Collapse

Product Details

Author : Jared Diamond
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780143036555
Edition : 1
Number of Pages : 592
Product Group : Book
Publication Date : 2005-12-27
Publisher : Penguin Paperbacks

ASIN : 0143036556

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Editorial Reviews

From Amazon.com

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

Measured Warning (2007-09-25)

It was a pleasant surprise that Collapse was not as depressing as I thought it could be. Despite its gloomy subject matter, Jared Diamond's sober and lucid analysis is more reassuring than frightening, providing a measured warning to readers.Diamond uses the fascinating historical accounts of past societies (Easter Island, the Maya etc) to illustrate the common causes of societal failure, and repeatedly emphasizes the relevance of their demise to our current problems. (Perhaps a little too repeatedly as it is hard to miss the point.)Discussions about modern societies are even more interesting. I did not know that population pressure was behind the genocide in Rwanda. I did not know that seemingly harmless rabbits are devastating Australian soils either (which is sad as it is not really rabbits' fault).Diamond is also fair in recognizing the effort of some big businesses, along with government initiatives, in order to minimize environmental damage and develop sustainable resource management. If more companies follow suit and more governments consider environmental issues a priority, it would make a substantial difference. Surely this is not a new argument. However there is nothing wrong to remind us that, as consumers and society members, we can influence their decisions, if we choose to. This book may be too simplified for specialists but is a good starting point for the public audience like myself. It definitely helped me understand inter-relations between environmental issues and social, economic, political conditions.

Interesting BUT Repetitive (2007-07-27)

The book gives you a good explanation and goes into several factors why a society could and does collapse. It explains these factors by analyzing past cultures which have already collapse or were on the verge of collapse.The only down fall (some may not see it that way) is that after several chapters, you become very familiar with the factor which contribute to a collapse of a society, that the rest of the book becomes more of a historical book (many of the cultures he looked at, I had already studied and had background knowledge on them which made the end of the book less interesting for me. Known the less, this is a fantastic book which is worth reading. Kevin H

Fantastic Tours of Changing Environments, but leaves out the Middle East (2007-04-29)

"Collapse" is even better than "Guns, Germs, and Steel". And this time Diamond focuses, not on how environments have shaped people, but how we have transformed our environments. He looks at various places which suffered environmental collapse in the past like Yucatan or Greenland, then at some relative success stories like Japan or the Dominican Republic. He mainly covers places where he has both personal experience and great background knowledge. The resulting tour is marvelously insightful, and close to the finest non-fiction writing out there. But his examples leave out the sites of history's greatest environmental collapses and challenges, across North Africa and the Middle East.

My 100-word book review (2006-09-14)

Collapse is a thoroughly researched and fascinating book offering reasons why civilisations have failed in the past. The Mayans, Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse each encountered complex problems that eventually became catastrophic. Jared Diamond offers no simplistic explanation but describes a number of causes, such as climate change, geography and psychological flaws, which can reinforce one another and lead to disaster. The author does not take an overly pro-environmental stance, recognising that industry has a vital role to play in protecting our world. He provides a salutary lesson from history that current and future generations would do well to heed.

Fifteen Years. (2006-09-07)

