What Did the Last Easter Islander Say as He Chopped Down the Last Tree?

Photos by Max S. GerberOn a dim January afternoon,under a majestic portrait of a great horned owl that presides over his Bel Air living room, Jared Diamond has spent the day studying Italian. His new book, Collapse:HowSocietiesChooseToFailorSucceed,is burning its way up the best-seller lists. Strings of radio shows and readings lie ahead of him; television hosts he’s never heard of have requested his presence. But Diamond seems cheerfully unbothered; laid out on his coffee table are a notebook, a Larousse English-Italian dictionary and a paperback copy of SinNonOra,Cuando?(“If Not Now, When?”) by Primo Levi — a still life as neat and contemplative as André Kertész’s portrait of Mondrian’s glasses, ashtray and pipe. In another part of the room is an older Steinway baby grand, the lid over its strings lifted but its key cover rolled down — signs that it has been both recently played and meticulously well cared for (people who love their pianos cover the keys). Before he was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, when he was simply a professor and researcher in the physiology department at UCLA and looking for a second career, Diamond considered pursuing music professionally. When he concluded that he wasn’t sufficiently gifted, he started writing books instead. I ask him whether he still plays. “I do, but I’m rusty,” he admits. “Although I’ve been getting some practice in lately. And look, over here,” he says, leading me to a bookshelf near the piano, where there are bound volumes of music by several composers, with an emphasis on Brahms. “I’ve just reorganized all my music.” I ask him which Brahms pieces he plays. “Well,” he smiles, “before I proposed to my wife I played the A-major Intermezzo for her. I thought she’d probably say yes, but I knew she liked it, and I didn’t want to take any chances.” It’s a beautiful, romantic piece of music, one I’ve played since I was a teenager, so I sing a few bars. “That’s the one!” says Diamond, and then begins singing a few bars more. We hum our way through a couple more favorites before Diamond suggests we sit down in the living room. “I bought this house in part because of the acoustics,” he says, gesturing toward his living room’s high ceiling. “We have chamber-music concerts here.” Shortly after I’d read Guns,GermsandSteel:TheFatesofHumanSocieties— a book that, according to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, “changes the way you think” and ultimately won Diamond the Pulitzer Prize — I found a Web site with pictures showing the author crossing a precarious bridge made of vines and frolicking in a crowd of New Guineans. In a couple of the photos, Diamond looked preternaturally boyish and jovial, like an Elven elder in a Tolkien novel: a kindly creature from some other world, seemingly full of wisdom but free of cynicism. The impression in person isn’t much different. Diamond is a slight man, balding, with a thin strip of beard around his jaw that makes him look vaguely Amish, a look that seems to fit with his passion for cultures the West calls primitive, and his indifference toward modern technological toys like televisions. His eyes crinkle up generously when he smiles. In a blue shirt, black slacks, and brown fuzzy slippers made by Arctic Inuits, he seems much younger than he is, not so much because his face hasn't aged, but because of an almost magical sweetness in his small features, a good-natured wonder that most people lose well before college. His voice is equally of some other world: Though he has lived in Los Angeles since the late ’60s, the accent of his native Boston is so pronounced it almost sounds Australian. Or perhaps it is Australian: The country has fascinated him since he visited it on the way to New Guinea for the first time, in 1964; he later spent a sabbatical year in Canberra. “I personally am not conscious of my accent,” he says, “but Marie says my accent is a mishmash of Boston and New York and Britain.” And because he also spent a half-year in Germany and speaks the language fluently, there’s even some German in the mix — in Diamond’s idiolect, there’s a place in the San Fernando Valley called VanNoise.In addition to the German and Italian, Diamond speaks French, Indonesian and Fore, one of several New Guinean languages; at different times he has also spoken Finnish and Spanish, “although,” he admits, “the Italian has pushed that into the background.” In Diamond’s world, time is broken down in increments more geologic than modern — he refers in Collapseto events that happened eight years ago as “recent” — and he sometimes seems several degrees removed from present-day reality, blissfully indifferent to the vagaries of its culture. He nearly turned down an appearance on CharlieRose,his publicist told me, because he didn’t know who Charlie Rose was. “I really haven’t heard of him,” Diamond confirmed in person. “Is he on television?” Television, Diamond says, came to Boston when he was a student in middle school. “And I watched it. I watched HopalongCassidyand ThePerilsofPaulineand TheLoneRanger.By midterm, my grades had dropped, and I knew why.” He stopped watching TV back then, and only started again much later when his twin sons, Max and Joshua, got to be old enough to want to watch sports with their dad. Now that his sons are 17, Diamond says, they enjoy watching the Lakers and occasionally the New England Patriots (not just for their Super Bowl victories but “because Daddy comes from New England,” says Diamond). Beyond that he doesn’t have much use for the medium. