Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is not for the faint of heart. It is a commanding book, intended to utterly convince the reader of the danger of environmental ecocide (unintended ecological suicide). Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which studied the reasons why different continents have been built up differently over the course of human history. 

Ecocide has been determined to be the major cause of the disappearance of at least five major societies in the past: the inhabitants of Easter Island, the Anaszai, the Maya, Norse Greenland, and the Viking communities. Examining our present world, Diamond warns of the imminent ecological declines of Rwanda, Haiti, China, and Australia.

Diamond’s dissection of Easter Island’s collapse is very interesting because of parallels he draws between it and present-day North American culture. In a quick summary, historians, anthropologists and paleontologists have found several factors that contributed to the island’s ecocide. The island was divided into twelve territories, each with a ruling clan. Their religious beliefs prompted them into constructing the 887 statues that fill the island. The statues required workmen’s full concentration, which meant that more destruction and consumption occurred than planting and maintaining. During the peak of the Easter Island civilization the island was teeming with plant and animal life, but gradually it became completely deforested and the environment imploded. The religious system broke down, and cannibalism became common. Diamond spends a lot of time discussing Easter Island, because it is the best known example of overexploitation of environmental resources.

As a professor at UCLA, Diamond taught this material before he wrote the book. A student question that he found interesting was: “What do you think the people said as they watched the last tree being cut down on Easter Island?”, or another question, “Why didn’t they stop it from happening?.” Diamond thinks that disastrous decisions are comprised of four major reasoning errors.

The first error is failing to anticipate a problem before it arrives. The second is failing to perceive a problem once it has actually arrived. This is also termed “creeping normalcy” and “landscape amnesia”. The more a person sees something, the less they really see it, in other words. Third, failing to attempt to solve a known problem, for whatever reason. This is discussed in international relations under the term “tragedy of the commons”-when selfishness rules interpersonal dealings with no concern for long-term consequences. Lastly, failing to solve problems because of purely irrational behavior, such as clinging to values and traditions that no longer make sense. Diamond would categorize families that have 12 children as irrational, for instance.   

Diamond identifies the major environmental threats that are on the horizon, and provides time tables in which he believes the threats will become the world’s reality. These threats are: deforestation, aquaculture, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, lack of alternative energies that can be mass-produced, improper use of the world’s freshwater, decreasing photosynthetic capacity, toxic pollution, alien species (such as new viruses), out-of-control population growth, and the population’s environmental impact per person.

Environmental impact is a delicate subject, because of where we live. We live in America, a “first world” civilization, and each American citizen consumes 32 times more resources than a citizen of a third world civilization. Less developed civilizations dream of living as we do. The problem is, if they live like us the worldwide environmental impact would be completely devastating. Diamond says that if every citizen in China were to attain the U.S. living standard that the total human environmental impact on the world would be doubled. If China would do this, imagine what Africa would do. This is not a judgment; it is a wrenching, sad, and perplexing idea.

This book is a must-read, absolutely. We are college students, young adults, the future leaders of the world. We will be the ones facing the reality of diminished and collapsing societies in a few short decades if we don’t get to work. These are complex problems that are here, right now. We cannot ignore them.

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