Collapse: How People Choose Failed or Successfully (titled Fear: How People Choose Failed or Endure for English Edition) is a book 2005 by the scientific and popular author Jared Diamond, where Diamond first defines the collapse: "a drastic reduction in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a large area, for time "He then reviewed the historical and pre-historical causes of the collapse of society - especially those involving significant influences from environmental change, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, trading partners, and community responses to four previous challenges - and assuming the success or failure of society different in the face of such threats.
Although much of this book has to do with the demise of this historic civilization, Diamond also argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same problems, with consequences that may pose a future catastrophe for many of the world's population.
Video Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Sinopsis
In the prologue, Jared Diamond summarizes his methodology in one paragraph:
This book uses a comparative method to understand the collapse of society that is an environmental concern. My previous book ( Weapons, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ), has applied a comparative method to the opposite problem: the varying levels of human society accumulated on different continents during the last 13,000 years. In this book focusing on collapse instead of building, I compare many different past and present societies with respect to the fragility of the environment, relationships with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence the stability of society. The "output" variable I checked was collapse or survival, and the form of collapse if collapse occurred. By connecting the output variable to the input variable, I aim to override the influence of possible input variables on the collapses.
Crumbling past community
Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to the collapse: climate change, unfriendly neighbors, the collapse of important trading partners, environmental problems, and community responses to the four ongoing factors.
The root problem in all but one of the factors that caused Diamond to collapse was the overpopulation relative to the practical (as opposed to ideal theory) environmental carrying capacity. An environmental problem unrelated to the excess population is the harmful effect of introducing accidental or intentional non-native species into an area.
Diamond also writes about cultural factors (values), such as the obvious reluctance of the Greenland Norse to eat fish. Diamond also states that "it is unreasonable to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapse: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is ancient.It is clearly true that military or economic factors alone is sufficient.
Modern society
He also lists twelve environmental problems facing mankind today. The first eight have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:
- Deforestation and habitat destruction
- Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and loss of soil fertility)
- Water management issues
- Huddle
- Overfishing
- Effects of species introduced in native species
- Excess Population
- Increased per capita impact of people
Further, he says the four new factors can contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future society:
- Anthropogenic climate change
- Toxic buildup in the environment
- Lack of energy
- Humans fully use the Earth's photosynthesis capacity
Conclusion
In the last chapter, he discusses the environmental issues facing modern society and addresses frequent objections to ignore the importance of environmental issues (the "One-liner objection" section). In the "Further Reading" section, he advises people who ask, "What can I do as an individual?". He also draws conclusions, such as:
In fact, one of the main lessons that can be learned from the collapse of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islands and other societies of the past [...] is that the sharp decline of a society may begin only a decade or two after society reaches the number, wealth, and peak power. [...] The reason is simple: the maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching a limit where impacts go beyond resources.
Finally, he answers the question, "What choice should we make if we want to succeed, and not fail?" by identifying two important choices that distinguish past communities that failed from survivors:
- Long-term planning: "[...] the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, bold, anticipatory decisions when the problem has become clear but before they reach the proportion of the crisis." >
- The willingness to reconsider the core values: "[...] the courage to make painful decisions about values.What of the values ​​that previously served the community well can be maintained under new changing circumstances? of these valuable values ​​instead of being discarded and replaced by different approaches? "
Maps Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Book structure
Collapsed is divided into four sections.
- Part One explains Montana's state of the environment in the US, focusing on the lives of multiple individuals to place a human face on the interaction between society and the environment.
- Part Two describes the past society that has collapsed. Diamond uses the "framework" when considering the collapse of society, which consists of five "set of factors" that can affect what happens to society: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trading partners, and community responses to its environmental problems. Repeated problems in a collapsed society are structures that create "conflicts between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of society as a whole."
The community described by Diamond is:
- The Greenland Norse (Hvalsey Church) (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, unfriendly neighbors, irrational reluctance to eat fish, heads that keep their short-term interests).
- Easter Island (community that collapsed completely because of environmental damage)
- Polynesia Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners)
- Anasazi in north-western North America (environmental damage and climate change)
- Maya from Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors)
- Finally, Diamond discusses three success stories of the past:
- Small little island in the Pacific, Tikopia
- Agricultural success of egalitarian central New Guinea
- Forest management in Tokugawa-era Japan, and in Germany.
- Part Three looks at modern society, including:
- The collapse of the Rwandan genocide, partly caused by overpopulation
- The failure of Haiti is compared to the relative success of its neighbors in Hispaniola, Dominican Republic
- Problems facing developing countries, China
- Issues facing First World countries, Australia
Part Four summarizes the research by considering subjects such as business and globalization, and "extracting practical lessons for us today" (pp. 22-23). Particular attention is paid to the polder model as the way the Dutch society has overcome its challenges and the "top-down" and most important "bottom-up" approach we must take now that "our world society is currently on non-sustainable course" (p. A. 498) to avoid "12 non-sustainability issues" that he outlines the entire book, and reviews in the last chapter. The result of this survey is probably why Diamond sees "signs of hope" and arrives at a "careful optimism" position for all our futures.
