num_pages: 592
description: In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilizationEnvironmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
language: English
title: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
titlecomplete: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
genres: Anthropology, Social Science, Politics, Environment, Science, Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology, History, Society
ratings_count: 70403
series: Civilizations Rise and Fall
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Royal Society Science Book Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: California Book Award
category: Nonfiction (Silver), awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Prix du livre sur l'environnement
publisher: Viking Penguin