Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

• Author: Shaw, Jane S.
• Position: Book review

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed By Jared Diamond New York: Viking, 2005. Pp. 592. $29.95 cloth, $17.00 paperback.

A fascinating book lies within the nearly six hundred pages of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The interior book is an effort to marshal the facts surrounding the disappearances of past civilizations known for the most part by the tantalizing relics they left behind. Unlike the ancient civilizations of Greece or Rome, most of Diamond's lost cultures were small and isolated, but their names are familiar to most of us: the Anasazi who lived in Chaco Canyon in what is now New Mexico; the residents of Easter Island in the Pacific, who left giant, broken, humanlike statues; and the Vikings, who settled Greenland when the climate was warmer but died out when it grew colder. Many of us have wondered for years about these cultures. Jared Diamond--biologist, anthropologist, and author of the stunning book Guns, Germs, and Steel--should be the perfect guide to them.

Wrapped around this engrossing stow, however, is an attempt to do much more than weave together what is known about these civilizations and their demise. Diamond thinks he can explain why these civilizations vanished, even though in most cases we simply do not know enough about them to come to any conclusion. What is worse, Diamond chooses to apply his fragilely spun explanations to warding off environmental collapse in the future. Thus, the book moves from mystery to unreality.

Diamond admits that when he started his research, "I naively thought that the book would just be about environmental damage" (p. 11). By the end of his studies, he has discovered five explanatory variables--environmental damage, yes, but also climate change, hostile neighbors, weakened trade partners, and society's response.

Certainly, environmental damage was a big factor in all the collapses Diamond describes, and much of that damage was inflicted by the groups themselves. For example, the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon deforested their surroundings, although they needed the pinon nuts for food and the wood for firewood and construction. They also built irrigation ditches, but the dry climate turned the ditches into deep gulches where the water flowed too far down to be used for agriculture. Even so, the Anasazi lasted at Chaco for more than five hundred years. No one knows why they allowed their environment to deteriorate to the point where they were...