Publisher Description
In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana. Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
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“pretty scary stuff from Diamond. Tracing the growth and collapse of several societies (Maya, Easter Island, Viking colonists on Greenland and N. America, etc.) and proposing how we could potentially learn from their mistakes. A cautionary tale fo places not yet completely collapsed (like Australia), but highlighting errors of judgment from those who tried to colonize from Britain (bringing rabbits and foxes and trying to create an agricultural economy, to re-create the familiar only to discover that it was disastrous in this new and different place)”
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Bill (5 out of 5 stars)
