Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

by Jared Diamond

Despite these varying proximate causes of abandonments, all were ultimately due to the same fundamental challenge: people living in fragile and difficult environments, adopting solutions that were brilliantly successful and understandable “in the short run,” but that failed or else created fatal problems in the long run, when people became confronted with external environmental changes or human-caused environmental changes that societies without written histories and without archaeologists could not have anticipated. I put “in the short run” in quotation marks, because the Anasazi did survive in Chaco Canyon for about 600 years, considerably longer than the duration of European occupation anywhere in the New World since Columbus’s arrival in A.D. 1492. During their existence, those various southwestern Native Americans experimented with half-a-dozen alternative types of economies (pp. 140–143). It took many centuries to discover that, among those economies, only the Pueblo economy was sustainable “in the long run,” i.e. for at least a thousand years. That should make us modern Americans hesitate to be too confident yet about the sustainability of our First World economy, especially when we reflect how quickly Chaco society collapsed after its peak in the decade A.D. 1110–1120, and how implausible the risk of collapse would have seemed to Chacoans of that decade.

confident?