Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond.
Diamond, Jared M.
2005
HN13 .D5 2005 (Mapit)
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Title
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond.
Author
Diamond, Jared M.
ISBN
0670033375
Publication Details
New York : Viking, 2005.
Language
English
Description
xi, 575 p., [24] p. of plates : ill., maps ; 25 cm.
Call Number
HN13 .D5 2005
Dewey Decimal Classification
304.2/8
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 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 pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals or environment gives us.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [529]-560) and index.
Linked Resources
Table of contents
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Prologue : a tale of two farms
pt. 1: Modern Montana. Under Montana's big sky
pt. 2: Past societies. Twilight at Easter
The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors
The Maya collapses
The Viking prelude and fugues
Norse Greenland's flowering
Norse Greenland's end
Opposite paths to success
pt. 3: Modern societies. Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide
One island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti
China, lurching giant
"Mining" Australia
pt. 4: Practical lessons. Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?
Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes
The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today?

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