Author Jared Diamond is well known for his Pulitzer-Prize winning book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, in which he examines early human development, how and why it succeeded in Eurasia and outpaced other, older cultures. Following up on this spectacular success, Dr Diamond, a professor at UCLA, wrote his next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. This is, for reasons I shall explore below, a well written and interesting book, but at its core its strongest quality is that it is a deeply clever book, containing an unusual variation on a popular and topical subject.
Collapse is an exploration of a series of ancient cultures that, despite temporary or local successes and growth, ultimately faced the grim spectre of failure and collapse. Some of these are reasonably well known, such as the famous Easter Island Polynesians, others I admit I had never heard of before this, such as the Anasazi Indians of the South-western US. The majority of his chosen societies failed to adapt to or cope with the crisis and disappeared, However Diamond also explores several examples of societies that did manage to surmount the challenges they faced and overcome their impending collapse. The premise of the book is that many societies face collapse for surprisingly standard reasons, and it is the choices each culture makes as a society that determined the outcome of the crisis. Having explored twelve different cultures, both ancient and modern, Diamond then tries to tackle the question head on based on the evidence he had provided earlier in the book: why do some societies collapse while others, faces with the same problems, adapt and overcome? Why do some societies in effect choose to die out?
This is probably the only weakness of the book: his answers to these questions are a bit facile and do not serve to sufficiently explain the blindness with which some of these cultures rushed headlong into their own destruction. But this is a minor problem in an otherwise stellar book. The history and development of each society is explored in detail, and the parallels between their problems are carefully drawn. Diamond is especially to be commended for not leaping to draw parallels that do not exist or only exist on the surface, he is very careful to track and analyze his own decisions and is very up-front with his own biases and opinions. Diamond has done an excellent job at representing the facts in such a way that compel the reader to make their own decisions, as opposed to trying to decide for them. In one case, Diamond, who is clearly a strong environmentalist, even goes to far as to compliment the environmental policy of a specific Oil company (while condemning others), thus making it clear that business and environmentalists are not necessarily staunch enemies all the time.
And this is probably the greatest strength of the book, and the source of its exceptional cleverness, mentioned earlier. This book is an anthropological/ historical text on the face of it, but behind that is essentially an environmentalist polemic. That is not a criticism by the way, Diamond writes this so well and so carefully that the reader is drawn to conclusions the author never actually states. One of the central causes for the collapse or survival of the cultures surveyed is how they manage their own environmental resources, whether they exploit them in a sustainable manner or not, and how quickly they realize and act to stop environmental degradation. It is essentially a cautionary tale, actually a series of twelve cautionary tales, on how societies which exploit resources in an unsustainable manner eventually are faced with the repercussions of their actions, often in a cataclysmic manner. Reading about the progressive deforestation of the small Easter Island by its natives, one wonders how any culture could be so idiotic, yet one is faced with similarly blind exploitation in the modern world.
Yet Diamond stays away from much of the rhetoric and borderline-hysteria which characterizes the fringes of the environmental movement, and never goes ‘over the top’ by making specific claims or predictions about our own future. Regardless of your view on environmentalism, this is still a detailed, interesting and well-written account of ancient cultures and how they adapted to their environment, making it of interest to anyone who enjoys History, anthropology or classical studies.
Nowadays, documentaries seem to be trying to out-shrill each other by applying their points with the subtlety of a sledge-hammer. Whether you love or hate such political documentarians such as Michael Moore, you have to admit there is no light touch in his efforts. Diamond is careful, well-researched, and makes the most compelling of arguments: one where he simply presents the facts and lets the reader come to the conclusions on their own. It is a compelling read from a compelling author, and I look forward to Dr Diamond’s next book.
