5-star topic.
Minus 1 for tragic presentation of materialism in the first half.
Minus 2 for farcical political economy in the second half.

The Tragic:
--The first half surveys a handful of historical collapses and a few survivals; frankly, I do not think there is need to give too much credit for a good choice of topic and some quantitative "fact"-gathering. This topic deserves much higher expectations.
--For direct critiques of Diamond from anthropologists, see: Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Diamond falls under “environmental/geographical/ecological determinism”; this must be critiqued carefully:
i) On the surface, we may be tempted to swing the other way and focus on ideas driving social change (i.e. idealism), ex. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which critiques “ecological determinism” in Ch.5.
ii) However, this would create a false binary. The real tragedy of Diamond is presenting a diluted historical materialism, which is actually a foundational lens for analyzing history.
...Indeed, this lens starts with the material conditions which humans reproduce themselves (production/distribution/surplus/reproduction), but this must be carefully synthesized with other side of the coin: social relations, in particular class struggle/political bargaining power and contradictions.
...For my historical materialist checklist, see this review: A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
...For a clear presentation of historical materialism, see the “What is Politics?” video lectures. Start from the beginning video, and note these episodes:
-"6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works and Why"
-"7. The Origins of Male Dominance and Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson get wrong"
-"7.1 Material Conditions: Why You Can't Eliminate Sexism or Patriarchy by Changing Culture"
-"8. Materialism vs. Idealism: How Social Change Happens"
--Back to Diamond: I am always impressed how we have standardized bad writing (think “textbook” writing). In this case, we took end-of-civilization (literally) material, somehow diluted it from the visceral senses of human/social struggle, vomited the remains onto a canvas, smeared it absent-mindedly to avoid insightful frameworks, and spent 600 pages to watch it all dry. So, a standard textbook treatment of an interesting topic, nothing special (at least it was accessible), but this is just the better half…

The Farcical:
--The farce begins in the second half, on modern times. It's comical when enlightened minds from the great liberal institutions of higher education (judging by the numerous prestigious science awards with Mr. Diamond’s name on them) put their intellect to use on modern social issues. But frankly I expected something a bit more critical from the Geography department; this isn’t Business or American International Relations after all…
--The typical shits-and-giggles of the liberal intelligentsia analyzing environmental destruction in the modern world. “Capitalism” is never even named, while short-term profit-maximization from reckless legally-mandatory plundering is portrayed as irrational behavior because long-term costs exceed short-term gain for both the public and the plunderers. Scintillating analysis

--Nothing on capitalism’s perfectly rational (for the laws of capitalism) profit-seeking behavior of externalizing costs, where environment is an obvious candidate to take the burden (as well as poor people/countries, more on this later). Try:
-Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
-The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
--Nothing on the market economy’s value system that prioritizes exchange-value (market price) over use-value, thus rampant commodification and waste. Ex. a forest has no market exchange-value (despite tremendous use-value) until it is:
a) Cut down and sold as commodities.
b) On fire (firefighting services as economic transactions).
c) Privatized and sold for speculation on financial markets, enclosing the “Commons” and kicking others out to create artificial scarcity. This is, after all, how the land market was created (“The Enclosures”) which also created the labour market (dispossessed serfs with nothing left but to sell their labour) and thus capitalism (the “market society”). “Green Capitalism” is the fresh new Enclosures to further expand capitalist market commodification/private property (ex. carbon offset markets).
...Just picture Diamond prancing down this last path, chanting the “Tragedy of the Commons” myth about how Commons (cooperation) is actually the unsustainable social relation because of free-riders. This completely neglects the diversity of Commons social arrangements spanning across cultures and time (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action), as Commons cooperation is confused with open-access under capitalism (which ironically promotes free-riding, i.e. individual short-term maximization at social cost: https://youtu.be/xcwXME-PNuE )
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

--There is one sentence on how executives are legally obligated to maximize profits, immediately followed by placing the responsibility on the public to protest. So, a child’s perception of power structures, got it. “Democracy” is just Western political democracy's political theater with periodic token elections, whereas economic democracy is scrubbed from consciousness (replaced with consumer choice “free market”, hooray!).
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
-Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

--If my use of "liberal" confuses you, I'm referring to liberal economics:
1) Clinton's smiling rhetoric but economic property rights/social power/funding still perpetuates one-dollar-one-vote. Refuses to acknowledge the dangers of accumulated wealth (i.e. money-power, money making money), the profitability of wars/imperialism/debt peonage/externalizing costs, etc.
2) The imperialism of private accumulation, i.e. Lockean property rights of those who developed the land deserve to own it. I mean, there's the whole genocidal displacement and colonial destruction of competition to challenge the idea of "development". But even if we accept "development", the serfs who were kicked off their land and forced into the labour market, the plantation slaves and indentured "coolies" and today's global division of labor, i.e. the backbone of industrialization/production, what sliver of the pie do they own?
...Diamond’s portrayal of the modern world is that of independent nations. Zero sense of the global division of labor and imperialism. Literally, unequal trade deals are blamed on “unsophisticated” poor countries making bad deals with sophisticated rich countries. Enough!

