Environmental Problems In Collapse By Jared Diamond

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In the novel Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, the author Jared Diamond illustrates how environmental problems in today’s society are linked with many of the same problems that have caused the collapse of ancient civilizations in the past. The purpose of his book is to show that if people do not take care of the land while there is time, the whole world could end up collapsing just like many other ancient civilizations. In the prologue, Diamond defines “collapse” as “A drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” (Page 3). Instead of starting with ancient civilizations from the past, Diamond starts off by talking about present day Montana to give people an idea that there truly are many environmental problems affecting the world today. The Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened …show more content…

(Page 11). There are also eight categories that past societies have used to damage their environments. These include: deforestation, salinization, water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, negative effects of introduced species, human population growth, and increases per-capita impact of people. Diamond points out that it was not uncommon for a population growth to force societies to adopt more intensive agricultural practices. He also argues that although the world today contains miraculous levels of complexity, knowledge, and technology, it is still threatened by those eight categories of ecological

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