Collapse

Rating:
Summary: Academia-trash!
Review:

We've all heard of Euro-trash - I'd like to coin a new phrase: Academia-trash - for the sole purpose of describing works like this.

Sure, everyone who is anyone raves about this book and others like it. Most are fellow academic travelers on the road to mediocrity - leading the ill-informed public by the nose to their profound view of "how and why all things happen".

To me this is mere drivel - simplistic pop culture-like scribbling. Pseudo-science wrapped in the guise of profundity. A waste of time for any right thinking, concerned individual.

I grow so weary of this new wave of trendy, pop culture, pseudo-science books that is covering the landscape today. It's indeed a shame that so many of these books are the product of ill-informed university professors. It's a sad commentary on the level of true education in academia today.

The only "dynamic" I see here is the dynamic of the uneducated flocking to a new pop-hit book that they "must have". Notice I said "must have" and not the more commonly used "must read" - for don't kid yourself authors: many who buy these works never actually work their way through them...

This new wave of academia is so enthralled with its discipline-specific jargon and "in" cliques of self perceived enlightenment, that I wonder if they still remember how to spell "gobbley-gook"...


Rating:
Summary: Recommended
Review:
Very thought-provoking, good read. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in anything beyond the end of his/her own nose. My other recommendation is "Can We Live 150 Years?" by M. Tombak. Have a quick preview of the book at www.starthealthylife.com


Rating:
Summary: Read the book, do the research ,make up your own mind
Review: I’m driven to write a review of this book in response to a couple of reviews who seem to have their knickers in a twist. :)
(Note: key words are “ bigoted white haters” or “Academia-trash”)
Notice that nowhere is anything of substance *in the book* they are supposed to be reviewing addressed.

I would like to point out a readily accessible source that can be used to evaluate the thesis proposed in “Collapse”., that environmental collapse is related to the collapse of societies.

The Icelandic Free State is an almost perfect society to evaluate this hypothesis. We know when the society was founded, have written records covering almost the entire period and it’s isolated from European culture for all practical purposes. Read “Collapse”, then read about the Free State. Look at how Icelandic society and economy changed according to changes in natural resources. The question is not whether the reader *likes* the results, but do observations match the hypothesis. The hypothesis (very generally speaking) is that environmental
collapse leads to societal collapse. The book then presents observations to support that thesis. There are nearly always problems when trying to write a popular book covering such a broad and complicated thesis.

The reader doesn’t have to believe me or the author or any reviewer. The data is public record for the most part, available at any public or university library.

While I may disagree with some of the details, overall I agree with the thesis. Environmental collapse leads to societal collapse. Which is neither a pro environmental nor anti business stance. Frankly, both sides of that argument are mush-for-brains. For years “business” fought the introduction of ‘environmentally friendly cleaners’ to replace the old petrochemical cleaners. After they were forced to accept them . . .they found the new cleaners were cheaper, better and easier to use. And workers didn’t get sick using them. Productivity and profits went up.

OTOH, some rabid environmentalists seem to feel that business is their natural enemy, without realizing that a subsistence society has neither the leisure nor the free capital to *think* about the environment, let alone work to preserve it. If it’s a choice between starving or eating the last great auk . . . Only rich societies can afford to worry about the environment.

Read the book, do the research make up your own mind.

Rating:
Summary: Deep
Review: In Collapse, Jared Diamond has successfully examined the thousands of year of human history, by evaluating many of the great civilizations that went extinct due to their inability to recognize the limits of their resources and the strength of the forces of nature. The failures of those ancient and modern societies especially in Africa and Asia, as well the Easter Island and Greenland stemmed from the fact that they were compromised by their environment through disasters that were either natural or induced.

In this well-researched book, Diamond wrote of eco-disasters and the depletion of environmental resources through unsustainable measures as the principal causes of the demise of those societies. Not only that, he mentioned some societies that that have solved their ecological problems and succeeded. Nevertheless, the overriding point Diamond made is that in this age of globalization, societies must take collective actions to avoid the collapse of the world's highly interdependent global economy, since it is fast approaching its unsustainable level. This book is a wake up call for the world to develop sustainable sources of energy that does not compromise the environment. Hydrogen cars, solar energy etc should be things for the immediate tomorrow.

