Books and
Cooks West
July 2005
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond
Nate's place, with Kevin cooking
Sunday, July 23 at 5:30 PM
Our rating: 4.2 cups of tea!
From Amazon.com
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
