Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive.

Jared Diamond’s book kept me awake for many a night. To follow the ascent and eventual demise of societies like the Greenland Norse (just horrid and gripping) or the Anazasi of North America was mind-boggling.

The book manages to keep politics or special interests out of its main message: live above your means, above the level that your environment can sustain, and you are going to face a very difficult decision: maintain your course and decline (even starve to death), or adapt your ways to a more sustainable behavior.

This insight is so critical in our times, when sustainability of the Western civilizations is in doubt. We burn too much fuel, consume too much ‘expensive’ food (that is food that is highly inefficient regarding calories invested / calories harvested).

It can even be brought down to our business operations. As long as we believe that the way we live will be there forever, without looking at the factors of sustainability, as long our way of live is in jeopardy. I am particularly concerned about the epidemic rise in below-average education for children and young adults. We are literally damaging the capabilities of the next generation to generate the disproportionate wealth they have become so accustomed to.

Here is the book’s synopsis from Amazon.co.uk: ‘From groundbreaking writer and thinker, Jared Diamond comes an epic, visionary new book on the mysterious collapse of past civilizations - and what this means for our future. Why do some societies flourish, while others founder? What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island or to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, "Collapse" also shows how unlike our ancestors we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors.’

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond Read more about this book...