It's pretty convincing, though I've become aware that archeologists dispute many of his claims. I think there is a common concern for the environment.
I'm not even 30, so perhaps I can't speak with a great deal of authority on the subject, but it feels to me that North America is obsessed with post-apocalyptic settings right now in If there is a "spirit" of a society that is translated in its literature, then I think it's safe to say that the bearded guy holding a "the end is nigh" sign is finally getting the mainstream audience he dreamed of.
It seems to me the real problem is that it is very difficult to minimize our impact on the environment. We can call upon America to lead the way, but they can't even manage their debt. In fact, the societies that Diamond relies on to illustrate that it is possible to limit deforestation, tend to be autocratic though so were the societies that Diamond relies on to illustrate failure.
Now, some NGOs have set up certification procedures that identify wood that was harvested sustainably, but other corporate commissions have set up their own certification bodies to confuse consumers. Nevertheless, Diamond outlines reasons to be cautiously optimistic before concluding. Unfortunately, this may have been the least convincing part of Collapse.
Now I feel like the world always has been ending. It's just that until recently, humanity could only end one specific part of it at any given time. Now we're a global society. View all 4 comments. Jan 20, Michael rated it liked it Shelves: s , environmental-writings.
The halfway point review: One question I've been wrestling with as I read, as I watch these societies move slightly past sustainability, as I read about societal collapse and the squandering of resources by the wealthy and then the inevitable cannibalism that always seems to show up in the last act, I keep asking myself how the environment became a "political issue. Or else, how can they justify placing jobs, business interests, or anything else ahead of the environment in their values?
Is it because environmental damage is such a gradual process? If so, we need to come up with some way to drive home the importance of creating a sustainable way of living. Politicians hedging around environmental issues--while placing these issues on the same level of importance as gays in the military--is clearly not getting us anywhere.
Literature on the dangers of global warming and about the human effects on the environment isn't going to get the point across to those who willfully avoid learning about the topic. Does the environmental movement need more advertisements? More celebrity endorsements? I hate asking rhetorical questions, even if my goal is to generate conversation, so my hypothesis, without any evidence to support it, is YES: we need a much fucking better PR department, and we need it quickly.
If we are going to keep the global society from reaching the point of some real collapse, we need to change the rhetoric with which we talk about the "environment. The way we abstractly think of "the environment" makes this separation of humans from their environment easier. We need rhetoric that makes it clear that when we speak of "the environment," what we are really concerned with is the continued ability for humanity to survive on this planet. What we're talking about isn't separate from people, physically or ethically.
I'll end my halfway point review by bringing up the personal guilt that reading these pages has reawakened in me. Reading about the way the Easter Islanders squandered resources building the tremendous statues and headpieces for the glorification of rich people has reminded me of my own complicity.
I've always thought of myself as an environmentalist: I take the light-rail whenever possible, recycle, eat with an awareness of where my food comes from. But, even as someone passionate about the environment, I've spent several years working at a bank. I've spent my time too focused on my own education to dedicate much time to preservation…which is what I'm complaining about others doing.
What have I truly done to rebel against a society that places greed and opulence above sustainability? I've found ways to reduce the damage that I inflict, but I have done nothing to challenge my society's destructive way of being. So, what right do I have to climb up on my soap-box? View all 11 comments. May 22, Sebastien rated it really liked it. This is an exhaustive and exhausting read. Still, I thought it was very good, the historical examples of collapse and also the examples of societies that successfully changed to avoid disaster were interesting.
I remember reading This is an exhaustive and exhausting read. I remember reading Guns, Germs, Steel and while I enjoyed it Diamond's geographical determinism was tiresome and I suspect overplayed. In this book he focuses on environmental stresses and issues playing a role in collapsing societies.
My impression is anthropologists really seem to have an ax to grind with Diamond. Given the interwoven nature of the global economy, intricate complexity of our systems, and rates of environmental destruction and pressures we are applying on environment Diamond readily admits we are facing huge, potentially civilization changing downshifts. Grave risks, weakness or breakdown in one part of the global system can reverberate throughout. I was a bit surprised by that tbh, maybe I was struck by the nonchalance of his optimism especially given his devastating analysis of what we are facing.
There were some great sections. This includes people who have magical belief in deux ex machina future tech that will come save us from problems we have or are causing.
