Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond | An Environmental Warning!

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Collapse: How Soci...

	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond, 2005 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 401 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hard to put down

Many people have written about the positive attributes of this book. I would like to add just two observations. First of all, I've read few non-fiction books that grabbed my attention to the degree that I felt like I could actually visualize the times and places being described. My favorite two sections were the ones on Easter Island and the Norse colonies in Greenland. They left images that are burned in my mind. Second, as someone who is interested in topics such as peak oil, global warming and so forth, the idea that this time, the entire planet may be exhibiting some of the same behaviors that individual collapsed civilizations did was both enlightening and scary. I have noticed that this is a book that is becoming widely quoted, and rightfully so. Even if all you take away from the experience of reading it are the many interesting little details about places you probably have heard of but don't know much about, it's worth your while and the price of a copy!

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An Environmental Warning!

Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at U.C.L.A., has written a brilliant sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel. In Collapse, Dr. Diamond looks at the flip side of biogeography: why do some societies fail to survive? He argues a variety of factors both environmental (natural resource misuse, global warming, etc.) and sociological (hostile vs. helpful neighbors and decision making structures) determines whether societies thrive or pass into the distant memory of time. Collapse is an expansive book both in scope and detail. At 535 pages readers will find it challenging but well worth the effort to understand our current plight compared with past civilizations. Dr. Diamond begins by looking at natural resource issues in Montana where he has spent the last fifty summers. He analyses many ancient, failed societies like Easter Island, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse. He even takes a fresh and fascinating look at current societies like Rwanda and Haiti. I am currently planning a unit on biogeography for my AP Environmental Science class using the material from this book as a case study. This book is so interdisciplinary that almost any science teacher would gain great insight from reading this book and then incorporating some of the material into his/her classroom. This book is also very readable for the general public and is a warning for our society that is so consumer oriented.

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Fascinating Reading

I really enjoyed reading this book. I have always been interested in how and why diffrent societies throughout history have collapsed and failed. This book gives you a brief synopsis of how diffrent societies have failed in the past and then backs it up with stories of real failed socities.

This book will make you think diffrently about environmental issues. I have not read anyting or heard anything which comes at the environmental debate from this angle (reducing impacts on the environment which we depend on for our civilization in order to be able to continue our civilization).

Highly recommend this book.

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Enh

In this follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (which I have not read), Jared Diamond attempts to examine and explain why certain ancient societies such as the American Anasazi, Mayans and Easter Island collapsed. He poses the theory that there are essentially five factors in a societial collapse, although not all are always present: 1) environmental, 2) climatic, 3) warfare, isolation, and how the society responds to hardship. Nothing new or earth-shattering, but very interesting to look at in the detail Diamond gives. I thought he was a little high-handed at times and I could have done without his many nostalgic stories about fishing with his grandfather in Montana, but it was interesting all the same. I won't delve into it much more than that because this book has been reviewed to death! It's interesting for any history, sociology or anthropology buff, certainly.

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Diamond sounds the bell for a coming apocalypse

Jared Diamond proposed an interesting, environment-centered view of history is his dense but enriching Guns, Germs and Steel. Now he is proposing an interesting, environment-centered view of the future in Collapse. In so doing he sounds an alarm for potential environmental disasters that he sees as imminent.

Collapse is split into two sections: the first deals with ancient societies, such as those on Pacific islands, Greenland and the Mayas in the Americas that collapsed in a chain reaction of environmental degradation that led to starvation, wars and extinction. Here Diamond does what he does best: recounts in minute detail the plants, animals, natural resources and others on which these societies depended and which they failed to maintain. His example of Easter Island, whose natives managed to cut down every last tree and turn it into a barren wasteland, is particularly striking.

The second section deals with modern societies which are also facing environmental strain. Diamond has chosen five: the US state of Montana, which he knows very well and with which he starts off the book; Rwanda, whose overpopulation he cites as one of the causes of its 1994 genocide; Haiti, that shares an island with the Dominican Republic but is much poorer; China, whose growth has put a strain on its resources as well as those of the rest of the world; and Australia, whose European colonists were used to more hospitable terrain. The choices are interesting: while nobody will deny that Rwanda and Haiti are among the most wretched places on Earth, China and Australia are hardly anybody's idea of societies in decline, and most Chinese are gladly trading in their former poverty for a nice big gulp of Beijing's smog-laden air. Though Montana may have its problems, it's hardly Hades.

Diamond is an expert anthropologist, and the level of detail he brings to his retelling can be daunting, but nobody can accuse him of not knowing his subject. He loses his way when he leaves anthropology to dive into politics and statistics: claiming that China's air pollution costs it 54 billion dollars of health-care costs a year (at the time of the book, that was approximately the total of all health care spending in China), that Australia can only "sustainably" support 8 million people, or that a "conservative" estimate of the number of annual deaths caused by air pollution in the United States is 130,000 (the WHO puts it at 41,200 for 2002). A further problem is that Diamond gives no sources for his claims, leaving it up to the reader to wonder if he just quoted alarmists of made up the numbers himself.

Despite all this, Collapse brings important attention to the damage humanity is causing to its environment, damage which is often far more expensive and painful to undo than to prevent in the first place. Also, much of this damage (deforestation, toxic pollutants, overfishing, climate change, etc) takes place over decades and sometimes centuries, so by the time we realize that we have a problem it may be too late. I don't share Diamond's alarmist tone, but I don't believe either that we can simply keep ignoring our environmental impact on the Earth. This book should be read with a grain of salt, but it should be read.

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