Reviews
The Flannery team gave Cover the highest praise in Science , writes:
When he planned the book, Diamond initially thought that it would only deal with the human impact on the environment. Instead, what emerges is the most thorough study of the once-written human civilization ever written. [...] The fact that one of the world's most original thinkers has chosen to do this gigantic job when his career is at its peak is a persuasive argument that Collapse should be taken seriously. This is probably the most important book you've ever read.
The Economist's review is generally favorable, although reviewers have two disagreements. First, reviewers feel Diamond is not quite optimistic about the future. Secondly, the reviewer claimed Collapse contains some false statistics: for example, Diamond admits exaggerating the number of hungry people in the world. British University ecology planning professor William Rees writes that the most important lesson is that the people who are best able to avoid collapse are the most agile people, able to adopt profitable practices for their own survival. and avoid the bad ones. In addition, Rees writes that Collapse is the "necessary antidote" to Julian Simon's followers, such as BjÃÆ'¸rn Lomborg who wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist . Rees explains this statement as follows:
Human behavior towards the ecosphere has become dysfunctional and now arguably threatens our own long-term security. The real problem is that the modern world remains in the wobble of a dangerous cultural myth. Like Lomborg, most governments and international agencies seem to believe that human companies somehow 'separate' from the environment, and are also ready for unlimited expansion. Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse , faces this contradiction directly.
Jennifer Marohasy of think-tanks, the Institute of Public Affairs wrote a critical review in Energy & amp; The Environment, especially its chapter on Australia's environmental degradation. Marohasy claims that Diamond reflects a popular view reinforced by environmental campaigns in Australia, but is not supported by evidence, and argues that many of his claims are easily disputed.
In his review at The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell highlights how Diamond's approach differs from traditional historians by focusing on environmental issues rather than cultural questions.
Diamond's distinction between social and biological survival is very important, because too often we obscure the two, or assume that biological survival depends on the strength of the values ​​of our civilization... The fact is that we can be law-abiding. and love is peaceful and tolerant and inventive and committed to freedom and loyal to our own values ​​and still behaves in a biologically suicidal way.
While Diamond does not reject the traditional historian's approach, his book, according to Gladwell, vividly illustrates the limitations of that approach. Gladwell pointed this out with his own example of a recent voting initiative in Oregon, where questions about property rights and other freedoms are subject to free and healthy debates, but serious ecological questions are given little attention.
In 2006 the book was selected for the Aventis Prize Award for the Science Book, eventually losing to David Bodanis' Electric Universe .
Critique
Jared Diamond's thesis that Easter Island communities collapsed in complete isolation due to environmental damage and cultural flexibility contested by some ethnographers and archaeologists, who argued that the introduction of the disease brought by European colonists and slave robberies, which destroyed the population in the 19th century, had a social impact which is much larger than the environmental degradation, and that the animals introduced - the first rats and then the sheep - were largely responsible for the loss of the island's native flora, which came closest to deforestation by the end of 1930-1960.
The Questioning Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a collection of essays by anthropologists who criticize the various aspects of the Diamond Collapse and the Weapons, Germs and Steel: brief history of everyone for the last 13,000 years .
Movies
In 2010, National Geographic released the documentary Collapse based on Diamond's book.
See also
- List of important publications in anthropology
- Environmental book list
- Complexity
- Normality creeps
- Reject the Roman Empire
- Deforestation during the Roman period
- Weapons, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
- Ecocide
- Environmental disaster
- Global disaster risk
- Global warming
- Human impact on the environment
- List of environmental issues
- Social collapse
- Sustainability
- Elite Twilight: America After Meritocracy
Notes and references
External links
- Why does society collapse? (2003), a TED talk by Jared Diamond
- "Metacritic - book review collection". Archived from the original on July 21, 2006.
- First chapter
- Tokugawa Shogun vs. Consumer Democracy: Intan Interview on the subject raised in the book with NPQ , Spring 2005, concentrates on political intersection and environmentalism.
- How People Fail - And Sometimes It Works, video of a seminar given in June 2005 at the Long Now Foundation.
- Learning from the Past Community: The Sustainability Lesson Exists, If We Can Find It - This is a judgment about the process maturity used in Close and a similar book, Stepping on Light, to answer their driving questions. This assessment highlights the maturity of the process of similar efforts to solve complex complex social system problems, especially sustainability issues.
- COLLECT? - a museum exhibit developed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History in collaboration with Jared Diamond (pdf archive)
- Environmental issues - A public annotated bibliography containing print and online sources addressing the 12 most serious environmental issues discussed by Diamond at Collapse .
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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