Excerpt of Collapse by Jared Diamond
(Page 1 of 9)
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A substantial excerpt from the prologue follows the
Index.
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
Part One: MODERN MONTANA
Chapter 1: Under Montana's Big Sky
Stan Falkow's story
Montana and me
Why begin with Montana?
Montana's economic history
Mining
Forests
Soil
Water
Native and non-native species
Differing visions
Attitudes towards regulation
Rick Laible's story
Chip Pigman's story
Tim Huls's story
John Cook's story
Montana, model of the world
Part Two: PAST SOCIETIES
Chapter 2: Twilight at Easter
The quarry's mysteries
Easter's geography and history
People and food
Chiefs, clans, and commoners
Platforms and statues
Carving, transporting, erecting
The vanished forest
Consequences for society
Europeans and explanations
Why was Easter fragile?
Easter as metaphor
Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
Pitcairn before the Bounty
Three dissimilar islands
Trade
The movie's ending
Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors
Desert farmers
Tree rings
Agricultural strategies
Chaco's problems and packrats
Regional integration
Chaco's decline and end
Chaco's message
Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses
Mysteries of lost cities
The Maya environment
Maya agriculture
Maya history
Copán
Complexities of collapses
Wars and droughts
Collapse in the southern lowlands
The Maya message
Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues
Experiments in the Atlantic
The Viking explosion
Autocatalysis
Viking agriculture
Iron
Viking chiefs
Viking religion
Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes
Iceland's environment
Iceland's history
Iceland in context
Vinland
Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering 211
Europe's outpost
Greenland's climate today
Climate in the past
Native plants and animals
Norse settlement
Farming
Hunting and fishing
An integrated economy
Society
Trade with Europe
Self-image
Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End
Introduction to the end
Deforestation
Soil and turf damage
The Inuit's predecessors
Inuit subsistence
Inuit/Norse relations
The end
Ultimate causes of the end
Chapter 9 Opposite Paths to Success
Bottom up, top down
New Guinea highlands
Tikopia
Tokugawa problems
Tokugawa solutions
Why Japan succeeded
Other successes
Part Three: MODERN SOCIETIES
Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide
A dilemma
Events in Rwanda
More than ethnic hatred
Buildup in Kanama
Explosion in Kanama
Why it happened
Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories:
The Dominican Republic and Haiti
Differences
Histories
Causes of divergence
Dominican environmental impacts
Balaguer
The Dominican environment today
The future
Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant
China's significance
Background
Air, water, soil
Habitat, species, megaprojects
Consequences
Connections
The future
From Collapse by Jared Diamond. Copyright Jared Diamond
2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced
without written permission from the publisher.
