Collapse: How Societies Choose

Who hasn't gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? The National Geographic Channel looks 200 years into the future in Collapse, based on author Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", to examine how current habits might affect humans' ability to survive. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (also titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) is a 2005 book by Jared M. Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles. Diamond's book deals with "societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses". In writing the book Diamond intended that its readers should learn from history.

Who hasn't gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? The National Geographic Channel looks 200 years into the future in Collapse, based on author Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", to examine how current habits might affect humans' ability to survive. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.

In the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond chronicled the rise of human civilizations since the Ice Age. This time, he turns over the log and probes the rotted side–the demise of once-productive societies such as the Maya, Easter Islanders and Greenland Norse. He also sounds the alarm on environmental practices undermining modern societies, including China, Russia, Australia and the United States.

In his million-copy best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?