COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

In his million copy bestseller 'Guns, Germs and Steel', Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilisations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, he probes the other side of the equation - what caused some of the great civilisations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilisations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and already have brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite Western society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivalled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge in ecologically robust areas like Montana. Illuminating and immensely absorbing, the book asks: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide? He concludes that today's society faces the same eight problems of the past plus four new ones - human-caused climate change, build up of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full utilisation of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. 'By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.' 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times. 589 page Penguin paperback, photos.