Catastrophic Callapse of Societies How Arguments Only Partially Succeed

Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005.

As the keyword of its title suggests, this book deals with the catastrophic collapse of societies. Specifically it deals with collapses that resulted from ecological changes. In some cases these changes have been due to natural trends with which the society was unable or unwilling to cope, such as the gradual cooling of Greenland during the "Little Ice Age" that wiped out the medieval Norse settlements in Greenland, or due to the society's own action, such as led to the collapse of the Polynesian civilization of Easter Island. The scope of the book, in terms of the examples used, is global, and extends over the past few thousand years, with some references to events tens of thousands of years ago.

The thesis of the book, as suggested in the subtitle, is that societies' own actions can determine their success or failure when faced with environmental change, whether or not the society's own actions produced those changes in the first place. Ultimately, as might be guessed, Collapse is about the environmental threats facing global society today, the possibly catastrophic effects of failing to respond to them effectively, and the possible means by which we can avoid the grim fate that overtook the Greenland Norse, the Easter Islanders, the Maya, and other societies that experienced collapse.

Viewed safely from long afterwards,

. . .
perate overpopulation (pp. 319-24). A somewhat different (but even more grim) fate overtook the Greenland Norse, in what I found to be the most intriguing section of the book (Chapters 6-8). The other vanished societies discussed in this book are remote and exotic to a person of Western background, but the Greenland Norse were an offshoot of our own society in a previous era. While the original settlers were "Vikings," within a few generations the Norse became Christianized. Their settlements had churches, presided over by a bishop, and their clothing and other artifacts followed the general fashion trends of medieval Western Europe. Greenland was always marginal for the techniques of farming and stock-breeding that the settlers had brought with them. They had no possible way to know that the climate of Europe and the North Atlantic region would become slightly cooler on average around the 14th century. Their contact with the outside world was reduced, then ended entirely. This was due partly to the increased amount of sea ice, making the voyage risky, and partly because changing fashions in Europe wiped out the market for their chief export of ivory from walrus tusks. Eventually, sometime before 1500, the climate
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1554
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)