Collapse, Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive - Jared Diamond, Allen Lane, 400 pages (January 17, 2005). ISBN:0713992867

Title & Author:	Collapse Jared Diamond
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In Collapse, Jared Diamond looks at the collapse of previous human societies, and the fate of our own. The failed societies include many that were highly creative, e.g. the ones that built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the statues of Easter Island, and the Maya pyramids. They also include the Vikings and other aggressive cultures driven to explore and dominate their worlds. All these societies collapsed  because of self-induced environmental crises, or more bluntly, they ran out of things to eat. 

As in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond brings together evidence from a vast range of sources and brings it to bear on one of the biggest crises in the modern world: ongoing environmental devastation. It is not all negative, for instance, he looks at Japan, Tonga and Inuit Greenland who have found ways to live harmoniously with their environments.

Accounts of the clash between short-term gratification and the defence of future generations' interests features prominently in Collapse. Today's middle-aged consumers can happily jet off on budget holidays and drive SUVs because they will be dead before the ecological disaster occurs. Also, Jared Diamond reveals, the greater the level of change required to a society's core values, the easier it becomes to lapse into systematic and falsely reassuring denial. Jared Diamond, rightly, places a good deal of responsibility on the American public for having failed to exert political and consumer power to curb the anti-environmental excesses of various industries.

Perhaps his most positive modern example is the Netherlands, the country with the highest membership of environmental organisations in the world (about half the population).. One-third of its land ("the polders") is below sea level, and is protected by dykes and pumps. The Dutch have a sense of being "all down in the polders together ... our survival depends on each other's survival". The worlds larger nations, e.g. the US and UK need to adopt the attitude that "the World is a Polder" and start finding ways in which we can all survive together.

• Jared Diamond in Collapse looks at the decisions that led some societies to ecological catastrophe, and others to avoiding this fate, and thereby illustrates what we need to do to give ourselves a chance of surviving.