I do think tech and innovation can be tools to help us, but they all have various externalities and can cause new problems of their own, plus in regards to environment, since the systems are all so interconnected you destroy or damage one aspect it can lead to a grand cascade. At that point tech can maybe help minimize issues but it is hard impossible? Good luck putting the genie back in the bottle, some changes are irrevocable 6th extinction underway is a good example, even the destruction of what can seem an innocuous tiny microorgamisn can completely change the ecosystem with implications for species in that system.
Diamond also points out another argument people use to justify environmental destruction: well the environment is a luxury and we need to do everything we can for our economy which includes destroying the environment. The economy is driven by the environment! Happens again and again. And it's not simple, I understand the tension in this dynamic because if you are hungry today you need to do whatever it is you can to put food on the table and sometimes that includes destroying the environment which will have long term implications, but if you are hungry and desperate you don't have as much luxury to think about or emphasize the long term.
I think it annoys me, lol. He also very much emphasizes consumer ability to exert pressure on companies to shift to more environmentally friendly habits. I believe this is a good tactic but can also be limited not to mention not all consumers have luxury to shift to more environmentally friendly consumption nor the luxury of time to research and learn what those options might be.
Ultimately I am of the belief one has to reform the systems we are operating in, this includes reforming how corporations operate instead of monolithic submission to shareholders I believe in a multi-foundational mission for corporations where community, workers, management, shareholders are all taken into consideration. The concept of sustainable living might be a high priority for me but it is very hard given the way the system is set up, I still generate a massive amount of trash and use tons of energy… this is not to sidestep accountability, because I should be held accountable and I can do better and many things I can do Diamond touches on this concept and it is pertinent to many problems: elites being insulated from the problems they create.
That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions. View all 9 comments. Shelves: societal-struggle , reviewed , history.
Jared Diamond demonstrates how Maya culture differed from Anasazi, with the former having written records but no pack animals, thus making expansion or movement less possible. Mayan calendars date from 3, BC, 2, years prior to "New World" calendars. Collapse has an environmental emphasis but a sociological component as well, for example suggesting that with the Vikings "trading led to raiding" but in the case of Greenland, a sense of racial superiority or ethnocentrism prevented the Viking "colonists" in Greenland from learning survival techniques from the native Inuit who might have served as willing partners, eventually leading to the demise of their initially prosperous settlement.
Presently people tend to avoid terminology that references "1st World vs. Feb 10, Felicia rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction. So I was in Belize for the holiday and became fascinated with all the Mayan ruins I visited. I had been to Copan in Honduras years ago, but was reminded of the great glory of this civilization, and the controversial collapse that happened to disperse people from these great structures around AD.
I love Guns Germs and Steel more than anything, it changed how I look at history and people and society, so I dug into this one, particularly the Mayan part, with great excitement. And it doesn't disa So I was in Belize for the holiday and became fascinated with all the Mayan ruins I visited. And it doesn't disappoint. A lot of this book is clearly set up to support the author's argument, that it is the roll of the dice of how delicate the ecology is where societies set up shop, and how the societies treated them that causes collapse.
Basically an extension of Guns Germs and Steel. This puts a stark face on how we should and need to consider dealing with the environment cards we're dealt though. Nothing is more tragic than the Easter Island chapter, it is breathtaking the research and evidence that proves why they disappeared, and tragic if you think about it in the context of our earth, from which we really cannot escape, same as the Easter Islanders.
If you are an environmentalist or not, there are thought provoking ideas and statistics here that put a concrete face to a cause that has become an emotional and numbing topic. This is NOT a book trying to convince you to care about the environment, it's a survey of lost civilizations and how they collapsed. The awareness for me was a byproduct, and fascinating in its own right.
View 2 comments. Guns, Germs and Steel occasionally felt like monday morning quarterbacking, but Collapse is superb. The argument was not airtight - his notion of what constitutes Guns, Germs and Steel occasionally felt like monday morning quarterbacking, but Collapse is superb.
The argument was not airtight - his notion of what constitutes a reasonable amount of time to spend on gathering food could use a little sharpening, and he didn't approach work as part and parcel of culture, which it most certainly is. The author is breathtakingly impartial, sometimes to a fault; he laconically remarks, for example, that "George W.
Bush remains unconvinced of the reality of global warming. You can buy all the long-line-caught Chilean sea bass you want, and eat organic lettuce all day, and still have an awful impact on the environment because the soil in which the lettuce grows is a limited resource, as are the fisheries that produce the fish you buy, which also suffer from land degradation.
