Jared Diamond is a highly regarded professor at UCLA who has written several groundbreaking books such as “Guns, Germs & Steel”.   His latest, from 2005, is the book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.    I really wanted to like this book because I loved his other books.  Sadly, “Collapse” disappoints.

In seeking to answer the question why societies collapse, Diamond presents five main reasons: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly neighbors (trade), and cultural response. Each of those could be a book itself, of course. One could quibble about the list but it’s actually pretty good.

The problem is that in Collapse, Diamond focuses almost exclusively on environmental damage and climate change. And to prove his points on both, he focuses on some relatively small societies (Haiti, Easter Island and Greenland, for instance) or societies that he projects failure upon but have shown no real signs of collapse (China and Australia, for instance). He focuses enormously on quantifying environmental issues and at times the book reads like a rehash of any number of “the sky is falling” environmental statistics. Which is fine, but let’s remember … Diamond is not an environmental scientist. There is nothing new or innovative in the review of our current environmental problems. Thus a great deal of the book is entirely old news to those of us who have been awake these past several decades.

I liked most everything he had to say in this book. It’s just that I’ve heard it all before. And concluding that societies collapse because we overburden the environment is really not a new thought. Besides, I can think of far more societies that failed for non-environmental reasons (Rome, Greece, Egypt, the Soviet Union, etc etc) than for environmental reasons.

If Diamond had focused more on such things as the collapse of trade, war, and a failure of cultures to adjust to changes, and then shown how those issues are intensified by environmental problems, it would be a more compelling book.

Read this book if you want a broad overview of how environmental issues are going to impact the world in the 21st Century. But skip it if you’ve got a grasp on the idea that waste and shortages of water, soil, food, timber and other natural resources shape everything from geo-politics to economic stability.