Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist's diatribe. He begins by setting the book's main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity.

Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
According to scripture, "How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle" (II Samuel 1:25). To war, Jared Diamond in his new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, adds self-inflicted environmental degradation, climate change, disastrous trading relations, and unwise responses to societal problems. In his earlier, Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, celebrated the rise of communities and nations despite microbial and self-imposed adversities. Collapse is the downside of those dynamics, the societies that didn't make it, barely made it, or are destined, as Diamond sees it, for the fall. In this exhaustively researched new book, he pre-sents carefully detailed case histories of failed societies—islands in warmish waters (Easter, Pitcairn, Haiti), an island in coolish waters (Greenland), a continental semidesert (the Anasazi of the Southwest U.S.), a continental tropical forest (the Maya of Mexico). Diamond begins with the failed state of Montana. Montana? Well, a Pulitzer Prize–winning tenured professor can take the liberty of giving priority to his passions. So Diamond the ardent fly-fisherman, defender of ecological pristineness, sympathetic friend of the farming "locals" has come to the sad conclusion that Montana is going to the dogs. Once one of the richest states of the union, it now ranks among the poorest, having squandered its nonrenewable mineral resources and savagely over-logged its forests. Maybe worst of all, some cad put pike into the trout waters. Although Montana is not about to fall off the map, leaving us with 49 states, the elements responsible for its decline are also responsible for societies that have fallen by the wayside. Diamond's central proposition is that wherever these globally disparate societies failed the chief cause had been anthropogenic ecological devastation, especially deforestation, imposed on ecosystems of limited resources. Those other western Americans, the Anasazi, settled in the New Mexico area about A.D. 600. There they built spectacular cliff housing, worked their marginal agricultural land, and chopped down all the trees without any plans for reforestation. Starving to the desperate point of cannibalism, wracked by internecine warfare, they met their end some 600 years later. To the south, the Maya mostly had it all: technological knowledge to build architecturally wonderful cities, writing, and crops of corn. What they did not have were large domestic animals, or the foresight to replant after they clear-cut forests, or the political sense to refrain from inter-city warfare. Mayan soldiers and city dwellers were, as Diamond puts it, "parasites on farmers," who could no longer produce surplus food on their now barren, treeless land. The Maya began to go into decline about A.D. 1000 and said goodbye to the world about 1675, mopped up by the Spanish. Diamond argues that the isolated island societies suffered a similar fate to the Anasazi and Maya for similar reasons. Pitcairn Island, Easter Island and Greenland all collapsed after the settlers had exhausted the fragile food and timber resources. Deforestation was particularly critical; after the larger trees were harvested, nothing was left to make the seagoing canoes needed for voyaging to other sources of food and material and for recruiting new people, especially wives, into their dwindling, interbreeding populations. In these historical accounts of fallen societies, untrammeled population growth did not play a significant role. Not until the section on modern societies with modern troubles does Diamond invoke Malthus, offering Rwanda as the prime Malthusian model of too many people with too little land. He makes an unconventional interpretation of the savage Rwandan conflict. It was not a mutually genocidal affair propelled by ancient hatreds. At the village level the Hutu and Tutsi had lived together amicably—until geometric population growth far exceeded the arithmetic increase in land and improved agricultural technology, fulfilling the thesis of Malthus's 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. The brutal killing was, according to Diamond, primarily over your neighbor's land, not his tribal affiliation. As the book' s subtitle suggests, there are societies that have come to success by right thought and action. The Japanese, for example, saw the light and preserved and replanted their forests (although they have not renounced their national wood esthetic; the trees now come from the forests of vulnerable states such as Papua New Guinea). The Dominican Republic preserved its forests and prospered. Its neighbor Haiti ravished both land and forests. And look what happened to them. I wrote these last words while flying home from a National Academy of Sciences meeting called to reconsider bringing back that contentious, effective and dirt-cheap chemical, DDT. Now the choice will have to be made between the ultraconservationists' prohibition of DDT and the equally ardent arguments of a new coterie of American scientists who are demanding the return of DDT to try to halt the carnage of the malaria parasite, which kills two million to three million children and pregnant women every year. Sorry, Professor Diamond, even in our time of enlightened science, societies don't always have an easy, clear choice to survive, let alone succeed. Collapse is a big book, 500-plus pages. It may well become a seminal work, although its plea for societal survival through ecological conservation is rather like preaching to the choir. It is not a page-turner, especially for slow readers of short attention span (like this reviewer). Some of Diamond's "case studies" may be overkilled by overdetail. The last section, on practical lessons, seems disconnected from the central Collapse story and almost constitutes a separate book. But, having discharged the reviewer's obligation to be critical, my recommendation would definitely be to read the book. It will challenge and make you think—long after you have turned that last 500th-plus page.

