Product Description

From groundbreaking writer and thinker Jared Diamond comes an epic, visionary new book on the mysterious collapse of past civilizations - and what this means for our future. Why do some societies flourish, while others founder? What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island or to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Collapse also shows how unlike our ancestors we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3241 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-26
• Released on: 2006-01-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

About the Author
Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until recently he was Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which also is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

Customer Reviews

Note well the word "collapse"--it can happen fast
This is an outstanding piece of work, in some ways even better than Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) which I highly recommend. Here, instead of explaining why wealth and power accrued to European states and not, for example, to South America states, Diamond demonstrates mostly how some societies failed. Along the way he contrasts the failures with some successes, and in the latter part of the book addresses current problems and possible solutions.

He begins with modern Montana, specifically Bitterroot Valley, a society in danger of failing because of deforestation, pollution, loss of productive top soil, and other factors. He follows this with Part 2, "Past Societies" in which the melancholy history of Easter Island and some other Pacific Islands is retold in fascinating detail. I was especially interested in the material on Easter Island, which, because of its relative isolation from the rest of the world over many centuries, has always served in my mind as a microcosmic cautionary tale for the entire planet. Although I have read other books about Easter Island and have seen a couple of documentaries, I found Diamond's exposition full of new information, offering fresh insights into how that society collapsed.

Also delineated in remarkably readable detail are the collapses of the Anasazi of the US southwest, the Maya in Mesoamerica, the Viking-founded colonies in the north Atlantic and especially in Greenland. There is some excellent material on how Iceland succeeded (barely) and how the New Guinea highland people managed to avoid the fate of some other Pacific Island societies, and why Japan succeeded in saving its forests and croplands in the time of the Tokugawa. Note that these stories are primarily about ecological successes or failures, not successes or failures due to political or military misadventures.

What surprised me about the failed societies is that the most destructive thing the people did was cut down their forests to plant food crops. Again and again, from Easter Island to Greenland, the effect of cutting down trees was devastating because it allowed wind and rain to remove the topsoil, either blowing it away or washing it down gullies and rivers into the sea. In the case of Easter Island, using up all the timber resulted in an inability to fish since without wood the people could not build boats.

People also clear forests to create pastures for grazing their livestock. This also proved disastrous in some cases, especially when the animals were sheep and goats, who typically graze right down to the roots of plants, and can thereby quickly strip the vegetation from great tracks of land.

But the common link between all societal ecological disasters is simple, and one of great importance to us all today. All those societies--Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, etc.--allowed their populations to grow beyond the carrying capacity of their environment. That is the bottom line for all of humanity. Hungry people do desperate things, as Diamond recalls in the chapter on Rwanda. When too many people share too little space and resources, laws and morality break down, governments fall and people kill one another massively. All peoples do this. No human race or ethnic group is exempt. It could happen here. Diamond's book is a warning that we all need to hear and appreciate. We are part of the ecology, and not above it. We need to live in harmony with the rest of the planet and not imagine that we can treat the planet and its resources with carelessness, abuse and neglect.

Toward the end of the book, Diamond gives his prescription on how we might avoid the fate of the failed societies. He notes on page 214 that bad things can happen "when parents take good care of their individual children but not of their children's future." He is referring to the parents of friends "who bought life insurance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children," but "blundered into the disaster of World War II."

I think Diamond nails it with this observation. Today's soccer moms (and dads) with all our affluence and all the care we put into our children's and grandchildren's future may be failing because we are not electing the kind of leadership that will provide for their future. High deficients (greedily borrowing from our children and grandchildren) and lack of consideration for the environment, through the depletion of fossil fuels and the pollution of fresh water sources and the air, etc., may completely override anything we might do for our children.

Diamond also says that at some point societies have to realize which core values are worth maintaining and which no longer make sense in light of current circumstances (p. 440 and elsewhere). He cites the example of the Greenland Norse who maintained their European values and lifestyles and died out when they might have survived had they taken on the Inuit lifestyle and learned to hunt ringed seals and whales and build igloos. Additionally there is the sad example of Easter Island where they continued to worship greedy gods (and their priests) and built statues instead of using their resources to maintain their forests and topsoil.

I think Diamond's argument especially applies to the false gods some people follow today, the Bronze Aged gods of fundamentalist religions who fear progressive change and continue to seek solutions through violence, intolerance, and the defeat of "enemies."

In reading about the various collapses here one is struck by what they had in common. In every case there were too many people chasing too few resources. At peak times on Easter Island or among the Maya, great monuments were build to celebrate the society's success. And then came the fall soon after. Diamond warns that the crash is typically not gradual like human senescence, but abrupt, following fast on the heels of the society's finest hour.

Fifteen Years.
It was Jared Diamond's answer to the last question of a presentation of "Collapse" at Frankfurt University's Museum of Natural Sciences. Given the comparative shortness of human existence in our planet's entire history, what does it matter, someone asked, "if in 20,000 years or so we do exterminate ourselves, and another species takes over. It's happened to the dinosaurs and the mammoths ... why should we be any different?" My own thoughts had run along similar lines earlier that evening: surrounded by skeletons of species extinct for 100,000s of years, I had recalled a recent visit to a historic museum chronicling social development in a part of Germany -- and I, too, had reflected on the rocket speed that had brought us from the Stone Age to the 21st century, and I had wondered, "what if?"

