Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

@book{citeulike:472910, abstract = {Jared Diamond's <I>Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed</I> 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 <I>Collapse</I>, 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. <p> 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 <I>Collapse</I>, 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 <I>Collapse</I> so compelling. <I>--Jennifer Buckendorff</I> In his runaway bestseller <I>Guns, Germs, and Steel</I>, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, <I>Collapse</I> exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.}, author = {Diamond, Jared }, citeulike-article-id = {472910}, howpublished = {Paperback}, isbn = {0143036556}, keywords = {agriculture, climate\_change, climate\_response, human\_behaviour, human\_culture}, month = {December}, posted-at = {2007-09-18 12:12:37}, priority = {0}, publisher = {Penguin (Non-Classics)}, title = {Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed}, url = {http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike09-20\&amp;path=ASIN/0143036556}, year = {2005} }

TY - BOOK ID - citeulike:472910 L3 - citeulike-article-id:472910 TI - Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed PB - Penguin (Non-Classics) SN - 0143036556 N2 - Jared Diamond's <I>Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed</I> 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 <I>Collapse</I>, 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. <p> 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 <I>Collapse</I>, 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 <I>Collapse</I> so compelling. <I>--Jennifer Buckendorff</I> In his runaway bestseller <I>Guns, Germs, and Steel</I>, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, <I>Collapse</I> exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future. KW - agriculture KW - climate_change KW - climate_response KW - human_behaviour KW - human_culture AU - Diamond, Jared PY - 2005/12/27/ UR - http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike09-20&amp;path=ASIN/0143036556 ER -