Diamond thinks that a lot of the resources we rely on have been made artificially cheap through subsidies and foolish government management of limited resources. He's right, but there is a conflict between egalitarianism and environmentalism lurking between the pages of this book: I don't think you can charge the right amount for energy or food or other essentials without further immiserating the poor. That's the unmet challenge of the environmental movement, the one this and most books on the subject dodge.
Despite that, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Collapse for its details on everyday life in Norse Greenland and Easter Island alone, not just for the nuanced analysis. View all 3 comments. This book serves as a supplement to that book in that it examines the same question, but here his primary focus is on the environmental factors and the ways that societies respond to them. He gives short histories of various civilizations, both ancient and modern, and the environmental problems that they created or faced.
These histories describe civilizations that collapsed or are collapsing and contrasts them with civilizations that succeeded in managing their environment. There are several environmental factors that affected these civilizations. The list contains things like climate change, soil erosion, water management, overpopulation, introduced foreign pests, toxic wastes, and many others.
His main focus is on deforestation, which in many cases contributed to some of the other problems. Because it is a shared resource, but lacks effective regulation there is no compulsion for an individual to limit their harvest. This has led to many resources being over-harvested and destroyed. The author does point out some positive trends.
He uses a Top-Down and Bottom-Up framework to discuss some success stories. They realized early that due to their isolation from other countries the people depended on their own natural resources and took steps to prevent things like over-harvesting. In China the government has instituted the one child rule, and also implemented some positive programs to save their environment. These were examples of Top-Down approach in that it was the leaders of the country that implemented the conservation measures.
In describing the situation on the South Pacific island of Tikopia he describes a Bottom-Up approach. This civilization had no strong central government so the people themselves implemented measures to save their environment and control population.
They made a decision to kill every pig on the island because they were destroying gardens even though they were a source of protein. He describes the per-capita impact of humans. This is the average resource consumption and waste production of one person. This impact is much higher in First World countries than in Third World countries.
However, with the globalization of communication people in Third World countries want the same standard of living as those they see living in First World countries. This impact is also increasing due to increased immigration to First World countries and the subsequent assumption of their living standard.
The financial costs resulting from people getting sick from air pollution, the increase in prices due to the destruction of fish habitat, the time spent in traffic, the cleanup of toxic chemicals, and the lack of clean water can run into the billions. The horrific view is that if ancient civilizations collapsed due to environmental problems with their primitive tools and relatively small populations, what impact might we have with our heavy machinery and nuclear power.
This was a very educational read for me. In addition to learning a context in which to think about our environmental problems, I learned valuable lessons in the histories of some civilizations which I doubt I would have ever read. However, the book did become a slog at times. Many of the histories seemed to repeat things and it got a little wordy. The Norse settlement in Greenland lasted about years and it seemed to take that long to read. This is an important book. Unlike the Norse of Greenland, or the Polynesian natives on Easter Island, we cannot plea ignorance of our environmental problems.
Unfortunately many people who make some of those decisions choose to ignore this problem. As the author points out a few times and I paraphrase : The rich and powerful only earn the privilege of being the last ones to starve. View all 20 comments. The author of this book was extremely long-winded, so I am going to do the opposite with this review and keep it short and simple.
I went into this read excited by the content. I love history and I love little known history even more. This book was a blend of past, present and future regarding how humans are affecting the planet. The basic premise was good and the examples the author chose to write about were perfect. I rank the chapters that discussed Easter Island, various other islands and Gre The author of this book was extremely long-winded, so I am going to do the opposite with this review and keep it short and simple.
I kept dozing off while reading them and considered skimming through them more times than I care to admit. Three stars to a book that needed a few hundred pages of unnecessary extra removed from it. As I have read this book the bush fire crisis in Australia was making news worldwide. Jared Diamond devoted an entire chapter to Australia in this 15 year old book and it made stark reading considering.
He hardly covered fire that devours but had a lot to say about water, agriculture and mining. Mining is huge in this country to the point that multi national and local miners can campaign very hard, with the mass media heavyweight assistance of US plutocrat Rupert Murdoch, to get what they want.
Governments will fall; some people do become silent as the fear of a smashing in the media as to their thoughts on the degradation of resources for cheap return are generally turned into some cheap point scoring propaganda on behalf of vested interests. Can I complain? Can I hell! Me and my generation, boomers, has made a mint from the resource sector via our superannuation with fast and easy returns and now in our dotage have a lot to yell about at those bludging whining youngsters.
