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.

Collapse is a book which takes a look at societies both past and present to examine in depth how each of these societies failed or succeeded according to a five point framework laid out by the author Jared Diamond.

The framework can be summarized as follows:
1. Damages societies cause to their environment and whether or not that damage is reversible concerning things like deforestation, resource extraction, soil erosion, sustainability of fisheries and other food sources.
2. Climate change and how societies have either adapted or failed to adapt to dry climates, wet climates and cold climates as well as the different challenges they pose for the other factors within this framework.
3. Hostile neighbors and how such hostilities have affected a society's ability to thrive in their environments.
4. Trade with neighbors and how the dependence on some trade partners has contributed to the rise or fall of different nations throughout history.
5. The last and probably most important factor is how a society chooses to address the problems they are facing. This is dependent largely on a society's politics, cultural values, economics and social institutions according to Jared Diamond.

Each chapter is more or less a case study of a different society or civilization that either collapsed or still exists today. Diamond puts these societies under the microscope of his five point framework to determine how they collapsed or how they overcame the challenges they faced. The idea is to look at the past/present in order to determine how we as a globalized citizens can solve the problems currently threatening our existence today. The challenges are daunting and although the book has a seemingly pessimistic outlook overall it's certainly not impossible for humanity to overcome them. Jared Diamond considers himself a cautious optimist when considering the environmental, climate and political problems facing us today and remains hopeful we'll find the political will to enact the changes necessary to avoid the collapse that could be facing us in just a few decades time.

I personally found the book to be very well written, researched and most of all eye opening. I think it should be mandatory reading for the inhabitants of this fragile world we share and depend on together.

A great, readable book about past and present societies, their decisions regarding societal and environmental challenges that led to their collapse or survival.

On the side, I found the book very informative about the history of the societies. I particularly enjoy those about the Greenland's Norse(Viking). This book inspire me to expand my reading to those about archaeology and history.

One important lesson: ability and willingness to change core values (religious or secular) proved to be essential for survival. Emigrating to live in a faraway country myself and seeing common problems of integration among the immigrants in Europe, I can relate to some of the past societies' experience in which they kept clinging to the past habits and identity. That may create difficulties to both migrant and host population or as in the case of Greenland's Viking, lead to their collapse.

Terrifying how often the pattern of exploitation of nature and decline of cultures has repeated itself.

The fitting additional book to Diamonds work "Guns Germs and Steel" offers past and present scenarios of various environmental conditions and the mastery or miserable failure of the peoples trying to master the challenge. Especially in isolated societies, where the socio-cultural aspect is much more emphasized by the absence of invaders or other disturbing factors, the processes leading to the formation of today's ruins or prosperous cities are described.

As a classic positive example, Iceland, which counters the desolation of the climate zone and infertility of barren landscapes with strong community feeling and intelligent farming, can be named. Other isolated island states, such as Easter Island and other ghost islands, have been caught in the throes of social degeneration and driven to self-destruction by meaningless, prestigious or religiously driven construction projects, civil wars, exploitation of natural resources to the collapse of the ecosystem, or a bit of this and that mixed up together.

Often there was an old tradition of proven survival strategies on the failed island states, but their practice was mostly forgotten or ignored in the course of the delusion, resulting in the collapse of the social system and the extinction of the tribe.

How the authors' theses could be applied to the history of the development of more significant, continental nations would be highly enjoyable. This would probably be far too far-reaching and hypothetical because of the added complexity, which is why Diamond didn´t mention it, but it would make a great, new research area. The factors that are taken into account, such as climate change, hostile neighbors, environmental destruction, breaking an alliance or loss of support from friendly neighbors and, as a decisive factor, the reaction of the population and ruling caste, already present a high potential for complexity. Therefore, it would no longer be concluded with scientific seriousness by introducing additional factors such as in the case of the Roman Empire or other fallen empires.

It is noteworthy that the scheme of slow degeneration through creeping degradation of cultural as well as naturally given resources can strike both relatively primitive, almost Stone Age societies as unexpectedly as highly developed and militarily nearly unbeatable empires. Despite the admonishers of the respective time, fanaticism and megalomania became the leading motive and in hindsight apparent nonsensical and self-destructive mechanisms leaked into politics until it was accepted as usual and criticism was negated until the downfall.

At this point, it makes sense to see the accordances with the present and to illustrate the classic repetition of the history using various examples. Thus, even after dozens of vivid and illustrative learning examples from the history of what one should avoid as a state, the same, actually, precisely recognizable mistakes are committed today.
Whether it is negligent, irreversible environmental destruction, political destabilization until to the collapse of state and social order, including genocide and targeted destruction of infrastructure until relapse into archaic forms of government and theocracy, there is a wide range of patterns.

