Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, tells the story of how societies in the past disappeared because they over-exploited their environment. Written by Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond, Collapse is a pertinent, probing discussion not only of how societies have failed, but in what ways a society such as our own, and individuals within it, may avoid comparable failure and subsequent near-or-total extinction.

Published in 2005, Collapse is really a textbook—a survey of an entire field of study; only a couple chapters are based on Diamond’s own work and experience. The rest is drawn from the findings of many scientists and historians about civilization collapses from the Rwandan Genocide to the collapse of Norse Greenland and the disappearance of the Maya and the Anasazi. Collapse is long and detailed and focuses on surveying existing work to examine how collapses are caused and by what kinds of environmental destruction, with an eye toward drawing general lessons with future applications. Nothing is more relevant to the world today than a textbook for societies on how not to die off.

Any good textbook introduction includes a vivid example of why the textbook contains information relevant to the reader; Collapse is no exception. To introduce the book, Diamond tells “a tale of two farms.” He discusses two highly successful dairy farms of about 200 cows, each with the largest, most state-of-the-art barn in their respective regions, and discusses how each uses irrigation to support a late-summer hay harvest which will feed the cows through the winter. He further explains how both men were dedicated farmers, religious men and community leaders, and yet sometimes find their farms hostage to outside forces. Their farms are in high-latitude regions not quite as well suited for dairy as some competitors, and suffer disproportionately when conditions or prices for dairy turn sour.

Then he drops the bombshell–one of these farms is a successful, growing establishment in modern day Montana, while the other was suddenly abandoned by the Greenland Norse (or its residents killed or starved) over 500 years ago. The Greenland farm and the society in which it thrived collapsed until every resident had been killed, starved, or emigrated. Moreover, like most collapses in history, there was no period of gradual decline… the society grew without end for centuries and then collapsed dramatically, in a matter of decades.

Most textbooks conclude the first chapter exhorting the relevance and importance of their subject and in subsequent chapters stick to chapter summaries and problem sets. Collapse never strays from the relevance theme, but then it is pretty difficult to think of global societal collapse, anarchy, and possible extinction as irrelevant. Chapter two offers expansive detail about how Easter Islanders deforested their culture out of existence. Every chapter is laced with careful conclusions about how a certain culture and its environmental policies resemble or contrast our own. And unlike a biology textbook which might or might not have a single page inset interview about one global environmental problem like the ozone-hole, Collapse dedicates its final three chapters exclusively to extracting practical lessons from study of collapses.

The first of these last chapters is a single posed question, “How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?” and Diamond’s efforts to both discuss and answer that question. Diamond admits that many scholars, such as the much-cited Joseph Tainter, have found the “failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups” to be so inexplicable a phenomenon that they altogether rule out environmental destruction as a cause of collapse. After all, what was the Easter Islander thinking when he cut down the very last of the largest palm trees in the world, and the last tree of any kind on the island!?

Diamond’s response is, like his book, cautious and detailed; he patiently explains how societies often fail to anticipate problems, notice problems, or even try to solve noticeable problems, until it becomes too late to avoid collapse.

Diamond notes that societies have difficulty remembering lessons from the past. Obviously societies without writing have little means of remembering disasters and remaining prepared for future disasters, but even very literate societies sometimes forget. Diamond points out that, “For a year or two after the gas shortages of the 1973 Gulf oil crisis, we Americans shied away from gas-guzzling cars, but then we forgot…and are now embracing gas SUVs, despite volumes of print spilled over the 1973 events.” Diamond notes that many problems are virtually undetectable, such as soil nutrient depletion or ozone destruction. Since some of the societies whose collapse Diamond studied clearly collapsed because of imperceptible problems like these; it isn’t surprising that they did not band together to solve problems they didn’t know they had .

Diamond also discusses which political structures are most likely to avert the tragedy of the commons. He compares the political environments of Easter Island, Japan and Tikopia–three islands which faced overpopulation and deforestation, only two of which averted disaster. The Tikopians lived on an island so small that every islander knew the entire island and every other person on it, and so community bonds made each of them a policy-maker and a policy-enforcer. Diamond calls that the “bottom-up” approach to environmental carefulness. Japan is a much, much larger island which was politically unified; when deforestation began to threaten the state, an order from a single man directed an entire government ready to harshly enforce careful forest protection laws.

Easter Island, however, was large enough for no person to know the island well, but was loosely ruled by religious chiefs who earned the allegiance of the people beneath them by building ever bigger monuments. If these leaders stopped making ever bigger monuments and using increasing amounts of timber, then some other chief who was making monuments would take over; an obvious problem went unsolved. The relevance of this chapter is hard to miss: there is an obvious correlation between Easter Islanders’ non-response to deforestation and the modern world’s global warming problem.

Diamond’s next chapter deals with the exclusively modern phenomena “the corporation” and how corporations can have negative or positive roles in environmental caution.

Diamond tells of two different oil wells in tropical regions in the South Pacific. One (owned by Pertamina) was a crisscross of 100 yard clear-cuts for roads, pillars of burning natural gas, “numerous oil spills,” and a wildlife decimated by environment destruction, environmental contamination, and the hunting carried out by the oil-well workers. The other (a Chevron field) had ten-yard unpaved roads, sealed borders, Israel-Airport-level inspection of all incoming worker’s and visitor’s luggage for alien species, rigid safety protocols with no oil spills during all four Diamond’s month-long visits. In Diamond’s words the second oil field was, “in effect…the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.” But if Chevron or Pertamina were acting radically out of line with their profit motive, then their shareholders could and would sue them. Something was different about the settings in which the two companies operated–so the same profit motive could create such radically different behavior.

Diamond explains that Pertamina is a national company run in a military dictatorship far from the area where the political leaders lived and Chevron is an international company run in a decentralized democracy where local displeasure could close down all operations. International consumers with higher environmental concerns prefer Chevron because it has a good environmental record. Diamond goes on to discuss many other types of corporations–but the point is already made. We do not have to trade corporations for the environment (and survival). Corporations are powerful forces which can work for the environment rather than against it.

In the final chapter, Diamond compares the world to a Dutch polder, which is an area of land below sealevel kept dry by pumps and dikes. One-fifth of the Netherlands are below sea-level–the rich and poor alike are protected by the same wall (much like the New Orleans levees). Diamond lists twelve environmental problems we face, and groups them into four categories: resource destruction, resource ceiling consumption, the creation of or relocation of harmful substances, and population problems. In no uncertain terms he spells out that any one of the twelve problems will cause dramatic collapse if unsolved, and everyone in the polder will be sunk.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is similar to Diamond’s earlier, well-renowned, Pulitzer-winning work Guns, Germs and Steel. Both books are geography books–geography textbooks if one considers their length, perspicacity, and dryness. Guns, Germs, and Steel nailed shut the coffin of a long-dead racist argument; Collapse, however, comes at a time when our society is beginning to wonder quite seriously about questions of global sustainability.

Collapse is deeply relevant to our society’s survival, and that relevance unquestionably deserves the attention of literate world-citizens everywhere, not to mention world leaders.