Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Around the world there are abandoned buildings and monuments of long-gone or greatly diminished human societies that evoke questions of what happened and why they aren’t around anymore. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the follow up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as he looks at how those societies rose and fell while also how they didn’t realize they were in trouble then how those lessons could help us today.

Diamond begins by defining collapse as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time” then brings forth five significant factors—environmental changes, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners, and the society's response to the foregoing four challenges—to look at how they played into the demise historical civilizations. From the beginning it was obvious that Diamond was using Easter Island, the Classical Maya, the Greenland Norse, and many others as small-scale stand-ins for our globalized society that is facing the same challenges they did. However, Diamond is not all doom and gloom as he included various examples of societies—Norse Iceland, Tokugawa Japan, and Tikopia—that did make changes to save themselves. After all this Diamond looks at 12 challenges we face as today and “one-line objections” that are encountered when trying to solve them. Throughout the book Diamond can appear like a downer, but he ends on cautious optimism as he thinks we have the agility and the capacity to adopt practices favorable to our own survival while avoiding unfavorable ones. Overall, this book is an interesting read as a study of how historical civilizations dealt with changing conditions whether because of their own actions or of environmental factors beyond their control. While I appreciate Diamond’s look at historical civilizations to support his thesis, he isn’t a historian and as I’m not familiar with all the historical societies he cited I had to keep that in mind as he examined our globalized society.

Collapse is a book that looks towards historical societies’ relation with their environments and how it compares to our modern society. Jared Diamond’s cautious optimism is a high point, but there felt a lot of doom and gloom early on.

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