Robert S. Desowitz is emeritus professor of tropical medicine at the University of Hawaii. He is author of five books on ecological and political issues relating to infectious diseases, the most recent being Federal Bodysnatchers and the New Guinea Virus (W. W. Norton, 2003).

From Bookmarks Magazine
Are we doomed, or can the next generation save us from ecological suicide? UCLA geography professor Diamond’s provocative, interdisciplinary picture of social decline paints a bleak vision of our future. He writes well, has done impressive research, and tells fascinating stories. Yet, his thesis failed to convince many critics. He connects his stories with common themes, but often draws tenuous links between past and present, especially given today’s use of technology and global markets to help solve environmental problems. Many critics also found fault with Diamond’s case studies. Some primitive societies like Easter Island, for example, left few clues to their demise. Other examples, like his population-based analysis of Rwanda’s genocide, raised questions about the relative role of ecological factors in societies’ collapses. Finally, despite Diamond’s cautious optimism about our ability to "choose" our destinies, a strain of environmental determinism runs throughout the book. You’re doomed if you do—and perhaps doomed if you don’t. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From AudioFile
In everyday language, Professor Diamond writes of the ecological collapse and subsequent decline of past societies. From the ravage of Australia by rabbits to the inability of the Mayas to supply their armies with food, we learn from the historical record how the misunderstanding and abuse of natural resources have destroyed cultures and made places on Earth uninhabitable. In a firm and raspy voice, Christopher Murney keeps a comfortable pace and doesn't stumble on a single word from the rich vocabulary. By finding the right tonal balance between being informative and entertaining, he renders a stimulating performance of science with a vital lesson for our future. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Defining collapse as "extreme decline," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which posed questions about Western civilization's domination of much of the world, now examines the reverse side of that coin. Diamond ponders reasons why certain civilizations have collapsed. With an eye on the implications for the present and future, he bases his analysis on his newly phrased version of an old maxim about what history teaches: "The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn." Drawing examples from this database, from Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the Viking outposts in Greenland to the Mayan civilization in Central America, the author finds "the fundamental pattern of catastrophe" that is apparent in these populations that once flourished and then collapsed. The template he holds up is a construct based on five factors, including environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors. In addition, Diamond casts his critical but acute and inclusive gaze on the issue of why civilizations fail to see collapse coming. A thought-provoking book containing not a single page of dense prose. Expect demand from civic- and history-minded readers. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana. Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

About the Author
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners, and pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems and persisted.

FROM THE CRITICS

Robert D. Kaplan - The Washington Post

In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spatially -- across an array of disciplines -- to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren't. He did this so well in Guns, Germs, and Steel, which has been a huge bestseller since its publication in 1997, that one might think Diamond would have little more to say about the vast sweep of human history. Think again. In his extraordinarily panoramic Collapse, he moves his wide lens to yet another telling phenomenon: failed nations, of both the distant and the recent past.

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

Mr. Diamond - who has academic training in physiology, geography and evolutionary biology - is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readily accessible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling. He presents some intriguing digressions about methods used by scientists and historians to diagnose the trajectory of long dead societies, and provides some provocative analyses of current environmental problems in Australia, the United States and China.

Publishers Weekly

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos. Agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson. (Jan.) Forecast: With a 12-city author tour and a 200,000-copy first printing, this BOMC main selection and History Book Club featured alternate is poised to compete with its ground-breaking predecessor. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The author of Guns, Germs, and Steel considers why some societies collapse when faced with environmental or political catastrophe, while others soldier on. Lessons for today? With a 12-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile