Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond.

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What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Diamond, Jared M.
Language:English
Published: New York : Viking, 2005.
Subjects:
Social history > Case studies.
Social change > Case studies.
Environmental policy > Case studies.
Civilization > history.
Social Conditions > history.
Environment.
Genre:
Case studies.
Physical Description:xi, 575 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Format: Book
Contents:
  • Prologue : a tale of two farms
  • Two farms
  • Collapses, past and present
  • Vanished Edens?
  • A five-point framework
  • Businesses and the environment
  • The comparative method
  • Plan of the book
  • pt. 1. Modern Montana
  • 1. Under Montana's big sky
  • Stan Falkow's story
  • Montana and me
  • Why begin with Montana?
  • Montana's economic history
  • Mining
  • Forests
  • Soil
  • Water
  • Native and non-native species
  • Differing visions
  • Attitudes towards regulation
  • Rick Laible's story
  • Chip Pigman's story
  • Tim Huls's story
  • John Cook's story
  • Montana, model of the world
  • pt. 2. Past societies
  • 2. Twilight at Easter
  • The quarry's mysteries
  • Easter's geography and history
  • People and food
  • Chiefs, clans, and commoners
  • Platforms and statues
  • Carving, transporting, erecting
  • The vanished forest
  • Consequences for society
  • Europeans and explanations
  • Why was Easter fragile?
  • Easter as metaphor
  • 3. The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
  • Pitcairn before the Bounty
  • Three dissimilar islands
  • Trade
  • The movie's ending
  • 4. The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors
  • Desert farmers
  • Tree rings
  • Agricultural strategies
  • Chaco's problems and packrats
  • Regional integration
  • Chaco's decline and end
  • Chaco's message
  • 5. The Maya collapses
  • Mysteries of lost cities
  • The Maya environment
  • Maya agriculture
  • Maya history
  • Copán
  • Complexities of collapses
  • Wars and droughts
  • Collapse in the southern lowlands
  • The Maya message
  • 6. The Viking prelude and fugues
  • Experiments in the Atlantic
  • The Viking explosion
  • Autocatalysis
  • Viking agriculture
  • Iron
  • Viking chiefs
  • Viking religion
  • Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes
  • Iceland's environment
  • Iceland's history
  • Iceland in context
  • Vinland
  • 7. Norse Greenland's flowering
  • Europe's outpost
  • Greenland's climate today
  • Climate in the past
  • Native plants and animals
  • Norse settlement
  • Farming
  • Hunting and fishing
  • An integrated economy
  • Society
  • Trade with Europe
  • Self-image
  • 8. Norse Greenland's end
  • Introduction to the end
  • Deforestation
  • Soil and turf damage
  • The Inuit's predecessors
  • Inuit subsistence
  • Inuit/Norse relations
  • The end
  • Ultimate causes of the end
  • 9. Opposite paths to success
  • Bottom up, top down
  • New Guinea highlands
  • Tikopia
  • Tokugawa problems
  • Tokugawa solutions
  • Why Japan succeeded
  • Other successes
  • pt. 3. Modern societies
  • 10. Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide
  • A dilemma
  • Events in Rwanda
  • More than ethnic hatred
  • Buildup in Kanama
  • Explosion in Kanama
  • Why it happened
  • 11. One island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti
  • Differences
  • Histories
  • Causes of divergence
  • Dominican environmental impacts
  • Balaguer
  • The Dominican environment today
  • The future
  • 12. China, lurching giant
  • China's significance
  • Background
  • Air, water, soil
  • Habitat, species, megaprojects
  • Consequences
  • Connections
  • The future
  • 13. "Mining" Australia
  • Australia's significance
  • Soils
  • Water
  • Distance
  • Early history
  • Imported values
  • Trade and immigration
  • Land degradation
  • Other environmental problems
  • Signs of hope and change
  • pt. 4. Practical lessons
  • 14. Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?
  • Road map for success
  • Failure to anticipate
  • Failure to perceive
  • Rational bad behavior
  • Disastrous values
  • Other irrational failures
  • Unsuccessful solutions
  • Signs of hope
  • 15. Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes
  • Resource extraction
  • Two oil fields
  • Oil company motives
  • Hardrock mining operations
  • Mining company motives
  • Differences among mining companies
  • The logging industry
  • Forest Stewardship Council
  • The seafood industry
  • Businesses and the public
  • 16. The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today?
  • Introduction
  • The most serious problems
  • If we don't solve them...
  • Life in Los Angeles
  • One-liner objections
  • The past and the present
  • Reasons for hope.