Their use seems to be so desirable to humanity that repeated attempts can no longer be construed as just perseverance. But instead, as ignorance and incompetence of elites, to whom a brief reading of any historical atlas could give numerous examples of the futility of their present action. The big and anxious question after completing the book remains whether we, as a society, may have not jumped on the wrong train for far too long. One that not only directs individual islands, regions or states, as described in the book, but the entire planet and the civilization living on it, on a path into the abyss.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_D...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaps...

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.

5/5 STARS. Jared Diamond examines why some societies have failed--and why some have been successful. An essential book.
A more complete review to come, if I find the time!

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*

I collapsed after reading this. What a slog. Good, but dense, detailed, and darn long. I don't particularly care for Jared Diamond's writing style. He's detailed, scholarly, and repetitive. There is so much information I had to take frequent breaks and snatch some quick reads in-between chapters. I almost abandoned it a few times but then I'd find a different chapter interesting and get hooked again. Diamond has solid arguments for explaining why societies collapse and while fascinating, he's overly detailed in spots - at least for me. His thesis shows five factors that influence the collapse of a society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, decreased support by friendly neighbors, and society's response to environmental problems. The book is full of great information and I can see recommending students to read certain chapters, but not the whole shebang - unless they are persistent readers.

Many of the societies he examines collapsed because of their fragile environments. While Diamond doesn't play judge and is sympathetic toward those who made decisions that were wrong and caused the downfall of their societies from ancient to modern times, he is judgmental against those who obviously don't care about the environment, who "rape-and-run" making quick cash and leave environmental disasters for citizens and governments to clean up. He balances this analysis of greedy businesses with stellar businesses whose good practices show how everyone can benefit when a company creates a product that respects the environment.

"Environmental determinism" looks at the physical environment such as climate and geography trying to determine how it affects societies. This concept has had negative press over the years and has led to some people using racism or superiority of intellect over other cultures based the oppressor being smarter than the suppressed group of people. Diamond is always refuting this and he also takes his studies further looking at multiple aspects of a hypothesis that include climate, geography, botany, science, economics and more. It is one reason his books are so dense and slow to read. But they are fascinating and require thoughtful reflection.

He has quite a few great quotes and I would have expanded on them if my Nook eReader hadn't deleted all my highlights. I will try to remember some from my bad memory. The genocide in Rwanda was a product of land disputes, deforestation, exports, and too many people living in extreme poverty. There was a direct correlation between starvation and increased crime. Diamond explains how the ethnic violence was not based solely on ethnic hatred but tied in with land disputes. The argument is compelling and interesting. Australia's fragile environment is a great chapter to read as well.

Diamond discusses the rarity of a leader who has the courage to anticipate a potential problem and take steps to solve it before it becomes a crisis. "Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary." Think of all the leaders you've come across in your life that surround themselves with people that tell them what they want to hear. The ability to listen to criticism and use it constructively and not be corrupted by power is not the norm.

I thought "Collapse" and "Gun, Germs, and Steel" both had first chapters that were hard to get through. This one is too detailed on Montana and slowed the pacing. The ancient societies that collapsed were not quite as interesting as the modern ones as his analysis is more complex because he has more information to prove his hypothesis. The author is quite brilliant and worth reading.

Yeah, we’re kinda fucked.

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

It was quite the book to read at this time when the doomsday clock has advanced almost to midnight. No civilization is immune to collapse and we are arrogant if we think it will never happen here. We have no unified policies with humanities' interests at heart. The book is depressing and uplifting at the same time. Just as civilizations can collapse, so too they can survive. My greatest hope is that the world realizes that the Earth is a closed system, that resources do have a limit, that not everything is renewable, and that not all problems can be solved with more technology.

Ha sido un buen libro. Bien enfocado a explicar el concepto de un sistema social y economico cerrado como es el propio planeta tierra pero visto des de perspectivas de sociedades historicamente aisladas cuyas civilizaciones colapsaron por la mala gestión de sus propios recursos. Principalmente capítulos como la China actual me han dejado pensativo. Al final un país que ha basado su gran potencial económico en dos pilares: alta demografía con mano barata y gran acceso a recursos abaratiendo costes de gestión ambiental. Pero al final todo sistema colapsa y se explica claramente como una mala gestión ambiental puede llevar al colapso de tu propia fuente de ingresos! Un buen ejemplo es como la sobreexplotación forestal llevo a un incremento en la economía de una determinada región, pero la falta de cubierta vegetal en las laderas montañosas llevó a mayor erosion del suelo, sedimentación de ríos y consecuente menor calado, por lo que se perdió la capacidad de transporte fluvial en epocas de sequia, con un mucho mayor impacto en la industria y economia de esa misma región.

Al final del día, aunque vivamos en un mundo globalizado, no deja de ser un sistema cerrado con materia limitada. Algo parecido a lo que pudo pasar en civilizaciones aisladas como los Mayas o la isla de Pascua

Un abrazo todas mis #GatesLesbianes!