Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed

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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. Diamonds many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japans 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.

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.

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.

In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spaciallyacross an array of disciplinesto make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact arent.... 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.

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.

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

On any short list of brilliant minds in the world today, Diamond makes the cut.

Read this book. It will challenge you and make you think.

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 Montanas big sky

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities. Both were by far the largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced farms in their respective districts. In particular, each was centered around a magnificent state-of-the-art barn for sheltering and milking cows. Those structures, both neatly divided into opposite-facing rows of cow stalls, dwarfed all other barns in the district. Both farms let their cows graze outdoors in lush pastures during the summer, produced their own hay to harvest in the late summer for feeding the cows through the winter, and increased their production of summer fodder and winter hay by irrigating their fields. The two farms were similar in area (a few square miles) and in barn size, Huls barn holding somewhat more cows than Gardar barn (200 vs. 165 cows, respectively). The owners of both farms were viewed as leaders of their respective societies. Both owners were deeply religious. Both farms were located in gorgeous natural settings that attract tourists from afar, with backdrops of high snow-capped mountains drained by streams teeming with fish, and sloping down to a famous river (below Huls Farm) or fjord (below Gardar Farm).

Those were the shared strengths of the two farms. As for their shared vulnerabilities, both lay in districts economically marginal for dairying, because their high northern latitudes meant a short summer growing season in which to produce pasture grass and hay. Because the climate was thus suboptimal even in good years, compared to dairy farms at lower latitudes, both farms were susceptible to being harmed by climate change, with drought or cold being the main concerns in the districts of Huls Farm or Gardar Farm respectively. Both districts lay far from population centers to which they could market their products, so that transportation costs and hazards placed them at a competitive disadvantage compared to more centrally located districts. The economies of both farms were hostage to forces beyond their owners control, such as the changing affluence and tastes of their customers and neighbors. On a larger scale, the economies of the countries in which both farms lay rose and fell with the waxing and waning of threats from distant enemy societies.