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ShareJared 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.
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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.
For more information about the title Collapse, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.) — Jared Diamond states the theme of his book up-front: "How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to ... > read more
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies — Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel ... > read more
The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) — Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will ... > read more
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance — Where's your next disease coming from? From anywhere in the world--from overflowing sewage in Cairo, from a war zone in Rwanda, from an ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
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