n  They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
***
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchelln

This book is the second in a series by this author that began with Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which I read and reviewed. In that book the author deals with the question of why some societies/people are more successful than others. 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.

Some of the environmental problems can be linked to something the author refers to as the “tragedy of commons.” This is when a community all harvests a resource from a common source, for instance, a forest, a communal pasture for grazing, or the fish in the ocean or a river. 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. An example of a successful country’s management of their environment is Japan. 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. One observer is quoted as saying “The apocalypse here will not take the form of an earthquake or hurricane, but of a world buried in garbage.” (Page 351)

Just like maintaining the health of our bodies, preventing environmental messes is cheaper in the long run. 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 500 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):

n  The rich and powerful only earn the privilege of being the last ones to starve.n

I did read at least half of this book. The section on Easter Island is one of the most memorable things I've read in the past few years, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

This book goes on my guilt shelf because shortly after he got to China, I got too depressed to continue. It's also a bit heavy (literally) for subway reading, and returning to New York from California with it combined with the prospect of learning about China's impact on the environment was just too much for this reader.... So Collapse is sitting on my real-life, non-virtual bookshelf with a JetBlue boaring pass marking my place, frozen in time like the artifact of some extinct civilization.

If I were really to make a comprehensive shelf of Books I Feel Like a Lazy Jerk for Not Having Read, Guns, Germs and Steel would also be on it.

DNF

Oh my lord, I could not possibly with this one. Diamond's writing is just too exhaustive and too dense for me to make much headway. I am interested in these ideas but prefer the summary articles I've read that reference this book much more.

This is a collection of fables drawn from human history all demonstrating how certain human societies have either achieved happiness through the wise management of their population and environment or have brought down divine nemesis upon themselves by ignoring overpopulation and the need to protect the environment. Each one of the tales is quite well down.

The seams between the tales are terrible visible and one shakes one's head at the seemingly arbitrary method used to select the stories. In other words, this is a hastily thrown together work designed to capitalize on the momentum in the market place created by Mr. Diamond's previous work: Guns, Germs and Steel.

Read and enjoy it if you have already read the vastly superior Guns, Germs and Steel. If you buy it in a marked-down bin or borrow it from a public library you will resent the crash commercialism of it much less.

Este libro desmonta sistemáticamente los argumentos de aquellos que aún tengan una posición negacionista sobre la crisis medioambiental en la que nos encontramos y nos pone cara a cara con los graves problemas que nos esperan a la vuelta de la esquina, pues son problemas que ya han sufrido con terribles consecuencias sociedades del pasado.

Como libro revelador sobre estos problemas y como despertador de conciencias dormidas tiene un valor innegable.

Sin embargo, tengo un sentimiento ambivalente con los libros de Diamond: por un lado, es una delicia leer sus ensayos excelentemente documentados y que, al menos en mi caso, me descubren datos e ideas muy enriquecedores. Por otro lado, me molesta sobremanera su sesgo de confirmación. Así como en "Armas, gérmenes y acero" el elefante en la habitación era la importancia de figuras individuales que han engrandecido civilizaciones (militar, política, científica y técnicamente) haciéndolas avanzar frente a otras y que contradicen claramente su argumento del determinismo geográfico para el avance de las sociedades, en el caso de Colapso parece increíble que soslaye el influjo en la superpobración de las grandes religiones (creced y multiplicaos) y el desmesurado consumo de proteínas animales frente a dietas vegetarianas en el caso del agotamiento de los suelos y recursos naturales. Además, cuando habla de sociedades devastadas por pueblos invasores también corre un tupido velo sobre las masacres anglosajonas en Sudáfrica, Australia o Estados Unidos.
Creo que a un científico y pensador de cierta talla se le debe exigir un distanciamiento mínimo sobre sus convicciones religiosas y culturales sobre todo, hablando de sociedades comparadas.

3,5*

This is a difficult book to give one rating to. Some parts of it deserve four or five stars, some parts deserve one or two. Generally, Collapse lacks the consistency of Diamond's most well known book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Where Guns, Germs and Steel is nearly intuitive in the simpleness but universal applicability of its principles, Collapse is episodic and fractured. Diamond's basic thesis is that societies in ecologically fragile environments "choose" to succeed or fail based on how willing they are to adopt to their environment, and how conscience they are of environmental change.

I was very interested in the sections about the collapse of the Easter Island society, as well as Diamond's extended discussion of the Greenland Norse. There are also some chilling examples of island societies that disappeared entirely. Modern examples of collapses include Rwanda and Haiti.

The book started boring me towards the end, when Diamond stops telling the story of particular societies and begins to expound at length about the principles that unite these examples. It quickly becomes clear that there are as many or more principles and factors as there are examples in the book.

