E-mail a friendJared Diamond
airdate July 20, 2005
Scientist Jared Diamond writes widely acclaimed books that the general public can understand. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his national best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is the basis for a new PBS series. A professor of geography at UCLA, Diamond is also a conservationist who has participated in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. In his newest book, Collapse, he explores critical lessons to be learned from the ecological collapses of past civilizations.
Jared Diamond
Tavis: Dr. Jared Diamond is a professor of geography, environmental science, and physiology at UCLA and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." That book now is the basis for a terrific series of specials airing this month, in fact, right here on PBS. His latest book is called "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Dr. Diamond, nice to have you here, sir.
Jared Diamond: It's a pleasure to be with you.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you. That is a fascinating--it is at once a fascinating and awfully ambitious question. How did the world become so unequal? I suspect then, guns, germs, and steel has something to do with that answer?
Diamond: That's right. The immediate answer we all know is guns, germs, and steel. Namely some people ended up with guns and steel and nasty germs, and that enabled them to defeat or in some cases exterminate other people who didn't have guns and steel and nasty germs. But the real question is why did some people end up with guns, germs, and steel while others didn't, and that's the biggest question of history.
Tavis: And what is the answer to that question?
Diamond: In one sentence, the answer is the origins of agriculture, beginning ten and a half thousand years ago, because agriculture permits a population explosion, food surpluses that can feed specialists who can then devote themselves to figuring out how to produce metal and tend animals and figure out writing systems and be kings. So agriculture was the prerequisite for guns, germs, and steel.
Tavis: So the fact that some people had that and some people did not have access to that, is that a conspiracy theory, is it racism, is it coincidence, is it et cetera, et cetera?
Diamond: It's none of those things. It's instead what you can call the luck of the draw of geography, or a real-estate agent would say it's location, location, location. That's...-when I got into this, naively I assumed anybody anywhere in the world could end up being a farmer, because you just go out and grow the plants and animals around you. But it turns out that only a tiny fraction of wild plants and animals are suitable to domesticate. For example, here in southern California, the sage scrub or the chaparral around us doesn't have much in the way of plants that are useful to eat, but the Fertile Crescent of southwest Asia was home to wild wheat and barley and peas. Those are still among the most valuable crops of the world, and that's where also wild sheep and goats and cows and horses and pigs lived. So the Fertile Crescent had the most valuable domesticable plants and animals. That's where the first farmers arose ten and a half thousand years ago, and they got a huge head start towards guns, germs, and steel.
Tavis: Help me understand something then, and I'm just a layman here. The United States is the world's last remaining superpower. We have the biggest and the baddest and, one could argue, the best of almost everything. I can't believe that our geography is the only thing that caused us to be in this superior position. There are other parts of globe that have pretty good geography where many of those issues, certainly with farming is concerned, offers them a wonderful opportunity, and yet they are nowhere near equal to the power and the awesome nature of the United States of America.
Diamond: That's true. There's not just geography, but there are also cultural factors that play in, and the United States, that you raise as a good example, the United States is wealthy today not because of its own native crops and animals. The Native Americans who lived in what's now the United States, until the time of Columbus, yes, they had some complex societies like the Anastasi in the southwest and the Mississippi nail builders in the southeast, but they were not on route to metal tools and they didn't have writing. Instead, Europeans acquired those. Europeans didn't develop these powerful things themselves. They developed in the fertile crescent and then crops and animals and metal and writing and empires moved into Europe from Southwest Asia, and then Europeans came to North America bringing wheat and cows and sheep so that the animals and crops that are the basis of the food production of America today, the reason why we are the most productive country for agricultural is imported Eurasian crops.
Tavis: The reason why I'm pressing this and because with all due respect to your winning a Pulitzer Prize for this work, I want to talk more about the PBS special and certainly about your book "Collapse" in the seen minutes that I have left in this conversation. There's a lot I want to cover. But the reason I raise this is and I'm pressing this is because I don't want to leave this conversation thinking that is an over simplification, with all due respect to your work, to say that the world is unequal, that the world is imbalanced, Just because of geography or even primarily because of geography. Because that seems to take out of the equation, as I view it, the will and the intent and the behavior of people who either use that geography to their advantage and bastardize others use of it. You see what I'm getting at here? I wonder if geography is, with all respect to you, an oversimplification, even though this has won a Pulitzer Prize.
