Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel ranks among my favourites. Insightful and full of perspectives. While that book was about how and why civilisations unfolded differently around the globe, this one is on why many of them collapsed. The author defines collapse as a”a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” He then uses a five point framework to analyse multiple examples, spanning time and geography. The five points are environmental changes, climate changes, hostile neighbours, decrease in trading partners, and finally, society’s response to the above.
The author starts with contemporary farms in Montana and then moves on to the Mayans in South America, the Easter Islands natives, the various Viking communities across continents, and the Native American Anasazi to apply the five point framework and understand the causes of their downfall, and sometimes survival. He then examines modern societies and their challenges – Rwanda, China, Australia, and the interesting case of neighbouring countries that went in opposite directions – The Dominican Republic and Haiti. Strangely, this is despite both countries having a history of dictators.
The last portion of the book delves into what caused societies to make disastrous decisions, and the impact of big businesses on the environment. The latter is not always a negative, and there are some excellent examples of large corporations realising that doing good can actually help the bottomline. There is also a very interesting section on the responsibility of individual consumers.
While we still may not know exactly what happened, there is a fair amount of convincing logic in the author’s hypotheses on how and why civilisations collapsed. And it gets more interesting when we look at the problems we are facing now. On one hand, the scale of the problems are indeed much higher. But on the other, there have been technological advances that can aid us. How much of a counterbalance is one for the other? And as one of his students asks, what was the islander who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking as he was doing it? Are we too, frogs in boiling water? Do we have landscape amnesia which prevents us from seeing the changes around us?
The book is not easy though, and sometimes one wonders whether the depth of research shared in the book takes away from the narrative flow. However, if the subject is interesting to you, it’s a read that will enlighten.
