Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | 
 enlarge | Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
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Rating:  402 reviews
Sales Rank: 1174
Media: Paperback
Pages: 592
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0143036556
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.28
EAN: 9780143036555
Publication Date: December 27, 2005
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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.
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 397 more reviews...
 The discipline of geography is back! January 7, 2005
Ellis O. Jones (Andover, MA USA)
573 out of 626 found this review helpful
"Collapse" is a wonderful book! Prof. Diamond combines hard science, rigorous historical research, and his own personal knowledge of people from the Bitterroot Valley of Montana to the west coast of Greenland to Rwanda to the highlands of New Guineau. He pulls together clear and compelling explanations of how events unfolded (and are still unfolding) in various parts of the world.
His accounts of various human communities draw on real data from a wide variety of academic fields, including isotope analysis, pollen analysis, tree-ring analysis, seismology, agronomy, archaeology, sociology, and even the history of religion. His explanations of each of these disciplines are lucid without oversimplification. But, the strength of the book comes from the the way he combines results from all these fields to create straightforward narratives of what might have happened as various communities rose and fell.
If I were I high school "social studies" teacher I would be talking to my principal today, saying "I want to put together an honors-level geography course and I want to use this as the textbook."
I do have one criticism. The subject matter of the book is tremendously consequential to people alive today, and hopefully "policy wonks" in governments will study the book and take it seriously. But, the title is a bit inflammatory. What's more, Prof. Diamond makes sure to explain the significance for the United States of his accounts of the demise of various ancient communities. Some of these explanations extrapolate from ancient situations to modern in a way that isn't quite as solid as the rest of the book. Diamond's extrapolations are very cleary marked as such. However, I am still afraid that they, combined with the title, will provide an excuse for people to dismiss the book as a "pro-environment anti-business" ideological polemic. That would be unfortunate, because it is actually balanced and nuanced in its explanation of the human condition.
History, ecology, technology, politics, and a warning rolled into one... January 17, 2006
ewomack (MN USA)
106 out of 121 found this review helpful
A debate between two camps continues to rage. One side thinks that the modern world continues to careen toward a non-sustainable future and impending doom. The other group thinks that "environmentalists" exaggerate their claims about a coming ecological crash. As usual the sides remain somewhat unproductively polarized with neither giving an inch to the other. This book's title exposes where Jared Diamond's sympathies stand, but he also takes some surprisingly neutral views. For one, he claims that some contemporary businesses have in fact successfully taken environmental concerns into consideration, and that these concerns have made them money and boosted their respect globally. Diamond doesn't believe that big business and environmental groups necessarily remain indissoluble enemies. And he goes further by suggesting that environmentalists should unabashedly praise those companies that have suceeded in balancing economics with ecology. "Collapse", though admittedly more slanted towards the environmental side of the continuum, nonetheless tries to narrow the gap between the two aforementioned camps.
"Collapse" takes the reader on a dizzying historical and global tour. The chapters weave in and out of modern, ancient, and medieval worlds. Along the way Diamond extrapolates which behaviors have threatened (or arguably are currently threatening) a significant inexorable decline in a particular society's population. By juxtaposing past and present societies he hopes to reveal the simularities between societies that no longer exist and the trends of the world today. The book surreptitously asks whether our current world is threatened by a global collapse.
Diamond uses a "five-point framework" to analyze various societies. These comprise certain behaviors and characterstics, namely, environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and a society's responses to its environmental problems. With these tools in hand, Diamond travels to Montana, Easter Island, the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the ancient and medieval Anasazi cultures in North America, the Maya, Norse Greenland, New Guinea, Tikopia, Tokugawa-era Japan, Rwanda, Hispaniola, China, and Australia. Each of these societies, both past and present, receive analysis in terms of the five point framework. For example, the Greenland Norse collapsed, according to Diamond, due to all five factors. Whereas Easter Island collapsed only due to three. But Diamond also discusses past successes such as Tikopia and Tokugawa Japan. These two societies managed to control their resources and avoid the others' fate. And those fates included horrifying ends in wars, mass starvation, and sometimes cannabalism.