The lesson is clear. Those societies that can adapt their ways of life to be in line with the potentials of their environment last while those societies that abuse their resources ultimate commit suicide, and so fail. Now, for the first time in human history, modern technology, global interdependence and international cooperation have provided us with the means and opportunity to judiciously use our resource and prevent their depletion not only from a small scale, but from a global scale as well. It is only by harnessing this new knowledge to sustain our planet, that we shall avoid the fate of self-destruction, like several great societies before us.

Also recommended: OVERSHOOT, DISCIPLES OF FORTUNE

Rating:
Summary: Curious examples
Review: Mr. Diamond has sifted through several millenia of human history, and the most relevant cases he can come up with are . . . Easter Island? Greenland? The Anasazi tribe? Were there no examples of larger societies available? Presumably, the bulk of his readership will be Americans, but it is difficult to understand how a nation of nearly 300 million people is supposed to draw conclusions from cases of tiny, remote societies going adrift. Had he developed his theories from an examination of, say, the fall of Rome, or of the Mongol Empire, they may have been more compelling. Any attempt to extrapolate findings from communities of 5,000 to nations of 300 million is going to be flawed.

Rating:
Summary: A few comments
Review: This is a logical sequel to Diamond's previous book. Both these books are basically works in applied human geography in that Diamond seeks to correlate environmental and ecological factors with subsequent cultural and economic development, specifically with the rise and ultimate fall of that particular culture or civilization. (Also Diamond's book is much more readable than other authors in the field that I've read. (Those of you who know what von Thunen circles are will know what I'm talking about :-)).

Diamond's book places him squarely in the context of that debate, and with other historians such as Toynbee, Spengler, Edward Gibbon, John Bury, and J.S. Mill, who have also pondered the question of the rise and fall of civilizations. Drawing on diverse sources of evidence and on his broad and far-reaching knowledge of many cultures around the world, Diamond makes a compelling case for the claim that those cultures that failed to come to terms with the inexorable limitations of their environment ultimately decline or perhaps even cause their own premature demise. As others have commented, however, Jared's thesis is not that environmental factors are the exclusive cause of such success or failure, but rather that failure to manage these resources sensibly can have serious enough effects on overall quality of life and standards of living, so that over time they can impair and degrade a society's well being enough to sometimes kill it off entirely, as in Easter Island, or damage it possibly beyond repair. The heavily polluted shores and areas around the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union also come to mind.

Most historians will tell you that however admirable they might be, all of these attempts to arrive at such historical laws have basically been failures. They fall into that unfortunate category of great theories that were killed off by nasty little facts. However, at least Diamond is in distinguished company. For those of you who already know thinkers like Oswald Spengler, John Stuart Mill, and Arnold Toynbee, the attempt to find those deterministic factors that drive the success or failure of entire civilizations will already be a familiar idea.

To just briefly recap (at the risk of a little digression) the history of this idea, Spengler thought that civilizations were analogous to living organisms, thriving when young but withering in old age; Mill thought that cultures went through positive and negative periods in their belief systems and ideologies, rising and falling on that basis; and Toynbee had the idea of "challenge and response," which is just like it sounds. A civilization is confronted with certain challenges and problems during its development. If it succeeds in surmounting them, it grows and becomes more powerful; if it fails, as almost all do at some point, it declines and ultimately dies off. Diamond's book places him squarely in the middle of a historical debate and problem which many of the greatest historical minds have pondered and struggled with for much of their careers.

Lastly, Oxford historian Filipe Fernandez-Armesto is another important modern historian who has also pondered this problem, and whose agriculturally and ecologically influenced ideas are actually not that different from Diamond's. On a different note, Harvard social psychologist David McClelland found that a country's increasing prosperity and power correlated with the increasing prominence of the individual personality traits of achievement motivation, ability to defer gratification, and a positive work ethic.

My take on this from my own reading of history (although I'm not a professional historian, merely an interested and well-informed amateur) is that the conditions and circumstances of each civilization and what ultimately led to its rise and fall, seem special or unique to that particular historical context, and probably wouldn't have worked out the same at a different time and place. Therefore, I am sceptical that general laws about the rise and fall of civilizations can be found, although I think there is a good deal of truth in the ideas of all these men. In that sense, it could be said that Toynbee's failure was greater than most other writer's successes.

Of course, all civilizations must maintain a strong military and economy, otherwise they are simply overrun by their enemies. Providing that, however, it seems to me that it comes down to the fact that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Great societies-- such as those of Old Kingdom Egypt, 2nd millenium B.C. Minoan civilization, Golden-Age Athens, early Renaissance Italy, or modern America, are built because people are galvanized by the ideas they embody and by the opportunities they create. The energy, dynamism, and enthusiasm this creates is what makes their rise to power possible and is what makes them great. When this is no longer the case, the formerly great society goes into decline. In that sense my own idea works out to sort of a combination of Mill's and McClelland's theories.

