Jared Diamond--Collapse-How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Produced by Penguin Audio

Duration: 7h 29min 29 sec
Files:    100
Quality:  32 kbps 22 kHz Mono (Not high but perfectly listenable.)


In his Pulitzer Prize?winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature.

Contents
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Prologue : a tale of two farms 1 

Pt. 1 Modern Montana 25 
Ch. 1 Under Montana's big sky 27 

Pt. 2 Past societies 77 
Ch. 2 Twilight at Easter 79 
Ch. 3 The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands 120 
Ch. 4 The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors 136 
Ch. 5 The Maya collapses 157 
Ch. 6 The Viking prelude and fugues 178 
Ch. 7 Norse Greenland's flowering 211 
Ch. 8 Norse Greenland's end 248 
Ch. 9 Opposite paths to success 277 

Pt. 3 Modern societies 309 
Ch. 10 Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide 311 
Ch. 11 One Island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti 329 
Ch. 12 China, lurching giant 358 
Ch. 13 "Mining" Australia 378 

Pt. 4 Practical lessons 417 
Ch. 14 Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? 419 
Ch. 15 Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes 441 
Ch. 16 The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today? 

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