--Accessible intro to imperialism "kicking away the ladder":
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

--Deeper dives:
-foundational: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

The thesis here is that the success or failure of any culture depends upon five factors:

Climate change,
Environmental preservation or degradation,
The presence of friendly external trade partners,
The presence of external enemies, and finally,
That society's ability and willingness to respond to the previous four factors.

To develop his theory, Diamond discusses about a dozen different societies, past and present, which had experienced various combinations of troubles with the first four factors, and each of which had responded differently to the challenges that it faced.

In describing the collapse of the society on Easter Island, he ponders what might have been going through the mind of the man who chopped down the very last of the trees that had been utterly indispensable to their civilization at its height. Diamond reasons that as the tree population declined slowly over the course of several generations, its importance in building and commerce likewise diminished, so that by the time only a handful remained, the once vital trees would have seemed nearly valueless. That woodsman would therefore most likely have had no idea how important those trees had been to his great grandparents and would have had no reason to understand the significance of destroying the last one.

In discussing the collapse of the Viking colony in Greenland, Diamond observes that the Vikings might have survived and flourished had they befriended their Inuit neighbors, and learned from them how to cope with the worsening climate. (Unfortunately for the Vikings, Greenland happened to have been uncharacteristically warm during their early years there, and they had no way of knowing that that warm period was to be short-lived.) The Norse colonists might, for example, have tried to copy the kayaks that served the Inuit so well for fishing. Instead, the Vikings looked down on the Inuit as inferiors and pagans (at this point the Norse had converted to Christianity), and clung vainly to a Northern European way of life that was unworkable in Greenland.

(The two examples above are only small samples of their respective sections of the book; neither represents the totality of those sections' arguments.)

Diamond concludes the book on a note of cautious optimism for the modern world's global society. With the advantages of our knowledge of past societies, and our modern technologies (and our understanding of the unintended consequences inherent in all technology), the world can overcome all of the political and environmental crises existing today, provided that governments and big business' are willing to respond intelligently to those crises. He adds that the only way they will have that will is if they're guided by conscientious voters and consumers.

Not as good as "Guns, germs and steel" that preceded it, but definitely an interesting book. Sometimes the author seems to lose a bit of his focus on the main topic and wanders around moralizing, tending to wishful thinking, but that is certainly not a reason to discard the book. He could also be "accused of leniency" (sic) toward large industries, but I would not lightly condemn the author.

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." There's no question that environmental resources aren't infinite, yet it seems like the majority of people…or at least the loudest faction…care less about human life on earth than their own comfort and status. 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 environment is an abstract "out there" that doesn't necessarily include human babies or grandchildren. 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?

From now on, every fledgling civilization should be issued with a little pamphlet outlining the dangers of deforestation. On the cover, there'd be a picture of a toppled Easter Island statue, with the caption, "Learn from our mistakes: if you chop down all your trees, your society will expire in an orgy of cannibalism. Also, you might want to go easy on the monoliths."

Collapse is a sobering book, but I'm just jaded enough that after about the tenth analysis of pollen readings from core samples, I was like, "Come on, Jared. Get to the part where they eat each other." And that was before he launched into a detailed discussion of Japanese forestry policy in the Tokugawa era. Silviculture was a lot more interesting to me when I thought it had something to do with art therapy for seniors.

So, yeah, we're all gonna die, and some of us will probably end up getting eaten. But in the meantime, I've still got a few seasons of Barney Miller to download, so no rush.

الانهيار

كنت قد قرأت كتاب جاريد دايموند والذي حصل على جائزة البوليتزر (أسلحة، جراثيم وفولاذ) قبل سنوات، وأعجبت به كثيراً، كانت دراسة جريئة تحاول فهم الأسباب البيئية الكامنة وراء صعود حضارات معينة وتفوقها على حضارات أخرى.

في هذا الكتاب يعكس دايموند الوضع ويحاول دراسة كيف تتداعى حضارات معينة وتنهار بسبب تدميرها لبيئتها، وهو يعرض مجموعة متفرقة من الحضارات المعروفة أو المعزولة والتي مارست بلا وعي تدميراً واسعاً لبيئتها ووصلت في النهاية إلى انهيار سريع لحضارتها، كما يعرض في المقابل حضارات تنبهت لتدهور البيئة فقامت بإجراءات ناجحة للحفاظ عليها واستدامتها واستطاعت البقاء في بيئات فقيرة جداً.