Good grief! Who are these people to complain about us receiving tax credits back from the PAYE taxpayer for our 1. The premise of this chapter can cover the individual as well. There is rational behaviour behind all decisions no matter how seemingly poor. Diamond discusses the foolishness of cotton growing in Queensland and northern New South Wales that depletes water resources from the likes of the Murray Darling downstream.
Rural and with that very conservative electorates downstream have complaining for years and years about water loss. Google is your friend to read up on this.
So with cotton, drought etc. And what a debate! For a more cerebral read look at this. Diamond writes that he is hopeful that correct decisions will be made with pressure from the public in general and gives many reasons as to why this has been successful. Again this all depends on ones point of view but after watching the power of the media to support and sway opinion in Australia over the issue of the environment and tax credits on fully franked shares I have my doubts.
It was suggested to me that some of the research may have been superseded, and a very quick internet read early on showed there was some thoughts as to the book becoming dated. Be that as it may it has been a good read and worth the effort. Oct 29, Charlie George rated it it was amazing Shelves: history , will-re-read , science , favorites , books-read-twice , current-events , anthropology , environmentalism.
I have come to regard this book as the best non-fiction I've had the pleasure of reading, and recommend it emphatically if you have an interest in any of the subjects in which I have it categorized on my shelves. Diamond's Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs and Steel. Collapse bridges the gap between anthropology and environmentalism, and critically connects each with our own welfare, both collectively and a [ Update: I am re-reading this after not quite 2 years.
Collapse bridges the gap between anthropology and environmentalism, and critically connects each with our own welfare, both collectively and as individuals. Diamond rightly takes to task environmental attitudes that appear to mindlessly value endangered birds or coral reefs above people's interests or livelihood.
That said, he also clarifies which aspects of the environment we should care about and why. He tallies dollars cost and lives lost. He illustrates in example after well-documented example the consequences for societies disregarding their resource base or destructive practices.
He repeatedly and explicitly asks the question: "well it obviously sucks to be a blue-footed bubi bird, but why should Joe Blow Logger care when he has the more pressing need to feed his family?
If he wants those children not to struggle with poverty and a declining society and standard of living, he should further care about many other aspects of the environment. Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.
Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Tags Add tags for "Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed". View most popular tags as: tag list tag cloud. Reading by 1 person. Social change -- Case studies. Environmental policy -- Case studies.
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Please sign in to WorldCat Don't have an account? Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password? Jared M Diamond. Social history -- Case studies. View all subjects. User tags User lists Similar Items. Print version: Diamond, Jared M.
We also want to know whether past collapses hold lessons for us, that might help us deal with our own problems and avoid collapse. Thus, my book includes four sets of studies. Seven chapters discuss some of the clearest, most familiar, most striking examples of past collapses: the ends of Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn Islands, where everybody either did abandon the island or else ended up dead; the end of the Viking settlements on Greenland, which similarly disappeared completely; the disappearance of Anasazi settlements in desert areas of the U.
My next set of studies concerns three societies that have flourished for several millennia, for over 10, years, and for over 40, years: Tikopia Island, Japan, and Highland New Guinea respectively. While all three of those regions enjoyed environmental advantages, we can also identify policies or conscious decisions that enabled the societies of all three regions to solve the environmental problems that they did encounter.
Next come five chapters examining gripping and instructive courses of events in the modern world. Montana, seemingly the most pristine and underpopulated U. Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa, suffered possibly the most ferocious convulsion in late 20th-century African history, when in six million Rwandans killed nearly one million of their fellow Rwandans and drove two million more into exile. The Caribbean island of Hispaniola is divided between two nations, of which Haiti is the poorest and one of the most overpopulated nations of the New World, while the Dominican Republic is many times more prosperous.
Those contrasting outcomes arose to a smaller degree from environmental differences, and to a greater degree from differences of human history. Australia is instructive as the First World country occupying the most fragile environment rivaled only by Iceland , and as the First World country now contemplating the most radical solutions to its resulting environmental patterns. It was surprise at this question that caused the archaeologist Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, to dismiss out of hand the possibility that complex societies could collapse as a result of depleting environmental resources.
Hence my chapter draws up a roadmap of group decision-making, starting with failure to perceive a problem in its initial stages, and ending with refusal to address the problem because of conflicts of interest and other reasons. Chapter 15 considers the environmental policies of big businesses, many of which are viewed as, and some of which actually are, among the most environmentally destructive forces in the world today.
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