Book Review – "Collapse"

Jared Diamond wrote about how Europe used firearms, biological warfare brought on through population density and technological innovation to conquer tribal peoples throughout much of the world ("Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies"). He’s recently published another book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" that examines ancient societies that perished, and societies that have persisted to these times. Since I’ve just heard about it, I haven’t read it yet. It’s on my reading list, though.

Using a multidisciplinary approach, he examines the extinction of four ancient societies, Easter Island in Polynesia, the Anasazi tribe in the southwestern United States, the Mayan civilization, and Viking settlements on the coast of Greenland. In each of the cases analyzed, a principal cause of extinction was ecocide, or unintentional ecological suicide. However, environmental degradation by itself did not result in extinction. Diamond concludes that a society’s fate in response to these crises is determined by how well its leaders and citizens anticipate problems before they become crises, and how decisively a society responds. However, as the Christian Science Monitor’s review says, “[s]uch factors may seem obvious, yet Diamond marshals overwhelming evidence of the short-sightedness, selfishness, and fractiousness of many otherwise robust cultures. He reveals that many leaders were (and are) so absorbed with their own pursuit of power that they lost sight of festering systemic problems.”

Diamond links the analyses of ancient societies with modern examples, including Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, China, and Australia, as well as in Montana, a state that once was among the wealthiest in the nation but now struggles with poverty, environmental problems and population loss.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard the message of trying to anticipate and respond to wide-ranging environmental problems. It will be interesting to see the linkages between the lessons in “Collapse” and the lessons from the precautionary principle. “Collapse” provides a much needed message, in these times when our currently elected leaders do not appear to be very interested in the lessons of history.