Diamond: Necessarily, in 7 minutes compressing a 520 page book, anything I say is an oversimplification.
Tavis: I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I'm just trying to make sure that I get this.
Diamond: Sure, yeah. But coming to your point, at the levels of whole continents, there's no evidence that, say, the Aboriginal Australians were any less get up and go than were Europeans and Chinese people. But Aboriginal Australia didn't have animals suitable for domestication. We still don't have domestic kangaroos. So, of course, Aboriginal Australians remain hunter-gathers. But then within a continent, to explain the differences between what happened in Europe and in India and in China and different parts of Europe in the Fertile Crescent, there you really have to start thinking about differences due to cultural. Or to go back to the question you asked a few minutes, why is the United States the most powerful and richest country in the world today? There's probably a big role of the fact that the United States was colonized from England with British institutions including relatively democratic institutions as compared to South America, who was colonized from Spain that brought over a more oligarchic society and exploitative society. So there is an example of the role of cultural, to defend myself of the charge of oversimplification.
Tavis: Fair enough. I respect that. Tell me what you have attempted to do in this PBS series. It's in three parts. What are we trying to get across from this deep and delicious book in a three-part PBS series?
Diamond: In the three-part PBS series, we're trying to make complex ideas of this book accessible and vivid for a large audience, including children who would not read the book, and adults who have other things to do and would rather watch TV. There are things you can do with TV that you can't do with--you can make things vivid. And just as an example, in the second program that we saw on Monday night, I'm trying to explain the origin of diseases like smallpox and measles from diseases of our domestic animals. So what "National Geographic" did was to put me in a pig sty with this 400 pound pig. And the pig is rooting around. I'm giving my lines. It takes me six tries, six takes get my lines correct. But the pig doesn't get his lines correct, and it takes four takes for the pig to get his line correct. But then after 10 takes, we've got a vivid explanation, a vivid illustration of the arrival of germs, in this case flu from our domestic animals. And it's much more vivid and convincing than Jared Diamond's 3,000 words of prose in this book.
Tavis: Ah, the wonders of television.
Diamond: Yes, the wonders of television.
Tavis: You shot this thing on four different continents.
Diamond: I personally was involved in shooting it in Spain, and in Africa, I shot in South Africa and Zambia, and then I shot on the island of New Guinea north of Australia, while the "National Geographic" TV crew went on themselves to shoot in Peru, recreating the Battle of Cajamarca. And in the last episode, we showed what they did shooting in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia and China.
Tavis: See, the problem with writing these polemics, these deep 500 page books is I can't do justice to it in a 10 minute conversation. Tell me right quick what the book I did not get a chance to get to in detail, "Collapse," is about.
Diamond: "Collapse" is about societies succeeding or failing. Some associates have collapsed. The Soviet Union recently. Easter Island and the Mayan, the most advanced civilization in the new world before Columbus in the Yucatan Peninsula collapsed. So the book is about why societies collapse today or in the past, and it's a mixture of environmental problems, climate change, enemies, friends, how a society responds. It also looks at societies that succeeded: Japan and Iceland have gone on for thousands of years without any big collapses. And then it looks at the lessons that would help us today become one of success stories instead of one of the failures.
Tavis: Give me right quick a country that you most think is on the verge, potentially, of a collapse?
Diamond: 25 countries are on the verge of collapse, including Haiti, sadly in the new world, Nepal in the Himalayas, the Philippines in Indonesia have big problems. Rwanda could have problems again. That's a short list.
Tavis: He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. You see why. And his work has been turned into a major PBS special. It is called "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," written by UCLA professor, distinguished professor there, Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Diamond, nice to have you on the program.
Diamond: It's a pleasure.
Tavis: Glad to have you here, sir. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on public radio this weekend and every weekend on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Thanks for watching, good night from
L.A., and keep the faith.
Back to July 20, 2005