How to succeed in history: Societies don’t die by accident – they commit ecologi

Why did once flourishing societies collapse and disappear? Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer at UCLA, has spent much of his career wrestling with this profound question. It is not merely a romantic mystery; the answers, he believes, offer us the prospect of self-preservation.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” is remarkable for its ambitious sweep and interpretive panache. Diamond studies four ancient societies across space and time: Easter Island in Polynesia, the native American Anasazi tribe in what is now the southwestern United States, the Maya civilization in Central America, and the isolated Viking settlement on the coast of Greenland. Although diverse in nature and context, these four societies experienced what Diamond calls “ecocide,” unintentional ecological suicide.

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