Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

·         Title:  Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

·        Author:  Jared Diamond

·        Edition: Hardcover

·        Publisher:  Viking / Penguin Group (New York)

·         Copyright: 2005

·         Printing: 2005

·         Dimensions in inches:   9.5 x 6.5 x 1.8  (575 pages)

·         ISBN:  0-670-03337-5

What is more haunting than the specter of a civilization’s collapse – the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat, the Maya cities overgrown by jungle, or the somber vigil of Easter island’s statues?  Who hasn’t looked at such ruin and wondered, could the same thing happen to us?

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 fascinating 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.

What makes one environment more fragile than another?  Why do some societies, but not others, blunder into self-destruction? 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.  What economic, social, and political choices can we still make so that we don’t meet the same ends?

Huge in scope, clear and passionate in style, 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 destroying itself?

Contents:

Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms

-          Two farms

-          Collapse, past and present

-          Vanished Edens?

-          A five-point framework

-          Businesses and the environment

-          The comparative method

-          Plan of the book

               PART ONE:  MODERN MONTANA

Under Montana’s Big Sky:

-          Stan Falkow’s story

-          Montana and me

-          Why begin with Montana?

-          Montana’s economic history

-          Mining

-          Forests

-          Soil

-          Water

-          Native and non-native species

-          Differing visions

-          Attitudes towards regulation

-          Rick Laible’s story

-          Chip Pigman’s story

-          Tim Huls’s story

-          John Cook’s story

-          Montana, model of the world

PART TWO:  PAST SOCIETIES

Twilight at Easter:

-          The quarry’s mysteries

-          Easter’s geography and history

-          People and food

-          Chiefs, clans, and commoners

-          Platforms and statues

-          Carving, transporting, erecting

-          The vanished forest

-          Consequences for society

-          Europeans and explanations

-          Why was Easter fragile?

-          Easter as metaphor

The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

-          Pitcairn before the Bounty

-          Three dissimilar islands

-          Trade

-          The movie’s ending

The Ancient Ones:  The Anasazi and Their Neighbors

-          Desert farmers

-          Tree rings

-          Agricultural strategies

-          Chaco’s problems and packrats

-          Regional integration

-          Chaco’s decline and end

-          Chaco’s message

The Maya Collapses:

-          Mysteries of lost cities

-          The Maya environment

-          Maya agriculture

-          Maya history

-          Copan

-          Complexities of collapses

-          War and droughts

-          Collapse in the southern lowlands

-          The Maya message

The Viking Prelude and Fugues:

-          Experiments in the Atlantic

-          The Viking explosion

-          Autocatalysis

-          Viking agriculture

-          Iron

-          Viking chiefs

-          Viking religion

-          Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes

-          Iceland’s environment

-          Iceland’s history

-          Iceland in context

-          Vinland

Norse Greenland’s Flowering:

-          Europe outpost

-          Greenland’s climate today

-          Climate in the past

-          Native plants and animals

-          Norse settlement

-          Farming

-          Hunting and fishing

-          An integrated economy

-          Society

-          Trade with Europe

-          Self-image

Norse Greenland’s End:

-          Introduction to the end

-          Deforestation

-          Soil and turf damage

-          The Inuit’s predecessors

-          Inuit subsistence

-          Inuit/Norse relations

-          The end

-          Ultimate causes of the end

Opposite Paths to Success:

-          Bottom up, top down

-          New Guinea highlands

-          Tikopia

-          Tokugawa problems

-          Tokugawa solutions

-          Why Japan succeeded

-          Other successes

PART THREE:  MODERN SOCIETIES

Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide

-          A dilemma

-          Events in Rwanda

-          More than ethnic hatred

-          Buildup in Kanama

-          Explosion in Kanama

-          Why it happened?

One Island, Two People, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti

-          Differences

-          Histories

-          Causes of divergence

-          Dominican environmental impacts

-          Balaguer

-          The Dominican environment today

-          The future

China, Lurching Giant:

-          China’s significance

-          Background

-          Air, water, soil

-          Habitat, species, megaprojects

-          Consequences

-          Connections

-          The future

“Mining” Australia:

-          Australia’s significance

-          Soils

-          Water

-          Distance

-          Early history

-          Imported values

-          Trade and immigration

-          Land degradation

-          Other environmental problems

-          Signs of hope and change

PART FOUR:  PRACTICAL LESSONS

Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

-          Road map for success

-          Failure to anticipate

-          Failure to perceive

-          Rational bad behavior

-          Disastrous values

-          Other irrational failures

-          Unsuccessful solutions

-          Signs of hope

Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes

-          Resource extraction

-          Two oil fields

-          Oil company motives

-          Hardrock mining operations

-          Mining company motives

-          Differences among mining companies

-          The logging industry

-          Forest Stewardship Council

-          The seafood industry

-          Businesses and the Public

The World as a Polder:  What Does It All Mean to Us Today

-          Introduction

-          The most serious problems

-          If we don’t solve them…

-          Life in Los Angeles

-          One-liner objections

-          The past and the present

-          Reasons for hope

CONDITION:  NEW

Hardcover edition with dust-jacket in FINE condition, with strong binding, bright boards, and sharp corners. All pages are free from any writings, markings, tears, or pastedowns. Text block and pages are tight and clean, with no soiling, creasing, dog-ears or markings.

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