Book Review: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond

David's Review:5/5

The book is a series of stories and analysis of past human societies that collapsed. It has great examples showing how some societies used the natural resources around them at an unsustainable rate and eventually faced starvation because the land they lived off of became infertile.

I found the story of Easter Islands very interesting. For hundreds of years people lived on the Easter Islands in the pacific ocean and used the islands trees for shelter, firewood and for transporting huge stone statues. But eventually they ran out of trees. Without trees providing shade and protecting the top soil, land eroded rapidly and Easter islanders food supply decreased significantly. This put a lot of stress on their community and caused them to start wars with their neighboring villages and further destroy the remaining trees in a race to use the last remaining tree. Once they had cut and burnt all the trees they could not even build any more boats to move to neighboring islands. So they eventually died of starvation. Similar stories happened to communities living in Greenland, to Vikings and to many other societies form the past.

Jared Diamond also writes about contemporary societies like the state of Montana and Rwanda. He has a great explanation for the genocide in Rwanda. He concludes that the genocide was was basically caused by over population and tension between land owners and poor peasants. The division of land between the heirs of a family caused plots to be continually subdivided into unsustainable smaller plots. Eventually people were forced to sell their small plots to landlords and migrated to already overcrowded cities. The genocide was a response to stress and built up tensions of overcrowding.

All the stories in the book end with starvation or other unhappy endings except in the last chapter where Jared Diamond describes how sound and sustainable use of natural resources can be done at reasonable costs.

Overall it is a great book. Great narrative, lots of scientific facts and sound reasoning.

Jared Diamond's other book "Guns, Germs and Steel" has an original analysis of why some human societies prospered while others didn't. It should be a mandatory school reading.