Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #246550 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Customer Reviews

Fascinating stories - unconvincing conclusions
The book starts with a fascinating collection of stories about historical societies that have collapsed due to ecological disasters. These stories are very fascinating and include stories such as: Easter Island, The Norse in Greenland and the collapse of the Maya civilisation.

Later in the book Diamond moves on to describe moderns problems and this is where the book gets confusing. He has chapters about mining waste in Montana and erosion of soil in Australia. The country of Australia is not likely to collapse due to soil erosion (And Diamond admits that), so why did he put a chapter about Australia in his book about collapsing societies?

Summing up there are a lot of good stories in the book, and it does make a lasting impression, but the editor should have forced Diamond to remove those chapters that are not relevant to his central point. That could have made the book more trustworthy and clearcut.

A humourless, ponderous treatise
This book can be found in the popular-science section of book shops yet is categorised by Penguin, its publisher, as an history book. Neither label does it full justice. Instead, it seems to be an ecological survey of a remote region of the United States (Montana) where the author spends his vacations and whose inhabitants he occasionally quotes, such as: "I like trees. They oughtn't cut them down". As such it is mind-numbingly, bone-achingly, tediously dull. Imagine the most boring geography lesson you ever had and then rather than its being a single or (God forbid) double period imagine it was all day and you weren't even allowed a break for lunch. Do that and you will begin to approach the boredom of reading this book. Undoubtedly Diamond is a very clever man -- loads of people enjoy his books and heap praise on him -- only as far as I'm concerned he flatly fails to infect the reader with his own enthusiasm for the subject matter in this case.

Too often -- right from the start, in fact -- he gets bogged down with unnecessary fine details. Essentially there's too much information and this reader at least suffered from information overload. Do we really need to know all about Montana's disused mines, forest fires, soil erosion, irrigation, etc.? Who cares? I want to know about those ancient Mayan cities poking out of the jungle and the stone statues of Easter Island. But to get to those bits one must wade through the environmental concerns of a nondescript US state. I'm glad I didn't pay the full RRP for this. Montanans, Diamond's friends (especially the ones he mentions, which means most of them), members of radical environmental campaigning groups, and academics with an interest in this area will enjoy this book. The curious lay reader will be disappointed. There are many excellent communicators of complex issues out there. Diamond isn't one of them.

Those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them, aren't we?
American polymath Jared Diamond first turns to past societies to try and make sense of our present environmental predicament and to warn us of our future. Why did certain societies rush headlong to turmoil and collapse when in retrospect they must have been able to see the potential consequences of their actions, while others survived intact? Did this mean that some peoples were more rapacious or reckless than others? Is modern America heading in the same direction? Will one day in the future human beings stand and gaze at the skyscrapers of New York and shake their heads in knowing pity the way that we stare in sad wonderment at the enigmatic moai of Easter Island or overgrown Mayan ruins? The author takes twenty-first century Montana as a modern example of a land very badly abused in the recent past and with an environmental future in the balance, by delving deeply into its social history and fabric. Her then takes a look back at the meltdown on Easter Island, pre-Bounty Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the native American civilizations of New Mexico, the collapse of the Maya, and the disappearance of the Greenland Vikings. Each case study is assessed in terms of five possible contributing factors that could have led to environmental collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners (lack of) and, perhaps most significantly, the society's responses to its environmental problems. All the case study societies were subjected to this five-point framework. At least one of these factors played a role in the collapse of all the societies reviewed, and in one all five contributed.
But what about today? Why did Rwanda implode? How have some Polynesian societies like Tikopia survived against the odds while others have vanished? How have technologically simple societies in New Guinea and Australia managed to survive for over 40,000 years (including 7000 years of agriculture in New Guinea), while modern-day Europeans Australians already live on an environmental time bomb of their own making after just a couple of hundred years? Why has the Dominican Republic, poor as it is, managed far better than Haiti, sharing the same island and separated only by a political boundary? The in-depth case studies, fascinating in their own right, finally make way for an expansive assessment of the current global situation, dreadful as it, and some cautiously hopeful conclusions based on evidence of the past and certain mind shifts in the present, notably greener business practices (if motivated by self-preservation). In the end, much depends on good governance and an educated or pliable populace.
This is a refreshing and highly intelligent way of looking at the current world written in precise language and related almost in story form with humour despite the gravity of the subject, and with profound human concern. I take on board the criticisms of excessive length and repetition but I prefer to use the term reiteration because it is still basically an educational text. Also, even small, technologically simple societies are microcosms of some modern societies and can act as models. The principals (planning and decisions in the light of available information) are the same today if the details differ. Sophisticated technology may aid us to deal with certain problems but it is just as likely to hasten environmental decline.
Scientists are often criticised for producing arcane and inaccessible, peer-reviewed works and of course scientific research is worthless if it cannot be communicated. But then they stand to be accused of `dumbing down' or of writing in a `matey' or patronising style if they produce populist works. It is difficult to pitch a book at a level both interesting and useful for all and few have succeeded: E O Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Jared Diamond spring top mind (from the biological sciences). A great book highly recommended to every thinking person at whatever educational level. With such an impressive body of research and, I'm sure, knowledge behind this book you should come away from it with a better understanding of the world, its history and its people, and hopefully a renewed determination to do something constructive, however small. If not, we may well be in the unenviable situation of being the first species to chronicle its own extinction.