We're All Gonna Die: Recommended Reading

Because part of my fatalistic world outlook has resulted from some books I've read, I thought I'd start an intermittent feature called "We're All Gonna Die: Recommended Reading." I think if the world were going to end tomorrow, I might spend today reading...I love books that much.

Anywho, the first doomsday book I'm going to recommend to those of you who are in the market for such things is the one that got me started down the path that lead to this blog: Jared Diamond's Collapse.

It's been four or five years since I read this book, but I find myself thinking about it from time to time. While it doesn't quite live up to the "masterpiece" status of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse does contain an interesting analysis of how environmental degradation contributes to societal downfall.

The basic premise of the book is that civilizations and societies often collapse not because of a cataclysmic event (like the meteor impact that might have doomed the dinosaurs), but rather because they choose to maintain themselves socially at the risk of ecological devastation.

Malcom Gladwell wrote a very nice book review of Collapse in the New Yorker and described the phenomenon (as it played out on Easter Island) thusly:

...Look...at Easter Island. Once, it was home to a thriving culture that produced the enormous stone statues that continue to inspire awe. It was home to dozens of species of trees, which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support as many as thirty thousand people. Today, it’s a barren and largely empty outcropping of volcanic rock. What happened? Did a rare plant virus wipe out the island’s forest cover? Not at all. The Easter Islanders chopped their trees down, one by one, until they were all gone. “I have often asked myself, ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?’ ” Diamond writes, and that, of course, is what is so troubling about the conclusions of “Collapse.” Those trees were felled by rational actors—who must have suspected that the destruction of this resource would result in the destruction of their civilization. The lesson of “Collapse” is that societies, as often as not, aren’t murdered. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death.

In another section of the book, Diamond discusses the Norse settlement of Greenland, and how the Norse's stubbornness in insisting on replicating the European way of life--despite clear indications that Greenland could not support it ecologically--lead them to starve to death. The part that sticks with me about this is that the priests--who maintained high status until the end--were, Diamond says, "the last to starve."

Sometimes I think America is too complacent about what is happening to the world environmentally because we are going to be the last to starve.

Collapse also discusses more recent societal treatment of the environment, and its discussion of China, Australia, Rwanda, and Haiti are all fascinating. I highly recommend the book, although I must say the section covering the Greenland Norse gets a bit long and boring. Keep on going through it, as the rest of the book is worth it.

We're All Gonna Die gives four stars (of five) to Jared Diamond's Collapse. Read it before you are the last to starve!

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