Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
ISBN: 9780143117001 | 0143117009
Edition: RevisedFormat: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pub. Date: 1/4/2011
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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 ... MORE
“Diamond’s most influential gift may be his ability to write about geopolitical and environmental systems in ways that don’t just educate and provoke, but entertain.” -The Seattle Times
“Extremely persuasive . . . replete with fascinating stories, a treasure trove of historical anecdotes and haunting statistics.” -The Boston Globe
“Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in its ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.” -The New York Times Book Review
In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization
Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
| List of Maps | p. xiii |
| Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms | p. 1 |
| Two farms | |
| Collapses, past and present | |
| Vanished Edens? | |
| A five-point framework | |
| Businesses and the environment | |
| The comparative method | |
| Plan of the book | |
| Modern Montana | p. 25 |
| Under Montana's Big Sky | p. 27 |
| ... MORE | |
| Montana and me | |
| Why begin with Montana? | |
| Montana's economic history | |
| Mining | |
| Forests | |
| Soil | |
| Water | |
| Native and non-native species | |
| Differing visions | |
| Attitudes towards regulation | |
| Rick Laible's story | |
| Chip Pigman's story | |
| Tim Huls's story | |
| John Cooks story | |
| Montana, model of the world | |
| Past Societies | p. 77 |
| Twilight at Easter | p. 79 |
| The quarry's mysteries | |
| Easter's geography and history | |
| People and food | |
| Chiefs, clans, and commoners | |
| Platforms and statues | |
| Carving, transporting, erecting | |
| The vanished forest | |
| Consequences for society | |
| Europeans and explanations | |
| Why was Easter fragile? | |
| Easter as metaphor | |
| The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands | p. 120 |
| Pitcairn before the Bounty | |
| Three dissimilar islands | |
| Trade | |
| The movie's ending | |
| The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors | p. 136 |
| Desert farmers | |
| Tree rings | |
| Agricultural strategies | |
| Chaco's problems and packrats | |
| Regional integration | |
| Chaco's decline and end | |
| Chaco's message | |
| The Maya Collapses | p. 157 |
| Mysteries of lost cities | |
| The Maya environment | |
| Maya agriculture | |
| Maya history | |
| Copán | |
| Complexities of collapses | |
| Wars and droughts | |
| Collapse in the southern lowlands | |
| The Maya message | |
| The Viking Prelude and Fugues | p. 178 |
| Experiments in the Atlantic | |
| The Viking explosion | |
| Autocatalysis | |
| Viking agriculture | |
| Iron | |
| Viking chiefs | |
| Viking religion | |
| Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes | |
| Iceland's environment | |
| Iceland's history | |
| Iceland in context | |
| Vinland | |
| Norse Greenland's Flowering | p. 211 |
| Europe's outpost | |
| Greenland's climate today | |
| Climate in the past | |
| Native plants and animals | |
| Norse settlement | |
| Farming | |
| Hunting and fishing | |
| An integrated economy | |
| Society | |
| Trade with Europe | |
| Self-image | |
| Norse Greenland's End | p. 248 |
| Introduction to the end | |
| Deforestation | |
| Soil and turf damage | |
| The Inuit's predecessors | |
| Inuit subsistence | |
| Inuit/Norse relations | |
| The end | |
| Ultimate causes of the end | |
| Opposite Paths to Success | p. 277 |
| Bottom up, top down | |
| New Guinea highlands | |
| Tikopia | |
| Tokugawa problems | |
| Tokugawa solutions | |
| Why Japan succeeded | |
| Other successes | |
| Modern Societies | p. 309 |
| Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide | p. 311 |
| A dilemma | |
| Events in Rwanda | |
| More than ethnic hatred | |
| Buildup in Kanama | |
| Explosion in Kanama | |
| Why it happened | |
| One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti | p. 329 |
| Differences | |
| Histories | |
| Causes of divergence | |
| Dominican environmental impacts | |
| Balaguer | |
| The Dominican environment today | |
| The future | |
| China, Lurching Giant | p. 358 |
| China's significance | |
| Background | |
| Air, water, soil | |
| Habitat, species, megaprojects | |
| Consequences | |
| Connections | |
| The future | |
| ôMiningö Australia | p. 378 |
| Australia's significance | |
| Soils | |
| Water | |
| Distance | |
| Early history | |
| Imported values | |
| Trade and immigration | |
| Land degradation | |
| Other environmental problems | |
| Signs of hope and change | |
| Practical Lessons | p. 417 |
| Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? | p. 419 |
| Road map for success | |
| Failure to anticipate | |
| Failure to perceive | |
| Rational bad behavior | |
| Disastrous values | |
| Other irrational failures | |
| Unsuccessful solutions | |
| Signs of hope | |
| Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes | p. 441 |
| Resource extraction | |
| Two oil fields | |
| Oil company motives | |
| Hardrock mining operations | |
| Mining company motives | |
| Differences among mining companies | |
| The logging industry | |
| Forest Stewardship Council | |
| The seafood industry | |
| Businesses and the public | |
| The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? | p. 486 |
| Introduction | |
| The most serious problems | |
| If we don't solve them... | |
| Life in Los Angeles | |
| One-liner objections | |
| The past and the present | |
| Reasons for hope | |
| Afterword: Angkor's Rise and Fall | p. 526 |
| Questions about Angkor | |
| Angkor's environment | |
| Angkor's rise | |
| The great city | |
| Magnificent engineering | |
| Angkor's decline | |
| Acknowledgments | p. 540 |
| Further Readings | p. 543 |
| Index | p. 575 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 590 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Look out for Jared Diamond's latest book, The World Until Yesterday, coming from Viking in January 2013.
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