The discussion of Norse Greenland receives three full length chapters (which at times seems a little too lengthy). Why? In a talk that Diamond gave for the Long Now Foundation in 2005 (downloadable from the Foundation's website), he claimed that he wanted to show that collapse doesn't only happen to non-europeans. Some skeptics may claim that collapse only happens to so-called "primitives". But the Norse Greelanders were medieval Europeans who desperately tried to hold on to their European Christian roots in Greenland, but they all ended up dying sometime in the 15th century. The reasons why remain somewhat mysterious, though archeologists have found evidence of starvation and cannabalism at the long abandoned sites. By contrast, the Greenland Inuit long outlasted the Norse.
Diamond thinks that societies also need to re-evaluate their values to survive in different climates. In addition, when the elite begin isolating themselves that often spells trouble for a society. Diamond sees this happening in our world today (in "gated" communities and private funding for personal amenities) as well as evidence for all of the above listed five points. He argues that our current course appears unsustainable unless we take action. In the end, he does leave room for hope (as evidenced by the societies that "saved" themselves and peoples).
Diamond also addresses the refutations often leveled against the environmental side of the spectrum. One-liners such as "technology will save us" or "the environment must be balanced against the economy" receive their own refutations. Finally, he presents justifications for his comparative method of juxtaposing and extrapolating the problems of past societies onto our own.
Diamond never argues that the contemporary world will inevitably collapse. He does admit to seeing many danger signs. In the end, whether or not readers agree with Diamond's conclusions, the book does a good job of presenting collapse as at least one of the possible outcomes of a society's actions. Much of the modern world doesn't seem to accept or even to realize this possibility. At the very least governments and citizens need to be aware that irresponsible actions could lead to a collapse. Infinite progress and expansion isn't a given. Though this book could have included much more information (along with analyses of many more now extinct societies), it provides a good foundation for thinking and debate on this increasingly important subject. And though it has its flaws "Collapse" nonetheless represents a book that environmental skeptics will have to contend with.
Eco-Driven Genocide Powerfully Described in New Tome January 9, 2005
Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA)
44 out of 49 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating examination of how ecologically speaking, we may be doomed to repeat history's mistakes due to the lack of their immediacy to our consciousness. The prospect of self-preservation on a societal level can be a daunting one, but it is a profound question author Jared Diamond handles with skill and panache in his sweeping book. He primarily covers four extinct civilizations, showing how human-led environmental damage was at least partially responsible for their devastation and illustrating how the ramifications of such behavior persist today. As an evolutionary biologist trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond deftly uses comparative methods in his areas of expertise, such as archaeology and anthropology, to marshal evidence that sustaining societies over time depends primarily on the quality of human interaction with the environment. His arguments are compelling and act as a direct counterpoint to more common thinking where ideology, culture, politics and economics help shape the course of history. But the author is far more focused on what they bear on the far more important relationship society has with its climate, geography and natural resources.
The overriding theme of human history, the author feels, is that societies aren't murdered; they commit suicide. He uses the Viking settlements on the coast of Greenland as a prime example. While it did get colder in Greenland in the early 1400's, it didn't get so cold as to make it uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn't adapt to the country's changing environmental conditions. Human accountability also shaped the fate of Easter Island where seafaring Polynesians settled over a thousand years ago. They cut the trees for canoes and firewood and used logs to help transport huge statues weighing as much as 80 tons. Eventually, they chopped down all the forests, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. By 1600, all of the trees and land birds on Easter Island were extinct. Diamond covers similarly fatalistic behavior in the native American Anasazi tribe in the southwestern U.S. and the Mayan civilization in Central America.
Diamond's perspective is not just historical, as he discusses in depth what is happening now in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, China, and Australia, as well as in Montana, a state that once was among the wealthiest in the nation but now struggles with poverty, population decline, and environmental problems. The author remains hopeful by giving more uplifting examples of societies that have found ways to sustain themselves without overexploiting their environments. His conclusion is that what determines a society's fate is how well its leaders and citizens anticipate problems before they become crises and how decisively a society responds. But as we know, and as Diamond corroborates, many societies, including ours, suffer from short-sightedness and political selfishness, which prevent us from seeing the scope of the potential destruction. But it is hopeful, the author asserts, that the U.S. has reduced major air pollutants by a quarter over the past thirty years, as energy consumption and population have risen forty percent. The author's guarded optimism signals a need to take so-called green issues more seriously than we have in the past. Strongly recommended reading.
