Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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.Prologue : a tale of two farms -- Two farms -- Collapses, past and present -- Vanished Edens? -- A five-point framework -- Businesses and the environment -- The comparative method -- Plan of the book -- pt. 1. Modern Montana -- 1. Under Montana's big sky -- Stan Falkow's story -- 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 Cook's story -- Montana, model of the worldpt. 2. Past societies -- 2. Twilight at Easter -- 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 -- 3. The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands -- Pitcairn before the Bounty -- Three dissimilar islands -- Trade -- The movie's ending -- 4. The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors -- Desert farmers -- Tree rings -- Agricultural strategies -- Chaco's problems and packrats -- Regional integration -- Chaco's decline and end -- Chaco's message -- 5. The Maya collapses -- 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 -- 6. The Viking prelude and fugues -- 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 -- 7. Norse Greenland's flowering -- 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 -- 8. Norse Greenland's end -- 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 -- 9. Opposite paths to success -- Bottom up, top down -- New Guinea highlands -- Tikopia -- Tokugawa problems -- Tokugawa solutions -- Why Japan succeeded -- Other successespt. 3. Modern societies -- 10. Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide -- A dilemma -- Events in Rwanda -- More than ethnic hatred -- Buildup in Kanama -- Explosion in Kanama -- Why it happened -- 11. One island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti -- Differences -- Histories -- Causes of divergence -- Dominican environmental impacts -- Balaguer -- The Dominican environment today -- The future -- 12. China, lurching giant -- China's significance -- Background -- Air, water, soil -- Habitat, species, megaprojects -- Consequences -- Connections -- The future -- 13. "Mining" Australia -- Australia's significance -- Soils -- Water -- Distance -- Early history -- Imported values -- Trade and immigration -- Land degradation -- Other environmental problems -- Signs of hope and changept. 4. Practical lessons -- 14. Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? -- Road map for success -- Failure to anticipate -- Failure to perceive -- Rational bad behavior -- Disastrous values -- Other irrational failures -- Unsuccessful solutions -- Signs of hope -- 15. Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes -- 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 -- 16. The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today? -- 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
