Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Amazon.com Review:
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

Product Description:
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.

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Customer Reviews

Rating: - If Past is Prologue . . .
The main theme of this lengthy and substantial book is that human beings invariably leave too great a footprint and that, given current human population levels, we've now just about infested the entire planet with nowhere else to go (barring substantial advances in space travel and better opportunities out there). As Jared Diamond shows again and again, through a large number of fairly well documented and examined examples, human societies tend to consume the environments in which they are established. ... Read More
Rating: - Weak, self important, poorly written
This pompous person, i.e., liberal professor, makes silly assumptions and writes them in a bombastic style.The usual professorial position is taken: you must think as I think or you are demented, stupid and/or dangerous.

And to make his whole pontifical tone more annoying, it is poorly edited and poorly proofread.For the price, I would have thought someone could have at least used grammar checker.

I am glad I didn't pay for it.I have thrown the book away to be sure that ... Read More
Rating: - An eye-opening and extremely informative read
You almost can feel the frustration the author pours into this book. As you would expect from Jared Diamond, the book is a well-researched, well-supported,scientific study with a peculiar sense of humor which I must admit I came to like. Providing a framework of five major factors that led the greatest civilization to collapse, the author warns that all five factors are not only present in the modern world but eerily and recklessly ignored by the societies who based on the accumulated knowledge about the ... Read More
Rating: - An astounding omission
I enjoyed Jared Diamond's book when I first read it, but am nevertheless astonished that he fails to mention the probable cause of the impending collapse of our own society - 'peak oil' or the peaking of world oil 'production'.

Industrial society depends on fossil fuel for everything that we eat, move, and make, yet the fact that this once-only gift from nature is finite seems to have been ignored. There is now increasing evidence that we are within a few years of peak oil - yet our politicians, ... Read More
Rating: - Well thought out, well written
Diamond had written an excellent volume for our times. I just finished reading the entire book, and enjoyed almost every page. A few technical subjects were hard for me to really enjoy, but overall, Diamond had written a very readable, and well thought-out volume about the strong connection between the environment and civilization. This has provided me with rich food for thought as I contemplate the 4-fold crisis our world is facing: ecological degradation, resource (and energy) depletion, climate change and economic ... Read More