Epic look at a major theme in history and today's world February 17, 2005
Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States)
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
_Collapse_ by Jared Diamond is an absolutely epic look at why some past societies that faced grave environmental problems failed, why others succeeded, and what this "rich database" of past civilizations tells us about the current and future problems we face in our world. By the word collapse, Diamond meant a drastic decrease in population as well as in the economy and political and social complexity of a society, as opposed to a more gradual or milder form of decline. While he admitted that sometimes the distinction between a milder form of decline and a collapse is in some cases arbitrary (how drastic does the decline have to be before it is labeled as a collapse), Diamond analyzed a number of "full-fledged collapses" that few people would disagree with classifying as such.
The primary theme of this book is the nature of environmental problems that society face, which he listed in eight categories (habitat destruction and particularly deforestation, soil problems such as erosion and salinization, water supply and management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of alien species, human population growth, and increased per capita impact of people), and what they choose to do (or not do) about them.
Diamond made two additional points. The first is that it is naive to assume that societies have collapsed solely due to human-caused environmental damage. He provided a five-point framework of possible contributing factors, some of which were at work in the collapse of a given civilization, while others were not. Four of these factors - environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners (or the lack thereof) - may not prove significant to a particular society's fortunes, but the fifth factor (a civilization's responses to its environmental problems), always does. The second point is that Diamond is not an advocate of any philosophy of environmental determinism - that the environment in which a civilization exists in means that it will ultimately fail. While for instance the moai-erecting civilization of Easter Island collapsed, the society found on much smaller Tikopia Island (1.8 square miles) has existed for 3,000 years (and still exists) on an island with sustainable cultivation; the Greenland Norse ultimately failed while the Inuit on the same island still exist.
After an introduction of concepts - including a comparison with modern day Montana - Diamond analyzed in depth the collapse of several past societies, namely that of Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island (both islands are in the Pacific and formerly had Polynesian societies which died out), the Anasazi, the Classic Lowland Maya, and the Greenland Norse, the last of which he spent a great deal of time discussing and made for absolutely fascinating reading. More briefly he analyzed some past (and still existing) societies that overcame grave environmental crises (that of Iceland, Tikopia Island, the New Guinea highlands, and Japan of the Tokugawa era). To me these sections (around half the book) were the best part (I found lots of very interesting information in the Easter Island chapter).
Within the framework of these success stories he illustrated two contrasting approaches to environmental success, namely that of a bottom-up approach to a problem (one in which individuals in a society make choices and perform actions to correct environmental problems, as with Tikopia and the New Guinea highlands) and the top-down approach (found in large societies with a centralized political structure, such as Tokugawa Japan). Additionally, both bottom-up and top-down approaches may exist side by side.
Next, Diamond focused on several modern societies that face grave environmental problems today and in the future, specifically Rwanda, Haiti (which he contrasted vividly with the neighboring Dominican Republic), China, and Australia, going into a great deal of detail about their history, culture as it relates to the environment, current environmental problems, and what is being done (if anything) to correct these problems. I found the chapters on Haiti/Dominican Republic (another example he wrote that there is no such thing as environmental determinism) and Australia particularly interesting.
The fourth part of the book is a section he titled "practical lessons;" what analysis of collapses, success stories, and modern problems have taught us about what can be done. One thing he wrote is that he disliked single factor explanations for problems or single factor issues for activists to focus on. For instance, with the contrasting environmental realities of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, their differing developments were "overdetermined;" a number of separate factors coincided to produce the current reality. Another is that for a society to continue to exist at sustainable levels in a deteriorating environment (or for a Third World society to become a First World one), it must decide as a society which of its deeply held core values are compatible with its continued survival, which are not, and then give up those that are not. For instance the love for the farming lifestyle in Australia is a core value in Australia, but to continue having that as a core value may be incompatible with a healthy environment.
Diamond discussed in detail why societies fail to solve their environmental problems. Briefly, a civilization may fail to anticipate a problem before it arises, it may fail to perceive a problem after it does arrive, they may not even try to solve it, or they may try to solve it and fail. Regarding the second problem he made some interesting points about "creeping normalcy" (the difficulty in recognizing a gradual downward trend over years because what constitutes "normalcy" shifts "gradually and imperceptibly") and "landscape amnesia" (forgetting what a landscape looked like in the past because the downward change has been so gradual that residents in an area are less aware of it, comparing changes unconsciously to the last few years rather than say 50 years ago).
