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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed |  |
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | |
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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–This powerful call to action should be read by all high school students. Diamond eloquently and persuasively describes the environmental and social problems that led to the collapse of previous civilizations and threaten us today. The book's organization makes researching particular regions or types of damage accessible. Unfamiliar words are defined, and mention of a place or issue that has been described in greater detail elsewhere includes relevant page numbers. Students may become impatient with the folksy Montana fishing stories in part one, but once the fascinating account of the vanished civilizations begins, readers are taken on an extraordinary journey. Using the Mayan empire, Easter Island, the Anasazi, and other examples, the author shows how a combination of environmental factors such as habitat destruction, the loss of biodiversity, and degradation of the soil caused complex, flourishing societies to suddenly disintegrate. Modern societies are divided into those that have begun to collapse, such as Rwanda and Haiti; those whose conservation policies have helped to avert disaster, such as Iceland and Japan; and those currently dealing with massive problems, such as Australia and China. Diamond is a cautious optimist. Some of his most compelling stories show how two groups of people sharing the same land, such as the Norse and Inuit in Greenland, can end up in completely different situations depending on how they address their problems. The solutions discussed are of vital importance: how societies respond to environmental degradation will determine how teens will live their adult lives. As Diamond points out, in a collapsing civilization, being rich just means being the last to starve. Black-and-white photos are included.–Kathy Tewell, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Scientific American
According to scripture, "How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle" (II Samuel 1:25). To war, Jared Diamond in his new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, adds self-inflicted environmental degradation, climate change, disastrous trading relations, and unwise responses to societal problems. In his earlier, Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, celebrated the rise of communities and nations despite microbial and self-imposed adversities. Collapse is the downside of those dynamics, the societies that didn't make it, barely made it, or are destined, as Diamond sees it, for the fall. In this exhaustively researched new book, he pre-sents carefully detailed case histories of failed societies—islands in warmish waters (Easter, Pitcairn, Haiti), an island in coolish waters (Greenland), a continental semidesert (the Anasazi of the Southwest U.S.), a continental tropical forest (the Maya of Mexico). Diamond begins with the failed state of Montana. Montana? Well, a Pulitzer Prize–winning tenured professor can take the liberty of giving priority to his passions. So Diamond the ardent fly-fisherman, defender of ecological pristineness, sympathetic friend of the farming "locals" has come to the sad conclusion that Montana is going to the dogs. Once one of the richest states of the union, it now ranks among the poorest, having squandered its nonrenewable mineral resources and savagely over-logged its forests. Maybe worst of all, some cad put pike into the trout waters. Although Montana is not about to fall off the map, leaving us with 49 states, the elements responsible for its decline are also responsible for societies that have fallen by the wayside. Diamond's central proposition is that wherever these globally disparate societies failed the chief cause had been anthropogenic ecological devastation, especially deforestation, imposed on ecosystems of limited resources. Those other western Americans, the Anasazi, settled in the New Mexico area about A.D. 600. There they built spectacular cliff housing, worked their marginal agricultural land, and chopped down all the trees without any plans for reforestation. Starving to the desperate point of cannibalism, wracked by internecine warfare, they met their end some 600 years later. To the south, the Maya mostly had it all: technological knowledge to build architecturally wonderful cities, writing, and crops of corn. What they did not have were large domestic animals, or the foresight to replant after they clear-cut forests, or the political sense to refrain from inter-city warfare. Mayan soldiers and city dwellers were, as Diamond puts it, "parasites on farmers," who could no longer produce surplus food on their now barren, treeless land. The Maya began to go into decline about A.D. 1000 and said goodbye to the world about 1675, mopped up by the Spanish. Diamond argues that the isolated island societies suffered a similar fate to the Anasazi and Maya for similar reasons. Pitcairn Island, Easter Island and Greenland all collapsed after the settlers had exhausted the fragile food and timber resources. Deforestation was particularly critical; after the larger trees were harvested, nothing was left to make the seagoing canoes needed for voyaging to other sources of food and material and for recruiting new people, especially wives, into their dwindling, interbreeding populations. In these historical accounts of fallen societies, untrammeled population growth did not play a significant role. Not until the section on modern societies with modern troubles does Diamond invoke Malthus, offering Rwanda as the prime Malthusian model of too many people with too little land. He