"I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics." — Jared Diamond

Who has looked on the ancient Maya or classical Mediterranean cities and not wondered why they were abandoned? Or whether they hold a message for us? In this fascinating book, Jared Diamond seeks to understand the fates of past societies that collapsed for ecological reasons, combining the most important policy debate of our generation with the romance and mystery of lost worlds. Citizens of first world societies look around and tend not to see signs of imminent ecological collapse: the supermarkets are full of food; water gushes from our faucets; we live amidst trees and green grass. Actually, though, many past civilizations — with far smaller populations and less potent destructive technologies than those of today — have inadvertently committed ecological suicide: the Polynesian societies on Easter Island and other Pacific islands or the Anasazi civiliation, for example.

Ecocide asks why some societies make disastrous decisions, and how can we in the modern world learn better problem solving? Ecocide is an ecological history of human societies that considers why societies in some regions have been more vulnerable than those in other regions, and also compares the trajectories of pastcivilizations with likely trajectories of our own. Why did Greenland fail where Iceland succeeded? What links Rwanda and Australia? What can contemporary Montana learn from the ancient Mayans and modern Chinese?

As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society's apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

List of Maps xiii

Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms 1

Two farms

Collapses, past and present

Vanished Edens?

A five-point framework

Businesses and the environment

The comparative method

Plan of the book

Part One: MODERN MONTANA 25

Chapter 1: Under Montana's Big Sky 27

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

Part Two: PAST SOCIETIES 77

Chapter 2: Twilight at Easter 79

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

Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands 120

Pitcairn before the Bounty

Three dissimilar islands

Trade

The movie's ending

Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors 136

Desert farmers

Tree rings

Agricultural strategies

Chaco's problems and packrats

Regional integration

Chaco's decline and end

Chaco's message

Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses 157

Mysteries of lost cities

The Maya environment

Maya agriculture

Maya history

Copn

Complexities of collapses

Wars and droughts

Collapse in the southern lowlands

The Maya message

Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues 178

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

Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering 211

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

Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End 248

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

Chapter 9: Opposite Paths to Success 277

Bottom up, top down

New Guinea highlands

Tikopia

Tokugawa problems

Tokugawa solutions

Why Japan succeeded

Other successes

Part Three: MODERN SOCIETIES 309

Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide 311

A dilemma

Events in Rwanda

More than ethnic hatred

Buildup in Kanama

Explosion in Kanama

Why it happened

Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories:

The Dominican Republic and Haiti 329

Differences

Histories

Causes of divergence

Dominican environmental impacts

Balaguer

The Dominican environment today

The future

Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant 358

China's significance

Background

Air, water, soil

Habitat, species, megaprojects

Consequences

Connections

The future

Chapter 13: "Mining" Australia 378

Australia's significance

Soils

Water

Distance

Early history

Imported values

Trade and immigration

Land degradation

Other environmental problems

Signs of hope and change

Part Four: PRACTICAL LESSONS 417

Chapter 14: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous

Decisions? 419

Road map for success

Failure to anticipate

Failure to perceive

Rational bad behavior

Disastrous values

Other irrational failures

Unsuccessful solutions

Signs of hope

Chapter 15: Big Businesses and the Environment:

Different Conditions, Different Outcomes 441

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

Chapter 16: The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today? 486

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

Acknowledgments 526

Further Readings 529

Index 561

Illustration Credits 576

LIST OF MAPS

The World: Prehistoric, Historic, and Modern Societies 4 &5

Contemporary Montana 31

The Pacific Ocean, the Pitcairn Islands, and Easter Island 84 &85

The Pitcairn Islands 122

Anasazi Sites 142

Maya Sites 161

The Viking Expansion 182 &183

Contemporary Hispaniola 331

Contemporary China 361

Contemporary Australia 386

Political Trouble Spots of the Modern World;

Environmental Trouble Spots of the Modern World 497