Summary
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... Full description
- 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.