Our world is on an unsustainable trajectory. What will happen as environmental collapse becomes an increasingly unignorable reality? While Jared Diamond can’t predict the future, he does draw helpful lessons from past societies and modern societies that have succumbed to or are enduring this fate.

According to Diamond, there are five sets of factors which lead to societal collapse:

1. Environmental damage
2. Climate change
3. Hostile neighbours
4. Withdrawal of support from friendly neighbours
5. Societal responses to problems

While factors three through five are not explicitly environmental factors, they all rest on the environment. People go to war over food shortages caused by the erosion of topsoil due to deforestation, for example.

Diamond explores how these factors contributed to the collapse of Easter Island, the Mayans, some Polynesian Islands, the Anasazi, and the Viking society of Greenland. Just as compelling is his look at the troubles in Rwanda, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, China, and Australia.

There are lessons to be learned for those who will hear them.

[B]ecause we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will be come resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. (498)

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin, 2005.