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Collapse

How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

By Jared Diamond

(127)

| Hardcover | 9780713992861

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Critics

Man vs nature

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond 400pp, Allen Lane, £20 As no other phenomenon in living memory, the Indian Ocean earthquake and resulting tsunami have reminded people of the raw power of natural forces at work. Ther ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

The way of the world

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each ex ... (read full critics)

spectator published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

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13 Reviews

4 people find this helpful

Must Read

Why do some societies collapse while others survive? What will be the fate of our society? An evolutionary biologist by trade, Diamond takes us through several examples of past societies that have succumbed, and others that have lived sustainably for thousands of years. In the second half of the boo ... (continue)

Why do some societies collapse while others survive? What will be the fate of our society? An evolutionary biologist by trade, Diamond takes us through several examples of past societies that have succumbed, and others that have lived sustainably for thousands of years. In the second half of the book, he applies these lessons from history to our society. He soberly confronts the problems facing us if we are to survive, and I guarantee they are much more serious than you realize. Even environmentalists may discover more pressing ecological problems than the ones they are worried about. Unfortunately, the popularity of topics is not always correlated with their importance, and this is certainly true of the MEGO (my eyes glaze over) contents of this book. But Diamond does an excellent job of making it interesting. Learning about diverse societies such as Easter Islanders, Norse settlers, and New Guinean farmers was extremely fascinating, and these history lessons alone are reason enough to pick up the book. But the book's true purpose goes far beyond this.
This book also enlightened my ethnocentric, temporalcentric attitude about our society being the most "advanced" and the notion that it is so much more different than any past society. In reality, we face many of the same fundamental problems (and worse) that many dead societies have, and we show all the signs of heading toward the same fate. It's easy to look back in history and see very poor choices leading to self-destruction, yet it is sobering to realize that this is actually easier to occur than it would seem, as it is occurring today in our world in exactly the same way.
The September 2008 issue of National Geographic is an excellent read in conjunction with this book. It has several articles on the sustainability of soils around the world.

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audioreader said on Sep 7, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

An excellent, marvelous and awesome masterpiece. This is one of the greatest books I had ever read (though I don't read lots of books). This book uses a very simple, down-to-earth tone to introduce the collapse of ancient societies in Greenland, Easter Island, Anasazi, and Maya. All of them seem to ... (continue)

An excellent, marvelous and awesome masterpiece. This is one of the greatest books I had ever read (though I don't read lots of books). This book uses a very simple, down-to-earth tone to introduce the collapse of ancient societies in Greenland, Easter Island, Anasazi, and Maya. All of them seem to be random examples in their surface, however they were deeply relevant when one think about how environmental degradation related to the collapse of these societies. The book also uses different modern societies, which may be at the peak of their power and prosperity, the edge of immediate collapse or the tipping point to collapse and prosperity. This makes us have a sense that why we have to learn from the ancient societies. Most importantly, the author listed out the 12 most sinister environmental problems in our modern society that is aggravated by the population growth combined with the infecting aspiration to the first world life style.
The author of this book did not predict whether the present society will collapse or not. He just gives us one of the possibility- human being will solve the scarcity of natural resources anyway, either by pleasant means or unpleasant means like genocides or warfare.
There are so many merits in this book which I would not write all of them in the passage.

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Brianho2006 said on Jul 2, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

From Scandanavia, Easter Island, Maya, to Inca, this book is a warning signal to the present generation that, if you're going to exhaust all the resources, human being will extinct. Great book, particularly for those who loves world history.

