Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

605 Pages·2008·3.75 MB·English

by  Jared Diamond

Table of Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph

PART ONE - MODERN MONTANA
CHAPTER 1 - Under Montana’s Big Sky

PART TWO - PAST SOCIETIES
CHAPTER 2 - Twilight at Easter
CHAPTER 3 - The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
CHAPTER 4 - The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors
CHAPTER 5 - The Maya Collapses
CHAPTER 6 - The Viking Prelude and Fugues
CHAPTER 7 - Norse Greenland’s Flowering
CHAPTER 8 - Norse Greenland’s End
CHAPTER 9 - Opposite Paths to Success

PART THREE - MODERN SOCIETIES
CHAPTER 10 - Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide
CHAPTER 11 - One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican
Republic ...
CHAPTER 12 - China, Lurching Giant
CHAPTER 13 - “Mining” Australia

PART FOUR - PRACTICAL LESSONS
CHAPTER 14 - Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?
CHAPTER 15 - Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, ...
CHAPTER 16 - The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
FURTHER READINGS
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PENGUIN BOOKS
COLLAPSE
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los
Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into
evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Among
Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize
for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as
Poet, presented by the Rockefeller University. He has published more than two
hundred articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines. His
previous books include The Third Sex and The Third Chimpanzee. His most
recent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Chosen as Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe,
the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Economiser, and
Discover
Praise for Collapse

“Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in [its] ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Readers learn on page 1 that they are in for quite a ride. No reader may carp that Diamond has provided a set of examples that is too limited chronologically or geographically.
Diamond . . . has been to most of the lands cited, often staying for months or even years, and what he writes about them and their populations is informed and engagingly colored
by personal observation. The Icelanders . . . learned to face up to reality and adapt to living within the limits of their environments. Jared Diamond has written a book to help us
do the same.”
—Los Angeles Times

“With Collapse, Jared Diamond has written a fascinating account of the collapse of civilizations around the world.... A reader cannot help but leave the book wondering whether
we are following the track of these other civilizations that failed. Any reader of Collapse will leave the book convinced that we must take steps now to save our planet.”
—The Boston Globe

“In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spacially—across an array of
disciplines—to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren’t. . . . Thank heavens there is someone of the stature of Diamond willing
to say so.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, The Washington Post

“Diamond looks to the past and present to sound a warning for the future.”
—Newsweek

“Rendering complex history and science into entertaining prose, Diamond reminds us that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.”
—People (four stars)

“Taken together Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent
books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I
read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care.”
—The New York Times

“Essential reading for anyone who is unafraid to be disillusioned if it means they can walk into the future with their eyes open.”
—Nature

“On any short list of brilliant minds in the world today, Diamond makes the cut.”
—San Jose Mercury News

“Read this book. It will challenge you and make you think.”
—Scientific American

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005 Published in Penguin Books 2006 This edition with a new afterword published 2011

Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2005, 2011
All rights reserved

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond. p. cm. Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-10150200-6
1. Social history—Case studies. 2. Social change—Case studies.
3. Environmental policy—Case studies. I. Title.
HN13.D5 2005
304.2’8—dc22 2004057152

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To
Jack and Ann Hirschy,
Jill Hirschy Eliel and John Eliel,
Joyce Hirschy McDowell,
Dick (1929-2003) and Margy Hirschy,
and their fellow Montanans:
guardians of Montana’s big sky