It was Jared Diamond's answer to the last question of a presentation of "Collapse" at Frankfurt University's Museum of Natural Sciences. Given the comparative shortness of human existence in our planet's entire history, what does it matter, someone asked, "if in 20,000 years or so we do exterminate ourselves, and another species takes over. It's happened to the dinosaurs and the mammoths ... why should we be any different?" My own thoughts had run along similar lines earlier that evening: surrounded by skeletons of species extinct for 100,000s of years, I had recalled a recent visit to a historic museum chronicling social development in a part of Germany -- and I, too, had reflected on the rocket speed that had brought us from the Stone Age to the 21st century, and I had wondered, "what if?"Yet, even knowing the book presented that evening and its author, his answer came as a clarion call. "I don't think we have another 20,000 years," Jared Diamond said in his impeccable German and with the same unassuming, polite composure with which he had answered all preceding questions. And he added: "I think it's closer to fifteen years."Fifteen -- not fifteen thousand or even just fifteen hundred. In the grand scheme of cosmological development, that's less than a millisecond.And this is precisely why "Collapse" is so important. For much more than exploring select past societies' failures (primarily those of pre-European Easter Island, the Anasazi, Maya and Vikings), which it contrasts with select success stories (New Guinea, Japan), it actually asks what we, living today, have to learn from the past in order to avoid the fatal mistakes of those unable to secure their own survival; a question highlighted even by the book's very first chapter, which examines no past society at all but modern-day Montana: serene, sparesly-populated, big-skied, mountain-river-and-valley-graced Montana, which both geographically and figuratively seems leagues away from the problems associated with modern metropoles like New York and Los Angeles (or isolated Polynesian Easter Island, for that matter), and whose social, political and ecological landscape is nevertheless every bit as fragile as theirs. Indeed, for us today the issue is no longer a mere matter of one society's (or species's) extinction in favor of another. For us, Jared Diamond emphasizes, the issue is that of our planet's survival as such. In this, our situation actually does very much resemble that of the Easter Island's inhabitants, who had nowhere to go after depriving themselves of their natural resources by reckless logging and their island's resulting desertification, and who were ultimately driven into cannibalism. Like their island to them, our earth to us is the only inhabitable world ... in our own solar system (tried to settle on Mars or Venus lately?) and probably also beyond: for all we know, those far-away galaxies of "Star Trek," "Star Wars" and Discworld belong to the world of science fiction only; "fiction" being the operative word.Bearing this in mind, the subtitle of "Collapse" is as important, and even more telling than the book's title itself: "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." It indicates that: (1) failure, even under adverse conditions, is not a necessity; and (2) whether (or how well) a society survives depends crucially on its values and goals, and the choices resulting therefrom, both collectively and individually. And of all the factors that Jared Diamond highlights as impacting a society's survival -- environmental changes, changes and conflicts of interest within that society, changes in neighboring societies and in the two societies' relationships, technological advances, and the inability, unwillingness or other failure to anticipate or acknowledge the impact of choices made -- it seems to me that this last point, the question how we play the hand we've dealt ourselves by our past and present choices, will ultimately prove decisive. The author himself likes to say he is "cautiously optimistic" in this regard, pointing to his eighteen-year-old twins, who have practically their entire life yet to live. I hope, however, that his answer will also prove justified by the growing respect he enjoys in public opinion and with national and international decisionmakers.So does he have all the answers? No -- and he himself would probably be the first to emphasize that he actually has more questions than answers (only coming from him, it wouldn't sound like a cliche). Is "Collapse" argued less stringently than, say, his Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Guns, Germs and Steel"? Personally I don't think so, but I'm admittedly biased. What's the use of "popular science writing" anyway -- why doesn't he, like any other good scientist, seek peer review and a discussion with his colleagues? Well, I believe that he does enjoy a spirited scientific debate and welcomes comments that force him to put his own theories to the test. Yet, it only takes one look at the broad space that pseudo-arguments like those he refutes as "one-line objections" at the end of "Collapse" still occupy in the public debate ("The environment must be balanced against the economy," "Technology will save us," "This is just another end-of-the-world-prophecy like the many that have already proved false in the past," "Environmental concerns are a first-world luxury," and of course the ubiquitous, "Why shoud I care anyway?") to realize this book's necessity. This is also why I have decided to set aside my reluctance to review any of his books; although personal acquaintance and unconditional respect render me patently incapable of objectivity, and a review like this might be construed as an exercise in flaunting an association with an internationally renowned scientist and award-winning author (even worse, one occasioned not by any achievement of my own but by mere coincidence). But "Collapse" concerns us all -- it's as simple as that.In signing my copy, Jared referenced the aforementioned never close, but long-lasting acquaintance: "to 2005 ---." Both on a personal and a global level, I hope those three dashes stand for much, much more than fifteen years.

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