Summary
In
his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared
Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the
technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of
the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What
caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into
ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?. As in Guns, Germs,
and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through
a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the
prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly
flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the
Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally
to the modern world, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of
catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our
resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and
when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees.
Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth,
unstable trade partners, and pressure from enemies were all factors
in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found
solutions to those same problems and persisted.--BOOK
JACKET.
