Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Editorial Review

In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe--one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist's diatribe. He begins by setting the book's main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.

Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
• Compelling Reading for Concerned Residents of Planet Earth
  Human history is full of tantalizing riddles. Some of the most fascinating of these arise from the appearance of ancient ruins in unlikely places, such as Easter Island, or the dense jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. To the uninitiated, these ruins are the ghosts of phantom civilizations whose disappearance is a mystery to our 21st Century minds. But like geologists reading Earth's history in the rocks, archaeologists can often read the history of past civilizations by studying the records of these... more info
• Thorough, significant, and relevant anthropology
  The only unfortunate aspect of Diamond's comparative history is that it too often gets confused with the work of James Kunstler because both wrote books that appeal to readers interested in climate change. The difference is that Diamond is an actual geographer while Kunstler is just a lunatic. Collapse uses an anthropological framework to analyze extinct societies in terms of their relationship to the environment, including an extensive discussion of modern societies in varying degrees of social collapse... more info
• A Compelling But Imperfect Look Into Environmental Reasons For Collapse And What It Means For Our World
  First, let me say the real score I'd want to give this book is a 3.5 or 3.75.
  First, on a more superficial level, it could have used another round or two of editing. There are multiple occasions where he hammers home the same point multiple times for the same culture, particularly in Chapters 6-8 dealing with the Greenland Norse. This book could have been slimmer by a solid 40-50 pages without losing much.
  Also, he rarely cites his sources directly in the text, often just referring to researcher... more info
• Read this book.
  This comprehensive look at humanity's impact on our environments (past and present) is a critical read for everyone alive today. I found it so important that I bought five copies and sent them to family and friends.
  The first chapter is pretty slow--though I've been contradicted on this--but from there on the book really takes off, so stick with it. Lovers of history will thoroughly enjoy the sections on past societies, and anyone concerned with or curious about the global environmental challenges we... more info

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