Lines of Flight

Although Jared Diamond didn't have too many illuminating ideas in regards to our topic of population, reading sections of Collapse did help us figure out more narrow questions about population that we are interested in pursuing next fall when we pick the working group back up.

1. Diamond essentially views people as consumers of resources and energy, is this legitimate, or are people able to have more of a positive ecological effects? (Potential further reading in Serres's Parasite)

2. For Diamond, it pretty much all boiled down to population density and food production. Population does need to be looked at in terms of processes, but these seem to basic, what are the isomorphic processes humans use to deal with the issues Diamond presents, as well as other issues, that are more pertinent to human populations.

3. Numbers suggest that the world's population growing at a decreasing rate. Is it possible for human population to level out? What are the factors that allow or disallow this from occurring?

4. It has been suggested the issue of resources is not so much Malthusian as economic. That is, it doesn't matter if population levels out or decreases if the economy grows and uses more resources. Loosely founded on this thought, there has recently been a proposal by French leaders to function as a capitalist economy without actually growing. Is this possible? Is it possible for any society to avoid growth? Is a generation's conception of well-being dependent upon being better off than their parents?

5. In what ways is it useful, or even necessary, to think of population in ecological terms?

6. In a similar vein as population as ecology, to what extent are individuals able to conceptualize themselves as active participants in a population? For example, it is rather easy for individuals to understand thar there is mutually dependence within a family unit, but can a person make the same connection to a larger scale population, and if so, to how large of a population?

7. What are the pluses and minuses of population engineering? Could there be a way to do it without the potential for major negative side effects?

For those who couldn't make it to the first meeting, feel free add any other questions that the reading or these questions bring to mind.

Live Blog for "Collapse" Meeting

On Grand Narratives

The first thing that struck me about the readings was the fact that Diamond seems to be unapologetically creating a master narrative of civilization. He says that his first book, Guns, Germs and Steel, is about “the different rates of buildup of human societies … over the last 13,000 years” (18). And now Collapse tells us exactly the opposite, how societies fail to "build up." Postmodernists like ourselves have been trained to be skeptical of such master narratives, to see historical events as more strongly impacted by chance and contingency. I think that the way that Diamond creates these narratives actually does have a lot to do with reducing people to populations. This is especially evident in the chapter on Rwanda. Here he reduces occurrences that have the timbre of individual dramas, such as brothers being suspicious of one another and orphans being disinherited, to population-level dynamics. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but I wonder how much is being lost in these descriptions. Just as in his account of the collapse of Easter Island, he describes how environmental and social factors lead to populations behaving in certain ways, but it strikes me that what's missing in the Rwandan case is that we actually have the means to discuss these things on the level of the individual as well. How would a Rwandan from the regions he analyzes think about his idea of "resolution by conflict?"

The other idea that interested me has to do with his master-narrative as well. To him it seems obvious that the success of a population involves "human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity" (3), and he defines collapse as the opposite of this. As someone who has always had a vague fantasy of running off to a small, sustainable agricultural commune, I wonder whether there is a possibility that "collapse" itself is a product of the belief that large, complex populations are what makes a "good" society. I don't mean to sound idealistic or hokey here, but is there a radical third option between collapse and "success?"