Collapse Quotes

“The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die rather than to compromise and live?”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most discussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living standards.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them no so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The ultimate reason behind that conservative outlook of the Greenlanders may have been the same as the reason to which my Icelandic friends attribute their own society’s conservatism. That is, even more than the Icelanders, the Greenlanders found themselves in a very difficult environment. While they succeeded in developing an economy that let them survive there for many generations, they found that variations on that economy were much more likely to prove disastrous than advantageous. That was good reason to be conservative.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as public services to everyone else.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“In short, the explanation of why Iceland became the European country with the most serious ecological damage is not that cautious Norwegian and British immigrants suddenly threw caution to the winds when they landed in Iceland, but that they found themselves in an apparently lush but actually fragile environment for which their Norwegian and British experience had failed to prepare them.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“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. The 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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change. In the last 60 years the world’s most powerful countries have given up long-held cherished values previously central to their national image, while holding on to other values. Britain and France abandoned their centuries-old role as independently acting world powers; Japan abandoned its military tradition and armed forces; and Russia abandoned its long experiment with communism. The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression. Australia is now reevaluating its status as a rural farming society with British identity. Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gambles.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“That is, cleaning up pollution is usually far more expensive than preventing pollution, just as doctors usually find it far more expensive and less effective to try to cure already sick patients than to prevent diseases in the first place by cheap, simple public health measures.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understand that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

“society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“I should explain that I selected them for close consideration precisely because processes unfolded faster and reached more extreme outcomes in such small societies, making them especially clear illustrations.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Specialists in the history of one society tend to dismiss comparisons as superficial, while those who compare tend to dismiss studies of single societies as hopelessly myopic and of limited value for understanding other societies.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“it’s based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“By invoking this assumption to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Any people can fall into the trap of overexploiting environmental resources, because of ubiquitous problems that we shall consider later in this book: that the resources initially seem inexhaustibly abundant; that signs of their incipient depletion become masked by normal fluctuations in resource levels between years or decades; that it’s difficult to get people to agree on exercising restraint in harvesting a shared resource (the so-called tragedy of the commons, to be discussed in later chapters); and that the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The environmental problems facing us today include the same eight that undermined past societies, plus four new ones: human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The most visible effect of global warming in Montana, and perhaps anywhere in the world, is in Glacier National Park. While glaciers all over the world are in retreat—on Mt. Kilimanjaro, in the Andes and Alps, on the mountains of New Guinea, and around Mt. Everest—the phenomenon has been especially well studied in Montana because its glaciers are so accessible to climatologists and tourists. When the area of Glacier National Park was first visited by naturalists in the late 1800s, it contained over 150 glaciers; now, there are only about 35 left, mostly at just a small fraction of their first-reported size. At present rates of melting, Glacier National Park will have no glaciers at all by the year 2030. Such declines in the mountain snowpack are bad for irrigation systems, whose summer water comes from melting of the snow”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

“That might have led to an Easter-Island–like catastrophe. Instead, over the course of the next two centuries Japan gradually achieved a stable population and much more nearly sustainable resource consumption rates. The shift was led from the top by successive shoguns, who invoked Confucian principles to promulgate an official ideology that encouraged limiting consumption and accumulating reserve supplies in order to protect the country against disaster.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“A momentous decision taken consciously around A.D. 1600, and recorded in oral traditions but also attested archaeologically, was the killing of every pig on the island, to be replaced as protein sources by an increase in consumption of fish, shellfish, and turtles. According to Tikopians’ accounts, their ancestors had made that decision because pigs raided and rooted up gardens, competed with humans for food, were an inefficient means to feed humans (it takes about 10 pounds of vegetables edible to humans to produce just one pound of pork), and had become a luxury food for the chiefs.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar’s chiefs and Los Angeles’s yellow tape.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Unfortunately, while Iceland’s soils and dense woodlands were impressive to the eye—corresponding to the large balance of the bank account—that balance had accumulated very slowly (as if with low interest rates) since the end of the last Ice Age. 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.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“The Anasazi collapse and other southwestern collapses offer us not only a gripping story but also an instructive one for the purposes of this book, illustrating well our themes of human environmental impact and climate change intersecting, environmental and population problems spilling over into warfare, the strengths but also the dangers of complex non-self-sufficient societies dependent on imports and exports, and societies collapsing swiftly after attaining peak population numbers and power.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed