Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

The settlers eventually discovered that they were not living off of Iceland’s ecological annual interest, but that they were drawing down its accumulated capital of soil and vegetation that had taken ten thousand years to build up, and much of which the settlers exhausted in a few decades or even within a year. Inadvertently, the settlers were not using the soil and vegetation sustainably, as resources that can persist indefinitely (like a well-managed fishery or forest) if harvested no faster than the resources can renew themselves. They were instead exploiting the soil and vegetation in the way that miners exploit oil and mineral deposits, which renew themselves only infinitely slowly and are mined until they are all gone.