Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners, and pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems and persisted.
FROM THE CRITICS
Robert D. Kaplan - The Washington Post
In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spatially -- across an array of disciplines -- to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren't. He did this so well in Guns, Germs, and Steel, which has been a huge bestseller since its publication in 1997, that one might think Diamond would have little more to say about the vast sweep of human history. Think again. In his extraordinarily panoramic Collapse, he moves his wide lens to yet another telling phenomenon: failed nations, of both the distant and the recent past.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
Mr. Diamond - who has academic training in physiology, geography and evolutionary biology - is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readily accessible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling. He presents some intriguing digressions about methods used by scientists and historians to diagnose the trajectory of long dead societies, and provides some provocative analyses of current environmental problems in Australia, the United States and China.
Publishers Weekly
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos. Agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson. (Jan.) Forecast: With a 12-city author tour and a 200,000-copy first printing, this BOMC main selection and History Book Club featured alternate is poised to compete with its ground-breaking predecessor. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
The author of Guns, Germs, and Steel considers why some societies collapse when faced with environmental or political catastrophe, while others soldier on. Lessons for today? With a 12-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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A reviewer, February 21, 2005,
Good book
I was looking for more globalization implications tied to modern times. Another good book is Stop Working by Rohan Hall
Also recommended: Stop Working by Rohan Hall
Bobby D., a reader from California, February 15, 2005,
Unintended consequences
This is a startling, enthralling, ever interesting read at least for the fist 400 of its 500 pages. Professor Diamond, a Geographer by training sets about to detail through a pile of evidence how man’s inattention to (or misunderstanding of) his environment can lead to lower and lower standards of livings, and in many cases the total “collapse” of a society. As an Economics major in College I learned two vital truths, that Economics is the science of scarcity, and that it then requires value judgements on how to deal with the distribution of scarce goods. Bottom line, geographer Diamond has written, as best I can determine, a first rate book of economic geography. How the management, use, replenishment of scarce natural resources leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. It is these historical consequences that I found most revealing and entertaining to read about. Your going to learn an awful lot by reading this book and your perspectives may change, or at a minimum will be challenged. Diamond is a very good writer, many chapters read like he is sitting in the room with you explaining his every thought. He can take dry statistics (and there a lot of them) and make them understandable in a few sentences. The early chapters on modern Montana, Easter Island, Pitcarn Island, the Anasazi and Maya and the Norse in Greenland are all just tremendous. As to modern societies I found his study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic especially interesting. My only criticism of the book is that I felt it got a bit redundant and over written in Part four, Practical Lessons. Not that this is not good stuff, but it lacks the historical and entertaining narrative drive Diamond displays in the first three parts of the book. One last note, I had just read the biography of JOHN JAMES AUDUBON: The making of an American (2004) by Richard Rhodes. In that book I found it remarkable how Audubon, during his lifetime, recorded the wholesale slaughter and disappearance of many birds, and of most forested areas he visited. For me, this could be another example of how we have depleted scarce resources over a short period of time. Unfortunately, I am much more environmentally pessimistic after reading Mr. Diamond’s wonderful book.
Pankaj Saxena (pankaj_saxena19842004@yahoo.co.uk), A reviewer, January 24, 2005,
Lack of Latitudinal Analysis
It was a good experience to read the book. In fact I was introduced to such topics by this very book. But the view that European Imperialists flourished best in the latitudes corresponding with Europe is missing. In fact it is not much stressed. I think a little more of the history of flaura and fauna would do. But nonethless it is excellent.
Also recommended: Ecological Imperialism - Allen Crosby
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