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced against it,” he insists. “I just collaborated with NationalGeographicon a three-hour television documentary based on Guns,GermsandSteel.It’s just that I’d rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun. If you gave me 10 million dollars, I wouldn’t live any differently. Although nowadays I guess you’d have to raise that to 20 million to mean anything.” Somewhat paradoxically, Diamond’s enormous capacity to concentrate fully on seemingly arcane pursuits, without the distractions of technology or popular culture, has made Diamond something of a rock star among science writers, with a status approaching the position of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s in evolutionary biology. “Some people would say, ‘Look, if he just focused on one area of interest, for instance on just being a physiologist, there’s no telling what he would have done in the future,’ ” says Ernest Wright, a colleague in physiology at UCLA and friend for 45 years. On the other hand, says Wright, Diamond’s eclecticism was fostered at UCLA, where the former dean, Sherman Mellinkoff, believed multiple careers helped provoke more original thinking. Diamond is a shining example of this philosophy in practice. “His work on evolutionary biology has paved the way for him to understand diabetes,” says Wright. “He gave a research lecture here in the medical school on diabetes, and the origins of diabetes. And where did this come from? It didn’t come from simply studying the language of medicine. He was bringing evolutionary biology to the whole concept of disease.” As with Gould, however, Diamond’s success has sparked some controversy among other scientists who consider popular science cheap. “For my practice, [his work] smacks too much of reductionism,” wrote Peter Von Sivers, a history professor at the University of Utah. “In the field of history it is . . . not quite as new and pathbreaking as it apparently looks in the sciences.” That may be true among historians and scientists, but how would the rest of us know? Few other writers bother to tackle the survival of the race in a way that engages the imagination of the lay public. “It’s a significant problem,” says Diamond. “A lot of scientists and academics are just uninterested in writing for or talking to the public. Even worse, some of them are opposed to those academics who do want to take their work to the public! But if the specialists in a field, the people who know most about a field, are not going to tell the public the take-away messages from the field, how on earth can you expect the best thinking to go on in public circles and in government circles? If we don’t have the facts? Science is just a matter of accurate knowledge of the world. And I see it as the responsibility of scientists; if they have specific knowledge of the world, they ought to share it. If they don’t want to share it, they ought to shut up and let other scientists share it.” The other part of the controversy, as it was with Gould, is no doubt jealousy. A month after its release, Collapseis already that rare, rare thing — a wildly popular book about environmental history, a NewYorkTimesbest-seller, which warns about the consequences of deforestation, global warming and alienating one’s allies. In May, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will mount a full-scale exhibit, COLLAPSE?, inspired by the book; Diamond is already fielding offers for another television special. For all that, though, it is no ripping history saga like Robert Hughes’ TheFatalShoreor Pierre Berton’s TheArcticGrail;it contains, in its 547 pages, not a single character-driven narrative. Instead, Collapseis a chronicle of historical evidence based on modern archaeological research, a story of tree rings and soil samples, centuries-old middens preserved with rat piss in which the feces of warm-weather flies can be sorted from the droppings of their cold-tolerating cousins and used to interpret a culture’s fate (the Greenland Norse, for example, must have run out of fuel as well as food — the flies in their remains were the kind that resist cold). Its language is scholarly, its structure strictly organized around the five factors that Diamond has determined lead to a society’s collapse (environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, the loss of friendly trade partners and a society’s response to its environmental problems). But it is also full of fun and wonder: Collapsemay warn that the end is near, but the warning comes from the same man who asked, in articles for the journals Scienceand Discover,why animals run on legs instead of wheels, why cats survive falls from New York City skyscrapers and why pygmies are small. “I’ve always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself,” he says. “I ask a lot of questions.” Diamond has built a career around those questions. In 1997’s WhyIsSexFun?:TheEvolutionofHumanSexuality,a book dedicated to his wife, Marie, he asks why men don’t get pregnant; in Guns,GermsandSteel:TheFatesofHumanSocietieshe writes a chapter called “How Africa Became Black,” and another, “How China Became Chinese.” (We take China’s apparent homogeneity, from its near-uniform language to the epicanthic fold of its people’s eyes, so much for granted, he writes, “that we forget how astonishing it is.”) “They’re the questions people ask early in their lives, and the answers are so difficult that they stop asking them,” Diamond says. “Why is it that there are these ethnic differences in the United States? Why were Africans being brought here as slaves instead of Europeans being brought as slaves to Aboriginal Australia? They’re the most obvious things in life, but when you get into the details of them — the details! — they’re just fascinating. Why can you ride horses but you can’t ride zebras?” The question at the center of Collapseis far less whimsical, if no less imaginative: “What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree?” It came from one of his students in geography, the subject he now teaches at UCLA, after learning that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui — the Polynesian name for the land that Dutch explorer Jakob Roggeveen named Easter Island in 1722 after landing there on Easter Sunday — turned a fertile land rich in natural palm forest into useless dust over the course of 500 years. And it’s not an altogether unique question: Even Kevin Costner, in 1994, produced a movie called RapaNuithat winds down with a band of islanders throwing aside the land’s lone conservationist so they could fell the last palm. “If we don’t do it,” they shout, “somebody else will.” Variations on the Easter Island question resonate throughout Diamond’s book: Why did the Greenland Norse prefer to starve rather than copy the ways of the Inuit? How did the Anasazi fail to notice that by squandering their piñon on structures, they were eliminating a precious food source? And how do we, in this 21st-century global village, continue to live in denial about impending climate change, something every credible climatologist has confirmed? Some have called the book depressing, but Diamond insists it’s not: Collapsewas not written so that we resign ourselves to the fates of the fallen, the Easter Islanders who destroyed their precious trees, the Greenland Norse who starved amid a sea of nutritious fish. It was written to teach us how not to end up like them. After all, says Diamond, “The Easter Islanders didn’t have anthropologists.”