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phystory said on Jun 3, 2007 | Add your feedback

No pain, no gain

Concise review: a must read book. Verbosity follows...
Reading "Collapse" will hardly left you untouched, especially if you are not familiar with rigorous treatises about ecology and society development. And you're not stupid.
The book is a mine of facts, supports its conclusions with those facts a ... (continue)

Concise review: a must read book. Verbosity follows...
Reading "Collapse" will hardly left you untouched, especially if you are not familiar with rigorous treatises about ecology and society development. And you're not stupid.
The book is a mine of facts, supports its conclusions with those facts and good reasoning, explains why and how the author reached those conclusions, answers the usual objections to those conclusions and suggests further readings and actions to the convinced and the non convinced ones. This makes it a long book and not a page turner: that's because there is so much on every page to be assimilated, that you (well, should say I) don't want to waste any inch of it. Also, reading it in English while not being English could have exacerbated things.
In fact, the first chapter, about modern Montana, was a little underwhelming on the onset: what... I was in for the Maya and the Rapa Nui and you give me Montana? But then the facts start flowing, and the parallels between ancient and modern societies let you understand that archeology is not just a mere leisure, but also a way to understand the rights and wrongs of our ancestors and to avoid the latter while trying to achieve the former. Those parallels would have to wait for the last chapters if it wasn't for that first chapter, so consider it a necessary struggle, kind of like for somebody are the first chapters of "The Lord of the Rings".
The conclusions are maybe nothing new, but so well grounded in a coherent and factual discourse that are hard to dismiss: societies should not hook themselves to their values and traditions, but choose those valuable and discard those that put at risk their present and future survival; the elite should not insulate from the rest of the world in a golden cage, because this way they'll only buy themselves the right to be the last one to starve to death (metaphorically or literally); we have to act for ourselves, everyone of us, because nobody will come and save the day; we should take global actions, because we all share the same planet, and there's only one.
Sorry for the long review, but there's no way to express in a sentence or two, what this book gave me; and I also felt necessary to let you know what you have to give to this book before you'll get your reward.

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DeK said on Feb 6, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Good though the style of this one is not as concise as the previous two, "The Thrid Chimpanzee" and "Gun, Germs and Steel".

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Monling said on Mar 19, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

As a keen supporter of environmental issues, it is tempting to completely disregard Jared Diamond's Collapse as just another in a long line of volumes on how we are all contributing to global warming and how it will eventually kill us all. Reading beyond the introduction and into examples bot ... (continue)

As a keen supporter of environmental issues, it is tempting to completely disregard Jared Diamond's Collapse as just another in a long line of volumes on how we are all contributing to global warming and how it will eventually kill us all. Reading beyond the introduction and into examples both historical and modern, it is apparent that Diamond is incredibly sympathetic not only to ecological issues but also to industrial and sociological issues.
That's where this book really begins to awe. It's not a rant against the mining and coal industries but a carefully considered and crafted volume on the suspected causes of cultural collapse given written and archeological evidence. Whilst wags of the finger are made to some modern companies and practices (the mandatory native crop destruction in Australia, for example), approving nods are made to companies trying to actively conserve and in some cases improve the areas in which they work. Diamond's book is not a compilation of statistics cleverly put together in a slideshow but an intelligently put-together portrayal of how human experience has led us to where we are now, the mistakes previously made (and still being made) and, crucially, the lessons learnt and now being actively applied.
The Rwandian chapter, perhaps the most controversial, is certainly a clear indication of Diamond's message. A very catastrophic collapse which could have been avoided were it not for the unintentional blindness of the society as a whole. If nothing else, the book has made me seriously reconsider that massacre, and whether it is truly possible to create a world society with any level of equality.
Much like Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity, at a mere 550 or so pages Diamond's work on societal collapses feels abridged, the summation of a much grander and all encompassing thesis not just on societies but also on human nature. Even though it took a good few weeks to read, it felt like there could be so much more - more conclusions, more examples. There are flaws to the conclusions - I felt that the map at the end of the book showing ecologically damaged versus sociologically damaged regions was far too simplistic and didn't take into account the two extremely damaged countries (Iceland and Australia) previously mentioned. It does rather impact on the faith in his conclusions elsewhere, but even so this isn't a book of continual negativity. In fact, the feeling I had at its' conclusion was of hope - people are changing, things are beginning to turn around, and even if global environmental change does occur then we should be able to limit its impact.

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Ben Daubney said on Sep 13, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback