Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed |  | Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Rating:  463 reviews
Sales Rank: 1392
Media: Paperback
Edition: Later printing
Pages: 575
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.6
ISBN: 0143036556
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.28
EAN: 9780143036555
ASIN: 0143036556
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 catastropheone 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 463
 Mindless Drivel July 26, 2010
Tom Roberts (Los Angeles, CA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
As usual, Jared has produced a work of almost unimaginable drivel.
On page 285 he describes New Guineans as "more curious and experimental than any other people." As proof, he offers a story of how they did not know the use of pencils and instead had used them as "a plug through the pierced nasal septum." In other words, as a bone through their noses!
These stone aged people, who have no written language and wear no clothes, are only described as being "primitive" with quotation marks, and only as seeming so to Europeans. Since their civilization did not collapse, they are seemingly only included in the tale to demonstrate that Europeans are "horrified" (page 281), "don't understand" (page 280), "innovations failed" (page 281) and "come to appreciate" (page 282).
In short, New Guineans are the golden example that Europeans fail to meet.
He then claims that terrain ruggedness had confined European explorers to the coast for 400 years, when a far more likely explanation is that the people of New Guinea are well known to be the world's most notorious cannibals!
When discussing the marvelous examples that they set, Jared makes no mention of how they bless their new homes with blood by decapitating a victim and dragging the headless body around the perimeter, or how they cover the skulls of those they have eaten with black bee's wax and cowry shells.
Although I am sure that the Ivy League loony liberal bigots for whom these works are written have taken it all as gospel.
Required reading for policy makers and planet savers July 21, 2010
Mark A. Rayner (London, Ontario, CANADA)
This isn't quite as engrossing as guns, germs, and steel is, despite the fact that it's about the apocalypse of many a historical society. (Easter Island, the Vikings in Greenland.)
I'd skip past the initial chapter about the mining industry in Montana, so you can get into the book, but make sure you come back to it, as it's important to the overall thesis.
Should be required reading for everyone on the planet -- at least, anyone making decisions about how we're using our resources.
Interesting societal histories - analyses at times arguable July 20, 2010
MJ Blustein
If one has no familiarity with why societies collapse, this is a "must read." The author identifies five central causasional factors, not all of which apply in every instance, nor appy equally when all are present. Depending on the instance, some do not apply at all. In painstaking detail, a number of past (now disappeared) societies are analyzed, then several modern (still extant) societies. One cannot help thinking about one's own society -- that of the United States -- while reading this book. But of course, more than ever today, all current organized societies are inextricably part of one grand global society. That situation exponentially increases the influences of the factors causing collapse of any one or all of the globally linked groups/countries. This is a book that will leave the reader with a clear paradigm for use in examining current health and life of existing cultures, so that more sense can be made of the socio-political-economic world in which we live.
Convincing; if a bit overdone July 3, 2010
Scott Huizenga
The famous author of Guns, Germs, and Steel returned in 2005 to further explore ancient and modern civilization with Collapse. The first book explored civilizations in the context of how environment and geography affected human activity and development. Collapse explored deeper how human activity development affected environment. Through his other writings, Diamond gained a reputation for being an "environmental determinist," in which he inferred that humanity is essentially helpless and beholden to its environs. Evidently, I was not the only person who held this perception. Diamond addressed this very early in the book. He explained that climate and ecology is probably the largest determinant of civilization, but that humanity can play a major role - positive or negative - in shaping its ecology.
Diamond relayed several ecological collapses in throughout Earth's history. And, he interwove a few success stories just to reinforce the notion that there is still hope for humanity. Numerous societies in the Pacific Rim, South America, Africa, Asia, Northern Europe, and the southwestern United States, among others, destroyed their environments, and, ultimately, their societies through poor resource management. However, some civilizations including medieval Japan and Iceland found ways to adapt and thrive by adopting sustainable resource management; sometimes through cooperative ventures of mutual benefit; and other times through governmental fiat.
Diamond notes five primary themes that affect all societal collapses to varying degrees. One refreshing aspect of Diamond's Collapse is that Diamond does not fall into what I call the "naturalist trap." In other words, he notes with painstaking evidence that simpler, non-modern cultures are just as capable of destroying the environment as modern, first-world nations with automobiles and plastics. Technology, in and of itself, is not inherently a detriment. In fact, with proper application it can be beneficial to the environment - although Diamond does not explicitly raise the latter point.
Some of the parallels are striking, nonetheless. The primary themes of deforestation, war, and regionalization, mass emigration, and unsustainable growth are difficult to ignore in either the ancient or the modern contexts. Not every example is perfectly analogous to the 21st century. But, there are certainly enough correlations to offer pointed reflection. Near the end of the book, Diamond notes that most problems "will get resolved one way or another." Sometimes humanity reacts in positive and sustainable improvements. Sometimes, resolution is achieved only through war, famine, and widespread death.
Diamond's anthropological journey provides enough insight to make even the greatest environment skeptics ponder our current consumption rates in first-world, 21st Century civilization. Diamond notes throughout that few of the societal collapses were sudden. Seldom was there an "A-ha" moment in which the last member of a society realized that he was cutting down the last tree in the regional ecosystem. Nonetheless, collpase did come to many civilizations gradually. Most did not realize the changes until it was too late. And, similar fates may await us if we do not change our practices and lifestyles. For this reason, I was a bit puzzled by Diamond's somewhat alarmist tone toward the conclusion of the book. Yes, change is a-coming; but are we really doomed in the next 30 years?
Collapse provided this environmental skeptic with new insight to the manners by which we act as caretakers of our environment.
 Excessively Repetitive June 26, 2010
Mistersocko1117
This book could have been written in about . . . 100 pages. The author hammers on the same points continuously without offering any fresh takes due to the different circumstances he describes in the book. Other than the history portions of the book which I found entertaining, I was thoroughly bored the entire way through.
Also . . . Montana??
Showing reviews 1-5 of 463
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