Overall, I would recommend reading sections of this book, but not the whole thing. If you are someone who cannot stop reading a book once you get into it, you should probably avoid Collapse, as it will trap you.

Audio book was as dry as a piece of Melba toast after Bar Rush. Impact could have been enhanced with a provocative frame structure. Title feels misleading since ancient cultures didn't know, what they didn't know. Book failed to produce an A-ha Moment. Maybe I'm just jaded about human nature and its approach to environment. Not recommended.

I like the choice of the word "choose" in the sub-title. While the world collapses around us, too many Americans think our problems are abortion, prayer in school, terrorism, immigration, and a lot of other not-shit issues. Meanwhile we have completely ignored issues like renewable energy, sustainable cities, and mass transportation. We are going to make Easter Island and the Norse settlements in Greenland look like the most well thought out societies in history because, baby, when we go down, we are going down hard. And we are choosing to do so. I guess we are all too busy with "So You Think You Can Dance" to give much thought to our collective futures.

Von Montana, polynesischen & Maya Kulturen bis hin zu Anasazi oder Vikinger nimmt der Autor den Leser mit in eine zerstörerische Zeitreise.
Warum haben diese sehr weit entwickelten Populationen einen Zusammenbruch erlitten? Schaut man sich die Zusammenhänge an, stellt man erschreckend fest, dass das Mismanagement der Vorbote eines Verfalls ist. Warum hat man Wälder bis auf den letzten Baum gerodet?
Jared Diamond stellt richtig fest, dass nicht die Prosperität ein Indikator für die Zukunft ist, sondern die Prognose der Zukunft. Wenn wir heute genügend Geld zum Ausgeben haben und wissen, dass wir nächstes Jahr keinen Cash-Flow mehr haben, dann sehen wir uns mit höchster Wahrscheinlichkeit eben nicht mehr als Gewinner.
Was steht Australien, China und uns Europäern bevor? Wie sieht die Situation in Rwanda aus? Was können wir von Haiti und der dominikanischen Republik lernen?
Gerade jetzt stehen wir am Scheidepunkt, wo wir uns unserer Prosperität bewusst sind aber sich die Ressourcen, die wir dafür benötigen sich langsam den Ende neigen.
Es ist handeln angesagt. SOFORT. Sonst klopft uns der Verfall wie es eins die Maya heimsuchte, schon in wenigen Jahrzehnten vor der Tür. Mit nur einem Unterschied. Es wird keine Fläche mehr zum Ausweichen geben.

0 stars if I could!! hated it!! great book if you're looking for pseudoscience that just proves one author's point!

Guns, Germs and Steel occasionally felt like monday morning quarterbacking, but Collapse is superb. In GG&S, Diamond tried to explain how technologies that evolved in some places did not in others, how some communities thrived due to excess food and more advanced agriculture, while others, perpetually on the verge of starvation, had to devote all of their time to dealing with that and thus didn't have time for building the Parthenon. 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. GG&S also overlooked a lot of crops available to people he strenuously argued had nothing to eat - for example, Acai in the Amazon Basin (a superfood which constitutes 45% of the diet of some locals) and others elsewhere.

In Collapse, Diamond examines how several ancient societies (Easter Island, Mangareva/Pitcairn Lapita, Maya, the Norse colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland) fell apart due to resource management issues, the environmental challenges faced by a few modern countries (Australia, Japan, China), and the best ways to avoid a tragedy of the commons-type situation that results in a drastically reduced standard of living for everyone. 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."

Overall, Diamond seems most worried about erosion, which he sees as a bigger problem than global warming because of the difficulty of replacing arable land, and the multitude of ways it can be destroyed. 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.

کتاب فروپاشی، به بررسی این مسئله می‮پردازد که چگونه جوامع انسانی در اثر عوامل مختلف دچار انحطاط و فروپاشی می‮شوند.

این کتاب، تحقیقی در مورد سقوط و فروپاشی برخی از تمدن‌های برتر تاریخ جهان است. با اینکه جارد دایموند بخش عمده کتاب را به توضیح در مورد ‮دلایل نابودی تمدن‮های تاریخی مانند مایا و یا وایکنیگ‮ها اختصاص داده است، اما خط سیر کتاب فروپاشی، به گونه‮ای است که برخلاف سایر کتاب های تاریخی جرد دایموند نیست و نویسنده در این کتاب با نگاهی موشکافانه به بررسی عوامل سقوط جوامع پرداخته است؛ دلایلی که در ظاهر امر نمی‮توان آن را تشخیص داد و باید به عمقش نفوذ کرد.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