Diamond does close with saying he is cautiously optimistic that the world's environmental problems can be solved, providing examples of success stories and answering common "one-liner objections" to environmental policies. A truly excellent book, I highly recommend it.
One of the Few Positive Books in the 'Collapse" literature January 30, 2006
Allen B. Hundley (Midway, AR)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful
Reading the collapse of civilization literature over the years it is easy to forget that not every society has made catastrophic blunders. While it certainly seems that the list of failures is a lot longer than that of the successes, one of the joys of Diamond's latest book is that he discusses some of these success stories at considerable length, pointing out in particular where human choice and not just blind luck made the difference. Even some that ultimately failed, like the Norse colony in Greenland that survived for 450 years, demonstrate that a tough people led by strong leaders can cope with adversity, even extreme adversity for a very long time.
Diamond also shows clearly that poor leadership and greed by the ruling elite consistently results in disaster. The chiefs of Easter Island, the ancient Maya kings, and more recently the long, sorry list of corrupt rulers in Haiti, Rwanda, and other Third World countries are examples. These contrast with Japanese rulers during the Tokugawa era who made sure that all the forests were not cut down, even if their subjects had to adopt more sustainable diets, and with more or less democratically elected leaders like Joaquin Balaguer of the Dominican Republic who also saw to it that his country's forests were not stripped bare leaving it a Haiti-like wasteland.
Although Diamond's study would have been improved by more careful editing, a point made by other reviewers, he makes up for some excessively detailed accounts with excellent and cogent summaries. I believe `Collapse' is actually better than his Pulitzer prize winning `Guns, Germs and Steel'. In that book he sets out to disprove the idea that racial superiority somehow accounts for the political and economic success of Western countries compared to those of the Third World.
To my way of thinking that is a straw man. Few people well read in world history and economics hold such a view today. The historical record does however show clearly that certain cultural values, combined with geography and natural resources, do indeed play a decisive role in determining societal winners and losers. (See my review of `The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' by David Landes).
The harsh reality, as Diamond clearly shows, is that one way or another the collapse of most societies over the centuries has been tied to too many people producing too little food - the Law of Malthus. Sometimes the food shortage is caused by natural causes, e.g. sudden climate change like a severe and prolonged drought. Other times it is either caused or exacerbated by human negligence, such as prolonged slash and burn practices in fragile jungle rainforests or overgrazing by human introduced and managed flocks of sheep and cattle.
The uplifting, even inspiring part of `Collapse' is Diamond's description of how even isolated, primitive people could figure out how to beat Malthus' Law. The population of tiny Tikopia Island in the South Pacific has stayed at about 1,200 over 3,000 years because very early on its inhabitants realized that they would have to limit their population growth or die of starvation.
Other groups such as the Inuit of northern Canada and Greenland and the Pueblo in the Southwest U.S. have successfully overcome environmental challenges for hundreds, even thousands of years. Even the communist Chinese, after a series of disastrous economic decisions in the 1960s and 70s, finally decided that population growth would have to be curtailed if China and its people were to survive. While we may lament such policies as forced abortion, looked at from the vantage point of the Chinese leadership trying to bring sweeping but necessary social change to a largely backward rural nation of a billion people, it is hard to see how anything but strict enforcement of the one child per family policy would have any hope of success.
It is clear from Diamond's analysis that control of population growth and hence consumption of scarce resources (most importantly food, energy, and water) is the single most important factor in a society's avoidance of collapse. Controlling population growth and conserving vital resources can only be achieved by wise and effective political leadership, whether from the bottom up or top down. These are the lessons to be taken from a very fine and enlightening book. Whether our present civilization can heed the warning signs of collapse is another matter. Failure to do so is likely to result in a future world vividly and disturbingly described by James Howard Kunstler in `The Long Emergency'. Along with `The Collapse of Complex Societies' by Joseph Tainter these books constitute a trilogy of must read books about the impending crisis facing our species on this little blue planet. It may be tiny and obscure in the grand scheme of things but it's all we've got.
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