Collapse is Jared Diamond's followup to Guns, Germs, and Steel, his study of how aspects of geography and speciation have given certain societies advantages over others. In his new work, Diamond examines the fates of societies who stretched their available natural resources, and the ways those societies have either scaled back or continued to their own demise, as well as the whys. He does this from case studies diverse societies, such as Polynesian Easter Island, the Greenland Norse and Inuit, and Native American civilizations in the Southwest.
While these are interesting anthropological investigations in their own right, the book also aims to apply them to ecological issues faced by modern societies, using modern case studies of regions such as Montana and Hispaniola, and industries like mining and petroleum extraction.
It's hard not to find a book like this somewhat depressing. It illustrates societies that overexploited their resources during environmental conditions conducive to expansion, and also couldn't or wouldn't adapt to changes in those environmental conditions. It's hard not to see the same lack of adaptability in our society--including my own lifestyle--and a similar lack of political will in our electorate. However, Diamond makes pains not to be that pessimistic in his conclusions. Although he sees reason for concern, he doesn't think the looming problems are insurmountable.
Partly due to this sense of worry, I didn't find I enjoyed Collapse as much as I did Guns, Germs, and Steel. I didn't find the story or its telling as compelling (though in both cases, Diamond can lapse into lists of facts that can be dry and sometimes repetitive.) I also didn't think the individual stories of societies held the book together as well as the overarching story of human civilization in Diamond's prior work. However it's only in the comparison that this book suffers. Collapse is an interesting look at anthropological stories you may have heard, but not with the most recently learned details. It does a good job of judging societies by their contemporary knowledge and attitudes. Yet, it also shows where these mores failed their societies, and ways in which are modern attitudes may be similar. This is an important read as we face potential tipping points in our modern world.
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I just finished Collapse a couple of weeks ago myself, actually. My impressions are quite similar to yours, I think: I enjoyed the book, I found it worrying in its description of environmental fragility, and I felt like it was less focused than Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Or, well, less focused and compelling than the first half of that book, anyway. The end of Guns, Germs, and Steel was pretty dull: it took me at least two tries before I finished the book (despite loving the first half). I think the two books slip up in the same way: they get less interesting when they focus on the specific cases that support the broad hypothesis.
I felt like Guns, Germs, and Steel got mired down in endless repetition of the same points over and over for at least its final third or so. The same applies to Collapse, but there it's almost the entire book. And really, it's mostly the repetition that I end up finding dull: many of the collapse stories taken on their own are very compelling.
Diamond's discussion of Easter Island in Collapse is very similar to an article that he wrote for Discover magazine many years ago; that article was more memorable and probably had a bigger impact on my view of the world than anything else I've seen in such magazines. The very repetition that shows that his conclusions are general also siphons off their freshness and interest.
Still, like you I enjoyed both books, and I think that both carry important messages for us today. (And I still want to see a version of Civ that's more Guns, Germs, and Steel-inspired... or write one myself.)
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