The same author's Guns, Germs, and Steel focused on the elements which brought about success in the evolution of a society. In the present volume, he focuses on elements which have led past societies to collapse and which continue to threaten our collective future existence.
At the outset Diamond lists eight aspects of environmental damage that undermined past societies, then adds four more that threaten societies today. Then he adds his realization from writing the book that environmental damage alone was not a sufficient cause for collapse of past societies, that climate change, hostile neighbors, dependence on friendly trade partners, and societal response to environmental problems were also important factors. Diamond recognizes particularly that the last -- which also shows up in the book's subtitle -- "always proves significant." (p. 11)
After writing extensively about the Bitterroot Valley of Montana as a "microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States" (p. 32) in Part 1, Diamond reports on his investigations of collapsed past societies in Part 2: Easter Island; Mangareva, Pitcairn, and Henderson Islands; the Anasazi of the American southwest; the Maya; Greenland and Vinland. He concludes Part 2 with a discussion of contrasting societies which did not collapse and an assessment of why they survived: the islands of Tikopia and Tonga, the New Guinea Highlanders, and pre-1868 Japan. "Leaders who don't just react passively, who have the courage to . . . anticipate crises or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. So can similarly courageous, active citizens practicing bottom-up management," he writes (p. 306). Part 3 is devoted to the assessment of selected modern societies in terms of the same criteria employed in Part 2: Rwanda, the nations of Hispaniola, China, and Australia.
Although Diamond occasionally foreshadows his conclusions in the course of writing about the societies he has studied, the bulk of his analysis and his final conclusions come in the final part of the book, which he has called "Practical Lessons." More specifically, they come in Chapter 14, "Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?" and Chapter 16, "The World as a Polder: W hat Does It All Mean to Us Today?" Chapter 14 was motivated by response to Diamond's field testing his material with his students at UCLA. They wondered "how on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which it depended?" (p. 419) Diamond responds to his students' query with "a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision making" in a "fuzzy delineated sequence of four categories," elaborating with reasons for each one: 1) failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives; 2) failure to perceive a problem when it does arrive; 3) failure to try to solve the problem after it is perceived; 4) failure to solve the problem after trying to do so.
In Chapter 16 Diamond revisits the 12 environmental problems cited in his Prologue, albeit in a different organization (see list at end). He also emphasizes that these problems are all related; for this reason, our future survival requires that we solve all of them. Diamond then lists twelve "one-liner objections" to solving environmental problems (see list at end), dismissing the first ten but maintaining that the last two cannot be dismissed. He also argues that the world's major environmental and political trouble spots are one and the same and further notes that "the problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalization," which "means nothing more than improved worldwide communications, which can convey many things in either direction," adding that ". . . societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline." (pp. 517, 519)
At the end, Diamond turns for answers to the experience of the Dutch, who have shown their awareness of the need to work together to safeguard their reclaimed lands, called "polders." Diamond would have us realize that we all live on one polder called Earth and "that there is no other island/other planet to which we can turn for help, or to which we can export our problems." (p. 521)
Although "today's larger population and more potent destructive technology . . . and . . . interconnectedness posing the risk of global rather than a local collapse . . . may seem to suggest a pessimistic outlook" (p. 521) about the future of planet Earth, Diamond maintains that he's a "cautious optimist." "Because we are the cause of our problems," he writes, "we are the ones in control of them." But "if we don't make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don't succeed in that effort, the world as a whole in the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse." (p. 521) Diamond repeats his view (earlier expressed in his discussions of China and Australia) of the future as an "exponentially accelerating horse race" between solutions to environmental problems and threats to the environment. He also repeats the "two types of choices" which seem to have been crucial in tipping the fate of past societies: "long-term planning" (cited in the last chapter of Part 2) and "willingness to reconsider core values" (cited in Diamond's assessment of the failure of the Greenland Norse and of the future of Australia).
By long-term planning, Diamond means looking for problems on the horizon and acting before there is a crisis, and he cites examples of this in the worlds of both business and politics. He also cites successes resulting from the re-examination of core values and applies this to the future of First World living standards. Though "inducing First World citizens to lower the impact on the world" (p. 524, previously alluded to on pages 7, 275, and 496) may seem impossible, Diamond feels that "the alternative is more impossible." (p. 524)
Realizing that he has written a complex book, Diamond further clarifies its organization by listing the subtopics of each chapter in the table of contents and on the first page of the chapter. The sections are clearly separated by greater than normal spacing between paragraphs, and the section title is the header on the right hand pages, while the chapter title is the header on the left hand pages.
I. Destruction/loss of natural resources.
A. Natural habitat.
B. Wild food sources.
C. Biological diversity.
D. Soil.
II. Ceilings on natural resources.
E. Energy.
F. Freshwater.
G. Photosynthetic capacity.
III. Harmful things.
H. Toxic chemicals.
I. Alien species.
J. Atmospheric gases.
IV. Human population.
K. Population growth.
L. Environmental impact per capita.
1. The environment has to be balanced against the economy.
2. Technology will solve our problems.
3. If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need.
4. There really isn't a world food problem; there is already enough food; we only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places that need it or The world's food problem is already being solved by the Green Revolution, with its high yield varieties of rice and other crops, or else it will be solved by genetically modified crops.
5. As measured by commonsense indicators such as human lifespan, health, and wealth . . ., conditions have actually been getting better for many decades or Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets, clean water flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse.
6. Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of fearmongering environmentalists have proved wrong. Why should we believe them this time?
7. The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase of the world's population is decreasing, such that world population will level off at less than double its present level.
8. The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ultimately more wealth.
9. Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing.
10. If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die, and I can't take them seriously.
11. There are big differences between modern societies and . . . past societies . . . who collapsed, so that we can't straightforwardly apply lessons from the past.
12. What can I, as an individual, do, when the world is being shaped by unstoppable powerful juggernauts of governments and big businesses?