Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize winner, Guns, Germs and Steel, explored why one society would succeed while another would fail. Diamond identified factors that lent themselves to success, and illuminated thriving cultures as blessed by history, resources and internal health.
Collapse looks at the flip side of this equation, identifying five main factors that lead not to simple failure, but to total (and in many cases, sudden) collapse of the society. This book will probably be read primarily as an environmental health warning, and Diamond frequently sounds a tocsin on environmental issues. But he points out that cultural causes also contribute to these catastrophes.
A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment... extent and reversibility of that damage depend partly on properties of people... and partly on properties of the environment... A next consideration in my five-point framework is climate change, a term that today we tend to associate with global warming... [but which also involves] changes in natural forces that drive climate, and have nothing to do with humans... A third consideration is hostile neighbors... The fourth... is the converse of the third set; decreased support by friendly neighbors, as opposed to increased attacks by hostile neighbors... The last set of factors... involves the ubiquitous question of the society's response to its problems... [which] depend on its political, economic and social institutions, and on its cultural values. [Emphasis mine.]
Diamond begins by placing these factors in a present-day context to which most of us can relate: Montana. Once he is sure we have a grasp of the complexity involved in these inter-locking issues, he goes on to consider historical collapses in the Pacific Islands (Easter Island and the Pitcairns), the desert West (Anasazi), Viking settlements in Iceland, Greenland and Vinland, and the Mayan empire.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
There's a really good interview with Diamond, conducted by Salon.com, that took place a month of two back.
Really interesting theories presented here, especially when looked at side-by-side with Michael Crichton's fiction-as-politics work of late.