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Summary:
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:
Average Customer Rating:
Compelling Reading for Concerned Residents of Planet Earth
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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 ruins.
In Collapse, author Jared Diamond brings an inquisitive mind and a varied and distinguised career as a student of humanity to bear on some often-alarming questions about the mysterious disappearances of past cultures and societies. And he asks a disturbing question that often goes ignored in our modern, 21st Century World: If advanced cultures in the past have disappeared--sometimes almost without at trace--can this mysterious past be part of our own future? In this fascinating and highly informative book, Diamond offers some alarming lessons drawn from the historical record, as well as reason to hope for the future.
Employing a five-part analytical framework, the author studies a number of past and present civilizations, hoping to draw lessons to explain why some survived and prospered, while others withered and died. Among the factors which seem to affect a society's chances of enduring, he points to a civilization's environmental damage to its surroundings, the impact of climate change, the rise of hostile neighbors or dislocations caused by the decline of trading partners, as well as the choices made by the society itself when confronting past crises that arise through changing circumstances, as being the most important.
Although the infinite variety of people and circumstances makes firm conclusions beyond the reach of our limited knowledge, cultures as diverse as the Vikings and the Japanese, the Anastasi and the Australians, the Chinese and the Polynesians, have all faced similar challenges, many of which are well known to our own era. Ecological fragility, the overuse of both fixed and renewable resources, the over-extension of settlements, and the tenuous interconnections of trading networks are all problems that face 21st Century societies. Now, as throughout history, advanced cultures often export the depletion of their own resources to those of underdeveloped societies that are desperate for cash; and the effect of leaders who come to view their own interests as synonymous with those of their societies--and who therefore make decisions that sacrifice the interests of their people for their own--are hardly confined to ancient civilizations.
But the author gives us reason to hope, as well as cause for concern. Not all societies collapse: some are able to confront and overcome their problems; and others, blessed with rich abundance and a forgiving environment, are able to skirt disaster through dumb luck or good fortune. Throughout the book, the author presents the reader with an interesting blend of history and theory, and his readable and accessible prose enlightens and challenges the reader. This book is not for those made uncomfortable by thinking about the challenges that may lie ahead; but for readers interested in expanding their knowledge of the past, and thinking about the kind of world we may be leaving to our children, its central message is one of cautious hope, tempered with the reality that in this world, all things are transitory...and that even the mightiest civilizations are not immune from the consequences of their own folly.
Thorough, significant, and relevant anthropology
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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 due to an unsustainable relationship with survival resources.
A Compelling But Imperfect Look Into Environmental Reasons For Collapse And What It Means For Our World
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Read this book.
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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 face today will find everything extremely relevant. The picture Diamond paints is fairly grim, but he concludes with an optimistic look forward and advice on how we might proceed.
Please read this book. You will not regret it.
As Turgid As Gray Oatmeal (It won't let me give it less than 5, 1 STAR 1 STAR)
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Unreadable, though Jared Diamond is brilliant, his rambling often monotonous descriptions of ancient civilization are hard to follow due to the unceasingly clunky prose style. It doesn't help that the first chapter is about Montana, AHH!
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