a land of paradoxes. Among the lower 48 states, Montana is the third largest in area,
yet the sixth smallest in population, hence the second lowest in population
density. Today the Bitterroot Valley looks lush, belying its original natural
vegetation of just sagebrush. Ravalli County in which the valley is located is
so beautiful and attracts so many immigrants from elsewhere in the U.S.
(including even from elsewhere in Montana) that it is one of our nation's
fastest growing counties, yet 70% of its own high school graduates leave the
valley, and most of those leave Montana. Although population is increasing
in the Bitterroot, it is falling in eastern Montana, so that for the state of
Montana as a whole the population trend is flat. Within the past decade the number of Ravalli County residents in their 50s has increased steeply, but
the number in their 30s has actually decreased. Some of the people recently establishing homes in the valley are extremely wealthy, such as the broker
age house founder Charles Schwab and the Intel president Craig Barrett,
but Ravalli County is nevertheless one of the poorest counties in the state of
Montana, which in turn is nearly the poorest state in the U.S. Many of the
county's residents find that they have to hold two or three jobs even to earn
an income at U.S. poverty levels.

We associate Montana with natural beauty. Indeed, environmentally Montana is perhaps the least damaged of the lower 48 states; ultimately, that's the main reason why so many people are moving to Ravalli County.