Another example might be the tobacco industry that is now hawking its cancer-causing wares to unsuspecting children world-wide.The petrochemical industry that reaps mountainous profits by selling products that are heating up the planet, contaminating our bodies with biologically-active industrial poisons, and leaving tens of thousands of chemically-contaminated waste sites for taxpayers to try to deal with.
The second reasons for collapse is "failure of group decision-making." Diamond then offers three kinds of failure of decision-making:ĭecision-making failure #1: "One reason involves conflicts of interest, whereby one group within a society (for instance, the pig farmers who caused the worst erosion in medieval Greenland and Iceland) can profit by engaging in practices that damage the rest of society," Diamond writes.Įxamples of this in contemporary society might include Just think how crises in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq have shaped the United States today." Moreover, while the Maya collapse affected just a few neighboring societies in Central America, globalization now means that any society's problems have the potential to affect anyone else. If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today. They destroyed societies in the past, and they are even more likely to do so now.
He answers bluntly: "The most straightforward : take environmental problems seriously.
Society's political, economic, and social responses to those shifts.Īfter telling the stories of particular societies that collapsed or prospered, Diamond asks pointedly, "What lessons can we draw from history?". The damage that people have inflicted on their environment. Collapse is the result of choices.ĭiamond asserts that collapse results from 5 inter-woven factors: What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly?"ĭiamond tells the stories of a few past civilizations that collapsed and rapidly disappeared - the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico the Polynesian societies on Henderson and Pitcairn islands in the tropical Pacific Ocean the Anasazi in the American southwest the ancient societies of the Fertile Crescent the Khmer at Angkor Wat and the Moche society of Peru, among others.ĭiamond then offers a long list of other societies that followed a different trajectory and survived for very long periods in Japan, Tonga, Tikopia, the New Guinea Highlands, and Central and Northwest Europe, among others. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?"ĭiamond goes on: "Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. It is an essay obviously intended to make us ask, "Does our civilization have what it takes to survive?" In the opening paragraph he says, "In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. The year 2005 began with an interesting choice by the editors of the New York Times - the first op-ed of the year was a long essay by Jared Diamond called "The ends of the world as we know them." Diamond won the Pulitzer prize for his non-fiction book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and later in 2005 he published "Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."ĭiamond's op-ed offers an analysis of why civilizations collapse. What accounts for the difference, and what does it matter to the U.S.? Some civilizations reach their peak of power and then suddenly collapse and remain in decline or even disappear.
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