كلا كتابي دايموند واجبي القراءة لكل مهتم بالتاريخ والبيئة والعلم، فدايموند يقدم هذا كله بأسلوب جميل جداً وممتع.

In case his name rings a bell, but you can't place it, he is best known for "Guns, Germs, and Steel", a weighty and well-crafted tome on the topic of how and why Europe conquered the rest of the world, instead of some other continent. The answer is (partially) in the title.

His latest effort is on a similarly cheery topic, the ways in which societies do (or do not) exhaust their environments to the point of extinction. He ranges across many centuries and continents, including a look at 20th-21st century Wyoming, but concentrates on a couple clusters:

1) pacific islands, from Easter Island to Pitcairn Island to Henderson Island
2) Norse societies, from Iceland to Greenland to Vinland

The advantage here is that he can look at societies with a similar origin (Pacific Islander or Scandinavian), and compare how they did in different environments. Other cases include the Maya, the Anasazi, and modern Australia and China.

The most haunting case histories are, of course, the failed ones. What did the Easter Islanders think as they were cutting down the last trees on their island, condemning themselves to poverty and imprisonment on an island they could no longer make the ships to leave? What did the Greenland Norse tell each other as they watch the non-Christian newcomers (Inuit) prosper, while they wasted their most valuable resources on churches dedicated to their God, and nonetheless declined into extinction? What did the Anasazi or the Maya think was going wrong, as their cities were abandoned near the end?

Which all brings up, of course, the obvious parallels to 21st century Earth. It has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but here Diamond manages to avoid the near-ubiquitous vice of the environmentalist writer: the Hellfire and Damnation Sermon.

The true H&DS lays out the manifold sins of the listeners mercilessly, spells out for them just how bad the fires of the netherworld will be, and demands that they beg God for forgiveness, all the while assuring them that they don't deserve it.

Sadly, it is the most common pattern for the modern environmentalist activist, who (in style, if not in beliefs) resembles 18th century Puritans more than a little. Which calls to mind why the Puritans eventually decline after every revival: they're depressing. Regardless of whether the populace believes they are right or not, after the novelty wears off, it's just gloomy and morbid. Abandon technology, or Mother Earth will bring on the ecopocalypse. But it's probably coming anyway, whatever you do.

To counter this, Diamond adds a number of success stories, where societies came to the bring of ecological catastrophe, and managed to learn, and pull back. Interestingly, they don't all follow the same path to get there. Tokugawa Japan is one such case, Norse Iceland is another, and the Dominican Republic and New Guineau are others.

This sort of thing, I've noticed, drives ecopuritans nuts. They apparently can't stand to hear anything positive said about the state of any ecosystem anywhere, for fear that people will think they can relax and go back to unlimited despoilation. The end result is the opposite of their intention, by the way: mainstream politics eventually learns to ignore the protests of any group (feminist, christian conservative, whatever) which is never happy.

By providing both examples of how things can go wrong (and in the past, actually have), Diamond also courts antagonism from those who believe in the Noble Savage, i.e. the idea that only modern Western-style capitalism wrecks ecosystems, and the people who got the worst of it in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" would never do such a thing. Which is bollocks, because stupidity exists equally in all races.

The sum total, however, is a well-reasoned examination of how societies come to exceed the limits of their environment's resources. One intriguing point is how the collapse often comes shortly after the peak prosperity, in a phenomenon similar to a bubble economy. Drawing on your ecosystem's resources as fast as possible does boost your productivity, including the production of more tools for exploiting additional resources. Right up until the point where something important (water, trees, topsoil, arable land) runs out, and then the crash is compounded by the fighting among too many for too little. Rwanda is a particularly brutal recent example of the multiplicative effects of resource scarcity and civil war.

If you like hard-nosed, fact-driven analysis, with a broad historical (and even pre-historical) sweep, this is a good one. Highly recommended. Not something to read while falling asleep, though. All those tales of ruined civilizations (toppled Easter Island statues, Mayan cities fallen back into jungle, crumbling Norse churches in Greenland) do not make for good dreams.

Should be required reading for anyone running for office, or for anyone voting. The list of reasons for why societies collapse are all things that are happening now in our country, not to mention throughout the world.

Diamond's prior 'Guns, Germs & Steel' addresses the reasons why some peoples in some areas of the world produced civilizations and others didn't. The factors emphasized are material and the subtext is that these factors, not moral or racial inferiority, were decisive.
'Disaster' tells the other side of the story, namely why some cultures and civilizations fail while others succeed. This is done through case studies such as a comparison of Viking Greenland (failure) to the Inuits (success) and Viking Iceland (near failure, current recovery) and Creole Haiti (failure) to the Spanish Dominican Republic (success). There are many other examples, including contemporary Montana, but these are the clearest comparisons.
A common thread of the exemplary failure is that of populations outstripping resources. Another is that of cascading effects once saturation occurs.
While the outlook is bleak, Diamond is at pains to point to success stories and to discuss the means by which good decisions have been and might be made as regards environmentally sustainable practices.

