This review appeared in the January 2, 2005 edition of the San Diego Union Book Review, edited by Arthur Salm

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

By David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved.

Do you imagine the future will be better, transformed by steady progress and rising human wisdom? Is your picture one of steady -- or sudden -- decline? Optimism and pessimism come in ironic shades. Some anticipate a biblically scripted apocalypse, or else a breakdown into ecological hell. Others expect the future will take care of itself -- solutions will arise naturally out of market forces, or we'll just continue our run of incredible luck.

History would seem to favor pessimists. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond shows how past cultures toppled, sometimes with little warning. Supplementing historical records with discoveries in archaeology and climatology, he offers a guided tour of crashes and narrow escapes, ranging from Viking Greenland and the Yucatan Mayans to the Anasazi peoples of America's southwest. Then, globe-hopping from Australia and China to Montana and Southern California, Diamond surveys how modern societies are adapting to even greater perils.

The lesson in a nutshell: learn from history, or risk repeating it.

A UCLA professor, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the National Medal of Science, Jared Diamond proved his gift for conveying serious issues in lucid, riveting books like Guns, Germs and Steel. That bestseller explored how Western peoples developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate the world. Now his attention focuses on the rapid arc from triumph to decline that many of our ancestors lived through, watching in helpless despair as their cultures overturned, often from their very zenith.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and Norse Iceland illustrate what can happen when a people's daily needs collide with their habitat's limited carrying capacity. Diamond shows how each isle must have seemed a paradise to early settlers, heavily timbered and thronging with wild foods. Through archaeological evidence, we can track ensuing sagas of deforestation, followed by rapid loss of topsoil, then a plummet in human population. The same pattern scourged dozens of other places, from fragile territories where all inhabitants simply vanished (Pitcairn, Viking Greenland and the Chaco settlements) to more robust lands like Central America, where some natives survived the collapse of their cities and splendor. Amid his outpouring of dour facts, Jared Diamond pauses to wonder.

"What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Then, more generally -- "How can a society have failed to have seen the dangers that seem so clear to us in retrospect?"

It is in addressing this core question -- why do cultures so often falter? -- that his book shows both strengths and faults.

To continue reading, please see THROUGH STRANGER EYES, a collection of my book reviews, introductions and essays on popular culture, which will soon be released in the Western Hemisphere by Nimble Books and in the Eastern Hemisphere by Altair (Australia). Included will be those infamous articles about Tolkien and Star Wars, sober reflections on Jared Diamond's Collapse, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows, scientific ponderings on Feynman and Gott, appraisals of Brunner, Resnick, Zelazny, Verne, and Orwell... all the way to fun riffs on the Matrix and Buffy! Watch for news here!

David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.

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