Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

earthworms in regenerating soil and maintaining its texture

was a lack of appropriate earthworms, contributing to altered soil/atmosphere gas exchange);

suppose that every couple in the world decided tonight to limit themselves to two children, approximately the correct number of children to yield an unchanging population in the long run by exactly replacing their two parents who will eventually die (actually, around 2.1 children when one considers mortality, childless couples, and children who won’t marry).

symbol of the state of California, and of my university (the University of California), is the California Golden Bear, but it is now extinct.

there are many reasons that are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental problems, and that are in my opinion not well informed.

“The environment has to be balanced against the economy.”

Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well.

expense of rearing and educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national economy—is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even if one takes the conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000, then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion per year.

“Technology will solve our problems.”

faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow onwards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and will cease to create new problems.

The multibilliondollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency of false alarms.

The 10 countries with the most people (over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, India, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria.

10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP) are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only country on both lists is the U.S.

the countries with large populations are disproportionately poor: eight of the 10 have per-capita GDP under $8,00...

affluent countries have disproportionately few people: seven of the 10 have populations below 9,000,000, ...

My best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. government to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.

list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others” (map, p. 497

list of political trouble spots should surely include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus others.”

Today, just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing.

best predictors of modern “state failures”—i.e., revolutions, violent regime change, collapse of authority, and genocide—prove to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high infant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the population in their late teens and 20s, and hordes of unemployed young men without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias.

judge from preserved Khmer inscriptions on stone. The Khmer language belongs to the Austroasiatic language family, consisting of about 150 languages spoken in scattered