Collapse Book Cover

Collapse

How societies choose to fail or survive
Jared Diamond

<Rated 5 stars>
Jarad Diamond has spent much of his life studying a diverse range of past and current societies. In collapse, he compares societies that have collapsed, are at risk of collapse, and some that have avoided collapse.

He reveals that the collapse of a society never occurs from only one factor, say environmental damage. Other factors such as the societies response to it's problems play a large part in its collapse or survival.

Jared uses the following five-point-framework of factors that contribute to the collapse of a society:
  1. Environmental damage;
  2. Climate change;
  3. Hostile neighbours;
  4. Trade partner loss;
  5. A society's response to it's problems.
Jarad shares with us his first hand knowledge of many collapsed societies including Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi, the Maya and the Norse-Viking of Greenland.

He illustrates some paths to success through both bottom up and top down management by giving the examples of New Guinea, Tikopia and Japan and some modern societies with problems still unfolding being Rwanda, China, Australia, Haiti and Dominican Republic.

When considering a society's possible response to its problems, Jarad discusses why societies make disastrous decisions:
  1. Failure to anticipate problems,
    No prior experience of the problem;
  2. Failure to perceive problems,
    Slow trends that conceal change;
  3. Rational bad behaviour,
    A failure to attempt to solve the problem / selfishness;
  4. Disastrous values,
    An inability to adapt due to beliefs and values;
  5. 'It's someone else's problem',
    Selfishness;
  6. Unsuccessful attempts,
    Solutions being beyond their capacities.

This book provides immense insight to the causes of collapse and what we can do to avoid it. The book left me with an even greater appreciation of the value of native ecosystems, especially the role of trees, and how dependent we are on the environmental services that ecosystems provide us.

more... On Wikipedia
more... On YouTube - Collapse Part 1, 2, 3, 4. Consumption.

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Updated Feb 2008