Books: When Things Fall Apart

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Diamond is not an eloquent writer, but he doesn't have to be: Collapse is full of spectacles of unbearable, nightmarish poignance. He shows us the last desperate Norsemen rioting and eating newborn calves and even their own hunting dogs. He lays out the decline of the Mayan empire, the extinction of the Anasazi--whose five-story buildings were the tallest in North America until the 1880s--and the final days of Mangareva, a tiny tropical island where the last inhabitants not only ate one another but dug up buried corpses and ate them too.

Collapse also surveys modern societies that appear to Diamond to be at risk. Among them are China, where 300,000 people a year die from air pollution, and Montana, which is grappling with the economic and environmental ravages of logging and mining. There are success stories too, such as Iceland, which bounced back from severe environmental damage (in an environment that was no picnic to begin with) through tough-minded communal decision making.

Despite all the devastation, there are hopeful messages in Collapse. In most cases, the problems those extinct peoples faced weren't insoluble; they just couldn't spot the difficulties in time, whether because of cultural blind spots, scientific ignorance or sheer pigheadedness. "We don't need new technologies to solve our problems," Diamond writes, "we 'just' need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course," he adds, "that's a big 'just.'" With Diamond's help, maybe we'll learn to see our own problems a little more clearly--before we chop down that last palm tree.