02432cam a2200301 4500 388807114 TxAuBib 20090122120000.0 050202s2005||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2004057152 9780670033379 0670033375 TxAuBib Diamond, Jared M, 1937- Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed / Jared Diamond. New York : Viking, 2005. xi, 575 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [529]-560) and index. Prologue: A tale of two farms -- Two farms -- Collapses, past and present -- Vanished Edens? -- A five-point framework -- Businesses and the environment -- The comparative method -- Plan of the book -- Modern Montana -- Twilight at Easter -- The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands -- The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors -- The Maya Collapses -- The Vikings Prelude and Fugues -- Norse Greenland's Flowering Europe's Outpost -- Norse Greenland's End -- Opposite Paths to Success -- Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide -- One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti -- China, Lurching Giant -- "Mining" Australia -- Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? -- Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes -- The World as a Polder: What Does it All Mean to Us Today? What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us. 20050202. Social History Case studies. Social Change Case studies. Environmental Policy Case studies. Civilization History. Anthropology. History.