How Societies Destroy Themselves

Author Jared Diamond's argument sharply contrasts with conventional explanations for a society's collapse...

"In 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In 'Collapse,' he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history's losers—like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans.

We live in an era preoccupied with the way that ideology and culture and politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn't particularly interested in any of those things -- or, at least, he’s interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society's relationship to its climate and geography and resources and neighbors. 'Collapse' is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth's ecosystem--soil, trees, and water--because societies fail, in Diamond's view, when they mismanage those environmental factors."

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