I saw this sort of devastation myself back in the early 80s when I drove across much of the former Eastern bloc countries, and saw landscapes in western Czechoslovakia that had been strip-mined to the point where it looked like a nuclear war had been fought. I saw dozens of abandoned factories and places that looked like ghost towns on the road to Prague from Pilsen. I almost turned back, but pressed on, and was pleased to see that Prague was actually a very beautiful city as I'd been told, despite what I had to drive through to get there.

Diamond, however, is cautiously optimistic about American society although he sees many baleful influences and trends there that are cause for concern, such as deforestation. (I note that several people here were critical of this idea; in Diamond's defense I would point out that 80% of the U.S. forested areas have been logged since 1800 and less than half that has been replanted).

My only criticism of the book is that his selection of cultures and civilizations that support his thesis, although diverse, includes many obscure ones that have left very little influence in the way of a legacy for succeeding civilizations, while ignoring those such as the Romans, Greeks, and so on, whose rise and fall don't seem to fit his criteria. But overall, it's a well-written, interesting, and thought-provoking book which will no doubt continue to fuel the debate about the sustainable and sensible use of the world's resources and the possible social consequences of failing to do so.

Rating:
Summary: A startling, enthralling, ever interesting read!
Review: This is a startling, enthralling, ever interesting read at least for the fist 400 of its 500 pages. Professor Diamond, a Geographer by training sets about to detail through a pile of evidence how man's inattention to (or misunderstanding of) his environment can lead to lower and lower standards of livings, and in many cases the total "collapse" of a society. As an Economics major in College I learned two vital truths, that Economics is the science of scarcity, and that it then requires value judgements on how to deal with the distribution of scarce goods. Bottom line, geographer Diamond has written, as best I can determine, a first rate book of economic geography. How the management, use, replenishment of scarce natural resources leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. It is these historical consequences that I found most revealing and entertaining to read about. Your going to learn an awful lot by reading this book and your perspectives may change, or at a minimum will be challenged. Diamond is a very good writer, many chapters read like he is sitting in the room with you explaining his every thought. He can take dry statistics (and there a lot of them) and make them understandable in a few sentences. The early chapters on modern Montana, Easter Island, Pitcarn Island, the Anasazi and Maya and the Norse in Greenland are all just tremendous. As to modern societies I found his study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic especially interesting. My only criticism of the book is that I felt it got a bit redundant and over written in Part four, Practical Lessons. Not that this is not good stuff, but it lacks the historical and entertaining narrative drive Diamond displays in the first three parts of the book. One last note, I had just read the biography of JOHN JAMES AUDUBON: The making of an American (2004) by Richard Rhodes. In that book I found it remarkable how Audubon, during his lifetime, recorded the wholesale slaughter and disappearance of many birds, and of most forested areas he visited. For me, this could be another example of how we have depleted scarce resources over a short period of time. Unfortunately, I am much more environmentally pessimistic after reading Mr. Diamond's wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Collapse
Review: Why do societies collapse? Usually because millions of common trash stop believing in the very things that made their societies successful in the first place, and start believing the hype of bigoted white haters like Jared Diamond instead.

Rating:
Summary: The Most Important Book of the Year
Review: Yes, it's only February, but the odds that someone will write a book more important than this one anytime in the near future are pretty low. Those who dismiss Diamond as a "determinist" ignore the whole point of this book: Societies don't fail or succeed based on their surroundings. They fail or succeed based on how they interact with those surroundings. Societies that adapt their values and practices to match what their environment can provide to them on a sustainable basis thrive; those that persist in practices that deplete their resources ultimately fail. He backs this notion up with examples from the past and present that are both fascinating and compelling.

But Diamond's remarkable insight is this: For the first time in human history, we have the ability to see our resource use--and depletion--on a global scale, and to recognize how our actions impact others and how their actions impact us. We can harness this new knowledge to sustain our planet, or we can continue on a path that leads nowhere but ruin. Some may not like that message, but Diamond is both honest about how he arrives at his conclusions and optimistic that humanity can solve its problems. It's not overstating the case to say that the higher the number of people who read this well-researched and well-reasoned book, the more warranted Diamond's optimism will be. If you've got the time, read Guns, Germs and Steel first; these two work best together.