Review: "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Rise and Fall"

Original Date: 1/24/2009

When I started reading Jared Diamond’s (Award-winning author of the ground-breaking Guns, Germs and Steel) newest work, Collapse, I naively expected a simple natural history on how environmental factors attributed to the collapse of societies throughout history. Diamond, oddly enough, expected to write just such a work. To all of our benefit, however, the book evolved into a comprehensive study of all of the factors that cause a society to fall. From environmental factors, to societal norms, to economic dependencies and warfare Diamond discovers throughout the course of his work that no collapse can be attributed to any single factor.

“I arrived at a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse. Four of those sets of factors— environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, and friendly trade partners—may or may not prove significant for a particular society. The fifth set of factors—the society’s responses to its environmental problems—always proves significant. ”

Diamond’s work remains an incredibly easy and insightful read, even for those that aren’t already versed in history, ecology and how those disciplines join together to create natural history. If you aren’t familiar with these topics, Collapse provides enough background and explanation to understand these events, though Guns, Germs and Steel gives a better overall picture of how the study of history and the science of ecology meet.

Diamond’s stories on the collapse of Easter Island and Mayan societies help solve riddles that have plagued history for decades, and discount racist theories of inferior intelligence while at the same time place the blame for these collapses squarely at the feet of the societies themselves, which many overly-PC researchers are loathe to do. Diamond instead discovers that the changes in their societies often happened so slowly that often the people did not have the time or inclination to change their ways once they identified the problems.

“The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, ... deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people. [In the modern era these factors are joined by]... human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. ”

What really makes the work impressive though, is Diamond’s ability to make all of these events relevant to our society today. With environmental damage threatening every country, even if you don’t buy into the anthropogenic global warming theory, the collapse of any significant region’s ecology will hold massive consequences for global trade and therefore global political relations. The most important factor, the one that has been relevant in every societal collapse, is the society’s response to that environmental factor. What will ours be?