Collapse
Jared Diamond
Read it in paperback
with additional Afterward, 560 pages.
Sometimes you have
to just bear down and read something academically stimulating, this is one such
book for me, and a test if you will.
Jared Diamond is perhaps best known in the literally world for 'Guns,
Germs, and Steal', which I was not able to complete (much to my dissatisfaction
and why this was a test) and details how some societies progressed faster and
what contributed to their abundance or decline, so on and so forth, ad naseum. Wiki states that Diamond has a list of fields
including, Physiology, Biophysics, Ornithology, Environmentalism, Ecology,
Geography, Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology. Diamond also has a A.B. from Harvard and PhD
from Cambridge while currently teaching at UCLA. He is a busy and educated man that loves
birds. So educated and well-meaning that
he has earned an award from somewhere for something for nearly every year since
1984. It's a long list of
accomplishments for Mr. Diamond and he means to be taken seriously.
So seriously that he
decided to write a book about collapse and aptly titled it so. In Collapse, Diamond looks at the decisions
and factors of societies no longer with us and present societies big and small
who Diamond believes are showing signs of future collapse. It's all nitty-gritty and scientific with a
little cultural flavoring provided by Diamond.
It's really a simple formula for each collapse but peppered with death
throes of the culture experiencing the collapse. Admittedly the soup always seems to end with
cannibalism.
When
reading this, all I could think of was soup because the best way to think at a burgeoning society in my brain is much akin to soup. When the pot goes to boil everyone starts throwing things in, you got your water, your soil nutrient levels, your expected seasonal changes, etc. But
as the pot goes
to a simmer you
realize that maybe cutting all of the trees down
to heat the pot was
a
bad idea because now you have erosion and those pretty carrots go out the window. You
wanted pork in your stew? Too
bad the pork didn’t make it, and they also managed to increase erosion rates. Oh well
it's hardly anything to scoff at there is still so much
to throw into the soup, unless you don't get enough volcanic ash fallout which
means everything was only going to grow once but you ruined that. Inadvertently your soup is a meager brown
syrup with no fortification and this awful salinization taste, and you still
have a lot of hungry people expecting to eat soup. The guests are so angry in fact that first
they start fighting with themselves and when that still fails to satiate there
hunger they start eating each other. All
because your soup was lousy. Should have
put the pot to boil somewhere else I suppose but such is the cards dealt in
soup.
The book
starts with The Bitter Root valley in Montana and details so of the challenges
facing it in the near future. Challenges
that other societies current and past must also have faced. Some of the examples given include Easter
Island, The Mayan States, the Medieval Norse and their troubles in Greenland
and Iceland, and The Anasazi. After
carefully digesting each in turn you are shown modern institutions that could
see collapse in terms of China, Australia, Rwanda, and Haiti. Again, it's all perplexingly interesting and
scientific.
Not for
everyone but enjoyed much by me despite it being a relatively dry read. 3.5 rounding up to four for Goodreads. If you're interested in such things by all
means take a shot, if you are not then under no circumstance should you read
this as you won't get through it.
No comments:
Post a Comment