Collapse

Following his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), geologist and anthropologist Jared Diamond published a companion book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in 2006. Where Guns, Germs, and Steel described how various environments around the world helped or hindered human civilization, Collapse explains how environmental abuse ruined many past societies and how it threatens civilizations today. An updated edition, released in 2011 by Penguin Books, is the subject of this study guide.

Collapse discusses five major causes for the failure of cultures with degraded environments: human ecological impacts, changes in climate, hostile neighbors, friendly neighbors who back away, and a society’s unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances. Especially destructive is deforestation, which causes soil erosion, flooding, loss of wood products, and crop failures.

Through detailed examples, Diamond shows how some civilizations, misunderstanding or ignoring the environmental warnings all around them, suffered catastrophic failure, while other peoples, similarly stressed, made wiser decisions and survived. Societies often reached their greatest heights just before ecological catastrophe, causing mass starvation and collapse.

These examples can teach the modern world, which suffers from some of the worst environmental degradation in history, how to navigate similar difficulties, restore the regional ecosystems, and escape the deadly fate of their ancestors.