[Civilizations Rise and Fall 02] • Colapso

¿Por qué determinadas civilizaciones sobreviven y se imponen, mientras que otras acaban desapareciendo? A partir de estudios de varios casos concretos de sociedades pasadas y presentes, Diamond describe con gran rigor y amenidad los principales problemas a que se exponen las sociedades actuales; tanto en él ámbito medioambientalcomo en los aspectos sociales y culturales. La globalización, con sus grandezas y sus miserias, plantea grandes desafíos que el autor afronta con sagacidad, espíritu crítico y optimismo.

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs Steel, Jared Diamond examined how why Western civilizations developed the technologies immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, what can we learn from their fates?" As in Guns, Germs Steel, he weaves an all-encompassing global thesis thru a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, finally to the modern world, he traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems persisted.