Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Overview
Jared Diamond traces patterns of societal failure and survival by combining archaeology, history, ecology, and contemporary examples. He asks why some complex societies endured environmental and political stress while others disintegrated, and he treats collapse as the result of interacting pressures rather than a single cause. The narrative moves between distant pasts, preindustrial island communities and ancient civilizations, and recent cases to show continuities and differences in how humans respond to crisis.
Diamond emphasizes that collapses often unfolded gradually, with harmful choices compounded over generations. He highlights how resource degradation and short-term decision making can produce irreversible trajectories, and he treats societal responses, institutions, leadership, cultural values, as decisive in determining outcomes. The author aims to draw lessons for modern nations facing global environmental change and interconnected economic pressures.

Comparative Framework
Central to the analysis is a five-factor framework: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of essential trading partners, and the society's response to its problems. Diamond uses this checklist to compare disparate cases and to isolate variables that help explain different outcomes. The framework is intended to be diagnostic rather than deterministic, allowing for complex interactions and varying weights among factors.
Methodologically, the approach is interdisciplinary and synthetic. Diamond integrates ecological data, paleoclimate records, archaeological findings, and historical documents to reconstruct trajectories and to test hypotheses about why societies faltered or adapted. The comparative lens highlights recurring mechanisms, resource overuse, feedback delays, and institutional failure, while acknowledging unique local circumstances.

Selected Case Studies
Several well-known collapses receive detailed treatment. The Norse colonies in Greenland are portrayed as a cautionary tale of cultural rigidity, environmental mismanagement, and failure to adapt agricultural practices to a cooling climate. Easter Island's dramatic deforestation and societal fragmentation illustrate how isolated ecosystems and resource exhaustion can precipitate social collapse. Ancient Maya collapse is discussed in terms of severe drought interacting with deforestation, population pressures, and political fragmentation.
Diamond also examines less-remote examples such as the smallpox- and colonization-era transformations in Native American societies, the environmental missteps of Easter Island's settlers contrasted with more sustainable Polynesian neighbors, and modern instances where policy choices amplified vulnerability. Each case is used to test the five-factor checklist and to show how differing responses influenced survival.

Causes and Mechanisms of Collapse
Environmental degradation emerges repeatedly: deforestation, soil erosion, water mismanagement, and overexploitation of resources undermine economic bases. Coupled with climate variability, droughts, cooling or warming trends, these stresses can push societies past tipping points. Political and social structures mediate outcomes; flexible institutions and willingness to change subsistence or trade strategies foster resilience, while entrenched elites and short-term priorities accelerate decline.
Diamond stresses feedback delays and the human tendency to ignore slow environmental decline. He also highlights that collapse is contingent on interactions among multiple factors: external threats, loss of trade, and internal social cleavages can magnify ecological stresses. Resilience therefore depends on foresight, social cohesion, and the capacity to reorganize resource use and governance.

Contemporary Lessons and Debate
The prescriptive core is clear: modern global societies face analogous threats, climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion, but on a vastly larger, interconnected scale. Diamond argues for sustainable resource management, better informed policy, and learning from past cases to avoid repeating mistakes. He urges attention to long-term consequences and institutional reform to reduce vulnerability.
Critics have argued that the analysis sometimes oversimplifies complex historical dynamics, underplays global economic and colonial forces, or overattributes agency to environmental causes. Supporters value the synthetic perspective and its urgency. Whether one accepts every specific claim, the work's central contribution is its insistence that ecological realities matter for political and economic choices, and that understanding past collapses can inform strategies for survival and sustainability.