The esteemed Jared Diamond, author of one of the most insightful and profound books of the previous decade: Guns Germs and Steel, tried to break the wave of his success on Collapse, a book about the failure of societies due to a laundry-list of (mostly environmental) issues. It’s too soon to render a verdict on the bearded Professor (unlike Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson) since he wisely chose topics which cannot be gauged within a human lifetime but the book itself was a real steaming pile of environmental compost. I can’t resist quoting Fred L. Smith Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "[a] jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces laid out on the table - no structure, no serious organization." Indeed, I was so pissed after reading this book that I wanted to rip out all 592 pages and use every single one to give the author paper cuts between his toes. Then set him out barefoot on the New Guinea lowlands about which he can’t seem to shut the flock up. But this is a book review and I digress because I’m getting all worked up again so I’m going to end this paragraph prematurely: *SPURT*

Jared Diamond's non-fiction work Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail & Succeed quite definitely has an exceedingly broad scope, attempting to discern the variables that cause a country or a specific geographic landscape to survive or to encounter a gradual or a precipitous decline. The areas examined initially may not appear to have much in common but the author focuses on the ways in which various stresses occur within a group of people and their responses to whatever imperils their continued health & future existence, ranging from New Guinea to Rwanda-Burundi to Easter Island to Greenland.



Interestingly, the book begins with an area of particular interest to Jared Diamond & his family, Montana, and a consideration of how wealthy folks buying 3rd or 4th homes in that state, so-called "trophy or investment homes" that are seldom visited, together with large-scale mining interests bringing destructive side-effects such as toxic waste have changed the character of the western state.

To be sure, there is ambiguity in the manner in which the author portrays specific declines but his investigation of cultures under stress & the decisions each makes or fails to make seem in each case quite interesting, even if not always completely captivating. In the case of Easter Island, the causes for ecological demise are internal, including deforestation & suggesting a parallel with many places around the globe today, Haiti included among them.

Jared Diamond demonstrates how Maya culture differed from Anasazi, with the former having written records but no pack animals, thus making expansion or movement less possible. Mayan calendars date from 3,114 BC, 2,500 years prior to "New World" calendars. Mayan diets are examined & it is noted that unlike Aztec & Inca cultures, Mayans were largely rooted in place, making empire & also war less possible.

Collapse has an environmental emphasis but a sociological component as well, for example suggesting that with the Vikings "trading led to raiding" but in the case of Greenland, a sense of racial superiority or ethnocentrism prevented the Viking "colonists" in Greenland from learning survival techniques from the native Inuit who might have served as willing partners, eventually leading to the demise of their initially prosperous settlement. Again, unwholesome treatment of the land + an innate arrogance precipitated the downfall, as the Norse population bespoiled the land, failed to adapt to a new landscape, sought to preserve customs that were alien to a different part of the world & looked upon the native Inuit as competition.



Meanwhile, the Tikopia people of New Guinea seem to have developed a naturally benevolent form of sustainability of their own lands & but often at a "stiff price". They practiced crop rotation & a balance of nature but also engaged in population control that involved euthanasia, infanticide & clan wars.

Japan also has done an excellent job of retaining nature in the midst of a very crowded environment, achieving zero population growth, though the Ainu on the northern island of Hokkaido were made dependent on Japan & weaned from their own self-sustaining mode of life. It seems that in Japan the seafood diet meant an absence of cows, goats & other animals that were not always advantageous for the soil and also the ruling Shogan & local guards served as ecological stewards of the land.

Thomas Malthus is cited because populations often expand well beyond the ability of the soil to produce sufficient crops for increasing humanity because "populations expand exponentially & food production expands arithmetically".

Other variables explored include people following historically valued but outmoded patterns of behavior toward the land (which the author labels "sunk cost effect"), the effect of globalization & how high to extreme population density can be a factor in the cause of genocide, with Rwanda-Burundi as an example. One of the most compelling images is a map with an overlap of nations that are both environmental & political trouble-spots today. Beyond that, globalism is said to link us all, both via technology & increasing toxic waste.

Jared Diamond's Collapse appeared in 2005 & some elements of the book now seem somewhat dated. Presently people tend to avoid terminology that references "1st World vs. 3rd World" countries, etc. The material covered is indeed often treated with a broad brush & there is more than a little repetition in the book. Also, there are some rather obscure words & with a 550+ page book, a glossary would not have represented a burdensome expansion.

That said, I enjoyed the curious approach of Jared Diamond's scholarship, the portrayed linkages between overcrowding & deforestation, the author's commentary about the preeminent importance of sustainability & his guardedly positive sense of the future of our planet.



Jared Diamond has an eclectic background with degrees in Anthropology, History, Physiology & Bioethics from Harvard & Cambridge Universities. *There are 24 pages of black & white photos, including images of Easter Island & Angkor Wat, with the latter treated by Diamond in an epilogue to the book. Collapse is recommended by the Cambridge University Programme for Sustainability Leadership.

