Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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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? The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani 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.
Prologue : a tale of two farms1Pt. 1Modern Montana25Ch. 1Under Montana's big sky27Pt. 2Past societies77Ch. 2Twilight at Easter79Ch. 3The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands120Ch. 4The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors136Ch. 5The Maya collapses157Ch. 6The Viking prelude and fugues178Ch. 7Norse Greenland's flowering211Ch. 8Norse Greenland's end248Ch. 9Opposite paths to success277Pt. 3Modern societies309Ch. 10Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide311Ch. 11One Island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti329Ch. 12China, lurching giant358Ch. 13"Mining" Australia378Pt. 4Practical lessons417Ch. 14Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?419Ch. 15Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes441Ch. 16The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today?486
