Book Review
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
by Jared Diamond. Published by Viking, 2005
If books that make you think are not what you are into, then you can probably stop reading this review right now. If you have no interest in the environment, please move along - nothing to see here, folks. Finally, if you've never felt the slightest interest in Easter Island, or the Anasazi, or the Mayans, then Aqua Teen Hunger Force is on Thursdays at midnight.
But if the poem Ozymandias by Shelley (see the Library for his poetry if you want details) ever stirred something in you, or if the movie Apocalypto kept your attention, or even just because you are from Montana, then this book has something for you.
The author, Dr. Jared Diamond is a professor in geography at UCLA. He's got degrees from Harvard and from Cambridge, and has studied physiology and biophysics, ecology, history, and environmental science. He's won the National Medal of Science and the Pulitzer Prize. The man knows what he is talking about. And what he's talking about is why some human societies have collapsed and failed.
I guess you could say he had me from hello; he starts with the aforementioned poem just after the dedication, and that's always been one of my favorite works from Shelley. Then he plunges into talking about Montana, my home state. He gives one of the most clear-headed and concise summations on where Montana has been and where it is now, and that contributed to and built my interest. And I have to admit that those images of deserted ruins, such as you see in abandoned cliff pueblos from the US Southwest, or those jungle-overgrown temples from Central America, or even just those funky giant statues from Easter Island have always intrigued me. And he does more than just carry through on these initial points of interest. His global thesis is how not paying attention to the environment can have the most serious of catastrophic consequences (such as wars, mass starvation, and cannibalism).
On the way, he goes from Montana (formerly known for mining, logging, and food production and now one of the poorest states in the US) to Easter Island and its amazing statues. From there he takes us to the island where the mutineers from Mutiny on the Bounty landed (known as Pitcairn), and then to the stories of the Anasazi and the Mayans and their vanished cultures. He even goes into detail on why the Vikings failed in Greenland while the Inuit people are still there.
The last third of the book moves into the modern realm: why the Rwanda massacres were linked to environmental circumstances, why Haiti is known for its starving poor while the Dominican Republic is known for baseball (and they share the same island), and why Australia and China face some similar environmental challenges. He devotes time to how even "extraction" industries (oil, mining) can take completely different routes to achieve their ends, and either minimize or maximize their impact on the environment. While he is clearly on the environmentalist side of the issues, he does present some pro-business viewpoints and breaks lockstep with the standard environmentalist propaganda. If you are studying business, environmental science, history, or just find some of the issues in this book review compelling, you owe it to yourself to read this best-selling nonfiction title.
--Charles Diede, Library Director, Hurst Library