"Collapse" Jared Diamond

Wired 1/05 Will We Ever Learn? Jared Diamond says society's future depends on what we take from the past.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/play.html?pg=5

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Diamond identifies five major causes of societal collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trade partners, and stupidity. Any one or two plus stupidity will do.

The dangers discussed are our dangers - enormous and present, if not yet clearly recognized by the world's policymakers. The problems are solvable. All it takes is awareness, skill, and will. A self-described "cautious optimist," Diamond notes that the ancient societies that perished didn't know about each other and thus couldn't learn the crucial lessons, but we can.

追記
NYT 1/11/05 'COLLAPSE' Look on These Ruins, Ye Mighty, and Ponder Your Fate, By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Look on These Ruins, Ye Mighty, and Ponder Your Fate - The New York Times

With this volume, Mr. Diamond wants very much to write a kind of bookend to "Guns, Germs and Steel." That earlier book attempted to explain why Western civilizations developed the technologies and social and political strategies that enabled them to dominate the world; this volume attempts to explain in a far more haphazard manner why some societies failed to flourish and eventually vanished from the face of the earth.

Toward the end of "Collapse," Mr. Diamond poses the question of why some societies undermine themselves and even commit suicide by making disastrous decisions. He comes up with four fuzzily defined categories: 1) failure to anticipate a problem (i.e. the British introduction of foxes and rabbits to Australia - two alien mammals that have cost billions of dollars in damage and control expenditures); 2) failure to perceive a problem that has actually arrived (often because a slow trend like global warming is concealed by wide up and down fluctuations); 3) failure to attempt to solve a problem once it has been identified (usually because leaders put self-interest before the public good or focus on short-term benefits over long-term needs); and 4) failure to find a viable solution to the problem (frequently because of prohibitive costs or because too little has been done too late).

After all, as Mr. Diamond himself points out, there are huge differences between the historical examples he cites and the plight of the world today: most notably, the role that technology plays in accelerating change (speeding up both environmental damage and possible solutions to that damage) and the role of globalization in linking the fates of wildly disparate and distant societies.