Yet, even knowing the book presented that evening and its author, his answer came as a clarion call. "I don't think we have another 20,000 years," Jared Diamond said in his impeccable German and with the same unassuming, polite composure with which he had answered all preceding questions. And he added: "I think it's closer to fifteen years."

Fifteen -- not fifteen thousand or even just fifteen hundred. In the grand scheme of cosmological development, that's less than a millisecond.

And this is precisely why "Collapse" is so important. For much more than exploring select past societies' failures (primarily those of pre-European Easter Island, the Anasazi, Maya and Vikings), which it contrasts with select success stories (New Guinea, Japan), it actually asks what we, living today, have to learn from the past in order to avoid the fatal mistakes of those unable to secure their own survival; a question highlighted even by the book's very first chapter, which examines no past society at all but modern-day Montana: serene, sparesly-populated, big-skied, mountain-river-and-valley-graced Montana, which both geographically and figuratively seems leagues away from the problems associated with modern metropoles like New York and Los Angeles (or isolated Polynesian Easter Island, for that matter), and whose social, political and ecological landscape is nevertheless every bit as fragile as theirs. Indeed, for us today the issue is no longer a mere matter of one society's (or species's) extinction in favor of another. For us, Jared Diamond emphasizes, the issue is that of our planet's survival as such. In this, our situation actually does very much resemble that of the Easter Island's inhabitants, who had nowhere to go after depriving themselves of their natural resources by reckless logging and their island's resulting desertification, and who were ultimately driven into cannibalism. Like their island to them, our earth to us is the only inhabitable world ... in our own solar system (tried to settle on Mars or Venus lately?) and probably also beyond: for all we know, those far-away galaxies of "Star Trek," "Star Wars" and Discworld belong to the world of science fiction only; "fiction" being the operative word.

Bearing this in mind, the subtitle of "Collapse" is as important, and even more telling than the book's title itself: "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." It indicates that: (1) failure, even under adverse conditions, is not a necessity; and (2) whether (or how well) a society survives depends crucially on its values and goals, and the choices resulting therefrom, both collectively and individually. And of all the factors that Jared Diamond highlights as impacting a society's survival -- environmental changes, changes and conflicts of interest within that society, changes in neighboring societies and in the two societies' relationships, technological advances, and the inability, unwillingness or other failure to anticipate or acknowledge the impact of choices made -- it seems to me that this last point, the question how we play the hand we've dealt ourselves by our past and present choices, will ultimately prove decisive. The author himself likes to say he is "cautiously optimistic" in this regard, pointing to his eighteen-year-old twins, who have practically their entire life yet to live. I hope, however, that his answer will also prove justified by the growing respect he enjoys in public opinion and with national and international decisionmakers.

So does he have all the answers? No -- and he himself would probably be the first to emphasize that he actually has more questions than answers (only coming from him, it wouldn't sound like a cliche). Is "Collapse" argued less stringently than, say, his Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Guns, Germs and Steel"? Personally I don't think so, but I'm admittedly biased. What's the use of "popular science writing" anyway -- why doesn't he, like any other good scientist, seek peer review and a discussion with his colleagues? Well, I believe that he does enjoy a spirited scientific debate and welcomes comments that force him to put his own theories to the test. Yet, it only takes one look at the broad space that pseudo-arguments like those he refutes as "one-line objections" at the end of "Collapse" still occupy in the public debate ("The environment must be balanced against the economy," "Technology will save us," "This is just another end-of-the-world-prophecy like the many that have already proved false in the past," "Environmental concerns are a first-world luxury," and of course the ubiquitous, "Why shoud I care anyway?") to realize this book's necessity. This is also why I have decided to set aside my reluctance to review any of his books; although personal acquaintance and unconditional respect render me patently incapable of objectivity, and a review like this might be construed as an exercise in flaunting an association with an internationally renowned scientist and award-winning author (even worse, one occasioned not by any achievement of my own but by mere coincidence). But "Collapse" concerns us all -- it's as simple as that.

In signing my copy, Jared referenced the aforementioned never close, but long-lasting acquaintance: "to 2005 ---." Both on a personal and a global level, I hope those three dashes stand for much, much more than fifteen years.

Fascinating look at societies that imploded
Readers familiar with Mr. Diamond's best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel will recognize the recipe in this book: a tightly-woven blend of archaeology, geography, geology, and economics that offers up a big-picture answer to the question of why some societies simply collapse.
Though the author can get tendentious at times and tends to lend inordinate primacy to strictly environmental factors, his case studies make for great --and chilling-- reading.
The reconstruction of the agony of Easter Island is an extreme but cautionary story of a community brought to civil war, cannibalism, and almost complete societal collapse basically because they cut down too many trees.
A much more valuable contribution to the state of the world, and especially the gospel of sustainable development, than most titles out there.