Extremely repetitive, inadequately researched, highly speculative, and overly assertive. Jared Diamond clearly knows a lot about some things, but he seems to think he knows a lot about everything. And he gets a lot wrong, at least on the things I know something about (Easter Island, for example, where his Collapse hypothesis is generally regarded by people who actually study the island's history and prehistory as wildly off-base and unsupported by evidence).

This book was clearly written by someone who had a theory (Collapse) and went looking for evidence to justify it. Fine, I suppose, but that's the opposite of a scientific approach (examine evidence and search for a theory to explain it).

Stylistically, his tendency to repeat every point two or three or four times might be helpful in the classroom, but it's irritating to read.

Overall, my strong recommendation is not to bother with this book. Seriously, it's almost impossible to distinguish between the assertions that are supported by evidence and accepted by experts and those that are just Jared Diamond's speculation. Unfortunately, this hit the bestseller list and lots of his speculation became accepted by intelligent people who don't happen to be experts.

Collapse is even better than Guns, Germs, and Steel. And this time Diamond focuses, not on how environments have shaped people, but how we have transformed our environments. He looks at various places that suffered environmental collapse in the past, like Yucatan or Greenland, then looks at some relative success stories like Japan or the Dominican Republic. He mainly covers places where he has both personal experience and great background knowledge. The resulting tour is marvelously insightful, and close to the finest non-fiction writing out there. But his examples leave out the sites of history's greatest environmental collapses and challenges, across North Africa and the Middle East.

Five stars for the importance of the topic, three stars because it's so repetitive. I get it! We're all going to cannibalize each other. Well, maybe not us, personally, but likely our grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

Sigh.

Citizen Diamond is clearly a middle-of-the-road centrist who thinks that both sides have good points - and thus aggravates me to no end. Which is a shame, as I truly enjoy most of his other books. Over and over again, he defends businesses, their practices, and the people who run them because "they exist to make money" and seems to believe that this excuses their actions because there is no other way that we could ever possibly get anything done without allowing someone to make money by exploiting the people underneath them and destroying everything around them. He also seems to be a champion of regulated capitalism and American democracy as the only way to get anything done because of the "failed experiment" of the Soviet Union.

You know, it's funny, no one says banks are a "failed experiment" when one of them fails. No one says capitalism is a "failed experiment" when some company goes out of business. No one says democracy is a "failed experiment" when a democratic nation is conquered or undergoes a revolution/civil war. Yet time and time again, Communism is absolutely a failed experiment to these people because one nation failed one time. Completely discounting the fact that the backwards, agrarian nobody that was Imperial Russia in 1914 became a Superpower is less than 50 years whilst suffering the devastation of two world wars. The USA only reaped benefits from WW1 and 2, and yet, the USSR gave us a run for our money. How was this "failed?"

But that's neither here not there.

Citizen Diamond believes that if we just were nice and all had long-term views and drank cocoa around fires with business leaders and government officials that everyone would suddenly act appropriately, we'd all learn we'd need to do less with less, and all live quiet, modest, peasant lifestyles. Citizen Diamond pushes the myth of scarcity, champions Malthusian population ideals, and decries the lifestyle of the average American, whilst completely defending the devastation caused by the lifestyles of the top 1%...who, you know, are just trying to make everyone money, so we should really get off their backs, because you know, money.

His research into past societal collapses is just fine, and he points out what they did wrong interestingly. You can learn a lot from the fall of the Norse in Greenland, or "Easter Island," or the Maya, or the "Anasazi." You can also read about failures and successes in the Polynesian sphere. However, when he comes to modern societies, he spends a little bit of time discussing China, and a lot of time discussing Australia. He, of course, says it's because Australia is a First-World Country - unlike China - which, wow, I mean, in the actual Cold War definition of the First-World, Second-World, Third-World terms, he is correct, but you can tell that he means it in the completely Euro-centric viewpoint. He seem to think that we can not sympathize with China as they are "alien foreigners" (my impression), even though he goes on to explain how Australians can only live in very large cities or very small towns, as there isn't the infrastructure or resources on the continent to supply a medium-sized city. As a resident of a "medium-sized city" in a nation full of medium-sized cities, I can't relate to that experience. I bet China's got a lot of those, however.

This was a shame, for as I've said, I really like most of his other works and agree with his viewpoints, but his apparent faith in the western/American way of life as the solution for the future for everyone everywhere (as long as we regulate it and educated ourselves and learn control - you know, all those things that are highly valued in America *he says with a note of sarcasm*) is extraordinarily disappointing. He even uses the example of the Dutch and their collective concern for each other because of their need to maintain their sea walls, lest they all drown - seeming to believe that Americans are just one campfire-cocoa-chat away from becoming perfect collectivists...

