GibburtBook: Collapse, by Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond spent most of his career being a scholar of biology and ecology. In his fifties however he started a second career as a writer of popular science books. His most successful book up to date, his 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel, won a Pulitzer price. In 2005 he released his most recent book called Collapse, how societies choose to fail or survive.
As the title suggests Collapse is about the downfall of societies. Diamond describes a large number of both historical and current societies and uses these descriptions to build up a general framework of factors, which were important contributors to the downfall or, in some exceptional cases, the success of these societies. This framework consists of five factors: environmental damage done by the society, climate change, presence of hostile neighbors, presence of friendly trade partners and, most important, society’s response to the first four factors. Historical societies studied include Easter Island, the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Maya’s and the Greenland Norge. Present day examples include China, Rwanda and the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Diamond likes to provide us with lots of facts and especially the chapters on the historical societies are filled with information on carbon dating, midden heap research and other jewels of archeology. Although this mountain of facts can become overwhelming at times, it is worth holding on, because at very regular intervals he throws in beautiful comments or small stories that form a major part of the appeal of the book for me.
The individual case studies are about 30-40 pages long and critics have commented that it seems ambitious to come up with meaningful conclusions on such superficial studies. So whether the case studies provide enough evidence to support the Five Point Framework I will leave to the individual reader to decide.
Nevertheless, regardless of the validity of the Framework, I would say that the case studies in themselves provide more than enough reason to relook at our approach to some of our society’s environmental problems. Among the present day examples his descriptions of Rwanda and the island of Hispaniola (the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) I found to be very relevant. Of his historical case studies, the history of the Greenland Norge received much critical acclaim.
Diamond makes abundantly clear that, although he does not consider himself to be a pessimist – the main factor in all his case studies is society’s response and as such something within society’s (our!) power to change – there are number of issues that will be addressed in our near future, either by ourselves or by a series of very unpleasant events. Furthermore he points out that in order to successfully handle these issues it will be as much up to us as to our leaders within government or industry to make changes.
In Collapse Jared Diamond combines great story telling with sharp insights in the societies he describes, but what really makes the book a great read is that it presents a refreshing example of how the discussion on our environmental problems and their solutions should be waged: urgent but constructive, and realistic but without despair. For more information please also see his shorter but not as inspired TED talk. A more elaborate review of Collapse can be found here.
Sounds very interesting. I might just stumble upon this book in the near future.