makes an unconventional interpretation of the savage Rwandan conflict. It was not a mutually genocidal affair propelled by ancient hatreds. At the village level the Hutu and Tutsi had lived together amicably—until geometric population growth far exceeded the arithmetic increase in land and improved agricultural technology, fulfilling the thesis of Malthus's 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. The brutal killing was, according to Diamond, primarily over your neighbor's land, not his tribal affiliation. As the book' s subtitle suggests, there are societies that have come to success by right thought and action. The Japanese, for example, saw the light and preserved and replanted their forests (although they have not renounced their national wood esthetic; the trees now come from the forests of vulnerable states such as Papua New Guinea). The Dominican Republic preserved its forests and prospered. Its neighbor Haiti ravished both land and forests. And look what happened to them. I wrote these last words while flying home from a National Academy of Sciences meeting called to reconsider bringing back that contentious, effective and dirt-cheap chemical, DDT. Now the choice will have to be made between the ultraconservationists' prohibition of DDT and the equally ardent arguments of a new coterie of American scientists who are demanding the return of DDT to try to halt the carnage of the malaria parasite, which kills two million to three million children and pregnant women every year. Sorry, Professor Diamond, even in our time of enlightened science, societies don't always have an easy, clear choice to survive, let alone succeed. Collapse is a big book, 500-plus pages. It may well become a seminal work, although its plea for societal survival through ecological conservation is rather like preaching to the choir. It is not a page-turner, especially for slow readers of short attention span (like this reviewer). Some of Diamond's "case studies" may be overkilled by overdetail. The last section, on practical lessons, seems disconnected from the central Collapse story and almost constitutes a separate book. But, having discharged the reviewer's obligation to be critical, my recommendation would definitely be to read the book. It will challenge and make you think—long after you have turned that last 500th-plus page.
Robert S. Desowitz is emeritus professor of tropical medicine at the University of Hawaii. He is author of five books on ecological and political issues relating to infectious diseases, the most recent being Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus (W. W. Norton, 2003). --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Are we doomed, or can the next generation save us from ecological suicide? UCLA geography professor Diamond’s provocative, interdisciplinary picture of social decline paints a bleak vision of our future. He writes well, has done impressive research, and tells fascinating stories. Yet, his thesis failed to convince many critics. He connects his stories with common themes, but often draws tenuous links between past and present, especially given today’s use of technology and global markets to help solve environmental problems. Many critics also found fault with Diamond’s case studies. Some primitive societies like Easter Island, for example, left few clues to their demise. Other examples, like his population-based analysis of Rwanda’s genocide, raised questions about the relative role of ecological factors in societies’ collapses. Finally, despite Diamond’s cautious optimism about our ability to "choose" our destinies, a strain of environmental determinism runs throughout the book. You’re doomed if you do—and perhaps doomed if you don’t.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL and UCLA Professor Jared Diamond exhibits interests in physiology, evolutionary biology, and biogeography, which uniquely qualify him to write this huge and passionate book. Looking at such diverse phenomena as the extinction of the Easter Islanders and the Rwandan genocides, Diamond traces the impact of environmental damage, hostile neighbors, and other forces in the survival of cultures. Narrator Michael Prichard is efficient enough, but inflectionless, making Diamond's compelling work flat. It's not all doom and gloom, and Diamond offers hope for these thorny issues, though, again, Prichard's reading seems out of step, missing opportunities to engage listeners. The print version may be the better choice. D.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Defining collapse as "extreme decline," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which posed questions about Western civilization's domination of much of the world, now examines the reverse side of that coin. Diamond ponders reasons why certain civilizations have collapsed. With an eye on the implications for the present and future, he bases his analysis on his newly phrased version of an old maxim about what history teaches: "The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn." Drawing examples from this database, from Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the Viking outposts in Greenland to the Mayan civilization in Central America, the author finds "the fundamental pattern of catastrophe" that is apparent in these populations that once flourished and then collapsed. The template he holds up is a construct based on five factors, including environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors. In addition, Diamond casts his critical but acute and inclusive gaze on the issue of why civilizations fail to see collapse coming. A thought-provoking book containing not a single page of dense prose. Expect demand from civic- and history-minded readers. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
