Collapse

Malcolm Gladwell on Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond wrote an article for Harper's on this subject:

One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realize that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Fewer still appreciate that many of those civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth, and power.