Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond Dissects the Causes of Societal  Destruction and Survival. (January 7, 2005)

    Just published in the US (and to become available in Australia in February) the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles has written this 600 page assessment of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed which has received high praise for its analysis of the interaction of man and his environment. It is in a sense a complement to Paul and Anne Ehrlich's One with Nineveh, published last year.

Overall Diamond's message like the Ehrlich's is simple: it is possible but not inevitable for human societies to destroy their environment through over exploitation to the point of causing their extinction. The island communities of Easter, Pitcairn and Henderson in the South Pacific, Greenland in the Arctic are used as examples together with the Western Hemisphere Indian communities of the Anasazi, and Mayan cultures.

Moving to modern times the state of Montana is used as an example of a once resource rich north-western US state which has been denuded to the point where it is now one of poorest in the Union "having squandered its non-renewable mineral resources and savagely over-logged its forests." And as to the brutal mutual slaughter in Rwanda  by Hutus and Tutsis, according to Diamond it was, "primarily over your neighbour's land, not his tribal affiliation." Rather reminiscent of Hitler's invoking a conceptual requirement for Lebensraum to feed the German psyche 75 years ago.

Diamond, a frequent visitor to the South Pacific also has words for Australia. William Rees in reviewing Collapse notes that Diamond sees "Australia [as] a developed-world society reeling from ecological degradation but beginning to respond creatively. (Tellingly, however, Diamond's most realistic scenario for Australia sees it falling into decline under the weight of accelerating environmental problems, perhaps just ahead of the rest of the developed world.)."

Is he right?