Onvan : Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Nevisande : Jared Diamond - ISBN : 143036556 - ISBN13 : 9780143036555 - Dar 608 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2004

As usual, very informative, I enjoyed listening to the audiobook while I read the ebook. This book was published originally in 2005, so a lot of this information has been disseminated and accepted wisdom for years. Not the author’s fault, but my own for letting this languish on my nonfiction TBR list for so long! I definitely want to read the third of the trilogy as soon as possible. I enjoy the author’s expertise and style, but I am no expert, more of an armchair science nerd.

I was mostly engrossed and read closely the first half of the book, about ancient societies that have collapsed. I enjoy well-written and researched history and popular science, and this definitely fits the bill for me. In the last quarter of the book, as Diamond covers big business and their role in environmental problems, and what’s happening in “modern” society – modern being the early 2000s when this book was written - I found myself skimming. So much has happened in the last 10 years or so, not the least of which being the Covid pandemic, which has caused grave concern about our ability to handle big problems.

I found his description of what he says are the 12 intertwined biggest modern issues to be dealt with in determining whether we collapse most disturbing. He says all 12 areas are interrelated, and must be resolved within next 50 years, but we don’t know if they’ll be “…resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.” (p. 498) Yikes!

In the years since publication, so much he predicted has come to pass, it feels like we are already there - and at least here in the USA, it feels like political gridlock and polarization make good decision-making unlikely. I wish I could feel his cautious optimism, but he seems to feel like grassroots pressure on our elected officials could bring about positive change and good decisions. But this book was written before the extreme polarization and growing anti-science skepticism of the last several years, I’m not terribly hopeful. I do plan to read his third in the series as soon as possible to try and get his latest ideas.

Απιστευτα διαφωτιστικό. Το βιβλίο ειναι κτήνος και η έρευνα που έχει γίνει εις βάθος.

One of the most important questions of humanity. Why do human societies fail or succeed? And Jared Diamond proves that he is an incredibly talented writer, as well as one of the main researchers and thinkers that can dare to answer such a question. He takes on an amazing journey through some of the most epic experiences in human civilization. And we do learn how to look at our own time with the perspective of our species' past failures and sucesses.

My take-away from this difficult but absolutely important book is that we urgently need to change the ways in which we think, and in which we make our collective decisions.

This book was written 12 years ago, which is frightening enough, and even then, what he described seemed overwhelming. He does a monumental job of synthesizing and analyzing data from key cultures all over the world at different times, looking at what worked and didn't work from a long-term survival point of view, and asking (a bit like the questions asked by Cook in A Brief History of the Human Race ) why these various societies failed or succeeded.

Most instructive, as I see it, are the contrasting examples of Greenlands live Inuits and Dead Norse, and Hispanyola's foresting Dominican Republic and stripped-bare Haiti. He points to collapses, near-collapses, and timely but not necessarily popular policies placed to prevent collapse (particularly well summarized on page 440), and also delves into the problems of mass-manipulation and the related problem of group-think, using the handling of the decision-making processes in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missle crisis as contrasting examples of how president Kennedy adapted (even stepped out to ensure that they could think without being intimidated by his presence, wow) his governance processes in the small group situation to prevent a recurrence of his error with Bay of Pigs. How rare for a leader to insist that his advisors, and he, change their thinking strategy, and it worked. Unfortunately for the identity-bound Greenland Norse Christians, they were unable to change their thinking, and they died while the Inuits lived, under the very same climatalogical conditions, and with better tools and weapons to boot.
He goes on to answer many oft-cited solutions, like technology, as unable to solve the problems we face, which he lists in 12 major categories, unless we change (as Einstein also said) our ways of thinking, and he also pointed out that much of the problem is one related back to the Tragedy of the Commons (I remember seeing a rebuttal of that issue while working on my phd, but it escapes me) and points out that small-ish Non-anonymous groups often work best at policing themselves democratically (as my conclusions also found regarding small-scale issuance of money in SHARED MONETARY GOVERNANCE: Exploring Regulatory Frameworks, Participatory Internal Decision-making and Scale in Institutional Access to General and Special Purpose Currencies ) -the decision-making process is critical.

He also goes into some statistics that almost began to sound like what David Hackett Fischer talked about in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History regarding the correlation between societal upheavals and price inflation, which is caused by any number of variables also cited here by Jared Diamond: population pressure and consumption, types of energy being gathered and used and the by-products or externalities and problems caused thereby, inequalities of various kinds, etc.

He stresses that the decisions we make collectively, upon which our lives literally depend, are often made out of a biased or even racist point of view, as with the Greenland Norse who died as civilized European Christians, refusing to learn from or cooperate with the Inuit, who lived. (Ok, maybe they didn't have the choice of cooperating with, but they could surely see that the Inuit ate things that they, the Norse, refused, and also did not keep cows or sheep, which are not good animals to raise in Greenland!)
We therefore, just as both Armstrong in Islam: A Short History and Cook also point out, absolutely must change our ways of viewing and interacting with other cultures. We no longer, as Dr. King said over 40 years ago in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, have the luxury of not cooperating.
Shira
14 August, 12017 HE
(the Holocene Calendar)

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.