Fascinating work by the same author who won a Pulitzer prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

This exhaustive study in Malthusian economics as applied to several societies in history that have failed, such as the Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse, details the thematic traits common to each example. His chapter on Easter Island made me think of Thor Heyerdahl's work there.

Most notably is how deforestation and imprudent population control applies to modern societies in trouble as well. I find myself thinking about this work frequently, his ideas resonate with our times, mirroring as they do, and as he shows us, with failed societies of the past.

Haunting and thought provoking and a damn fine book.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. When I think about this book, I think about the Greenland Norse and the Polynesians. Great book.

Very good. Ranges credibly across multiple academic disciplines and historical periods in a way that is serious, accessible and engaging. Crucially for such an emotive topic the conclusions are balanced, with Diamond eschewing single cause explanations for past societal collapses and challenging those who hold specific business sectors or industrial practices responsible for all the world’s current environmental and socio-economic challenges. As Diamond himself acknowledges, this approach leaves him exposed to criticism both from ideological purists and deep subject matter experts on the various societies and issues he examines. However, the methodology is clearly explained, the sources fairly attributed and the synthesis achieved without taking any major liberties, all whilst articulating some punchy and challenging arguments. I’m not sure you can ask much more of a work of popular history/science/anthropology/geography/philosophy.

Diamond is well qualified to write this as he is Professor of Geography at the University of California. In this book he looks at the reasons why some societies survive and others fail.
The first chapter of the book considers Montana, it seems slightly odd as this is still a functioning state, but it has dropped to 49th in the state income chart from one of the top earners. It has always been a mining and logging state and is blessed with some of the most beautiful landscape. And yet there are underlying problems there; mine owners that have extracted the ore and have not considered the costs incurred with clean up; forests fires that proper management would reduce but that the local population won’t consider; invasion of non native species that have in certain case devastated local species, and so on. Part of the reason for the decline is people who live there temporarily and are not prepared to be part of the local community by paying taxes, but still want the landscape to remain as it is. Montana is dependent upon external monies coming in now, and if those were to dry up, then its circumstances will become perilous.
Diamond looks at the evidence for Easter Island that suggests the reason for its decline was that the local population had eaten all the native animals and felled all the trees. This led to rapid erosion of the soils and further degradation of the landscape. By this time the natives had been contacted by Europeans, who bought with the diseases such as small pox, and their fate was sealed.
Diamond then expands these theories of societies collapsing by looking at The Pitcairn Islands, The Chaco and the Maya. All of these had substantial populations in their time, and either had consumed most or all or their resources locally, or were living at the limit of what the environment could sustain. All it took was a shock of some form, i.e. a drought, and the population would take a dip, either temporarily or permanently.
The next three chapters look at the Vikings. Most people know of the violent expansion of these Scandinavian people into England and France, but they also established settlements in Iceland and Greenland. They arrived there just as the climate was favourable, and brought with them their farming techniques from Europe. The environment there is very fragile, and with the import of livestock to the land stripped back the trees and the grass. This led to significant erosion of the landscape and made a perilous existence even more susceptible to shock. They failed to learn from the Inuit people, who used the local resources sustainably. The Norse are still there in Iceland, but parts of the landscape there have been devastated.
The third section of the book looks at the state that some modern societies are in; China, Australia, Rwanda, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Each of these have particular problems from over population to corruption to serious environmental issues. For each there is a detailed description of the problems that they have got, either of their own making, or because of external factors like weather.
The final section is about how we as a planet can deal with these problems. He gives examples of oil companies who now routinely start with the best environmental methods as they know it saves them money in the long term, gives them credibility and more opportunities. He compares these to mining companies who frankly couldn’t give a monkeys, and who use all the political clout they have to pass all the cleanup costs to the state, even to the point of declaring bankruptcy to avoid these costs and staring a new company soon after.
He then list the twelve points that he thinks will have to be resolved, note not solved, as he thinks that these may be resolved by violence and war. He detail two of the organizations that are trying to put in place sustainable organizations, and showed that consumers are aware of them, and what they are trying to achieve.
He sees see some hope though. Humanity would not have got this far if we had always eradicated ourselves at each stage. That said, he does realise that we are at the point where our action will affect millions of people unless we do something soon.
This was an interesting read. Diamond has written a comprehensive book detailing all manner of reason why a society fades or suddenly ends. Even though I found it fascinating, I have only given it three stars as it is now out of date, and I feel could not do with being re written. I have one of his other books on my shelf, and I aim o read that soon.
The book can be summed up though by the American Indian quote: “When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money”