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In Questioning Collapse, the authors of individual chapters take issue with Diamond’s arguments concerning how specific societies have confronted...

In his book, Collapse, Diamond makes the arguments that societies such as the Rapa Nui of Easter Island and the Mayans changed their environments and thereby destroyed their own civilizations.  To Diamond, these serve as cautionary tales for today's civilizations not to destroy their food sources, pollute their water, or to use up their resources too quickly.  


According to Diamond, the Mayan collapse was caused by rapid population growth which caused deforestation in the...

In his book, Collapse, Diamond makes the arguments that societies such as the Rapa Nui of Easter Island and the Mayans changed their environments and thereby destroyed their own civilizations.  To Diamond, these serve as cautionary tales for today's civilizations not to destroy their food sources, pollute their water, or to use up their resources too quickly.  


According to Diamond, the Mayan collapse was caused by rapid population growth which caused deforestation in the Yucatan Peninsula.  The deforestation there caused more evaporation and more sporadic rainfall, which destroyed crops.  The famines resulted in governmental upheaval and ultimately the fall of the Mayans.  Diamond uses environmental data harvested from tree rings, and there is no doubt that the region did become drier in the late fourteenth century.  However, Diamond discounts one major possibility--that increased warfare and revolt might have fueled the environmental destruction and the loss of food might have been an effect of the warfare, not the cause.  Diamond discounts the fact that the Mayans had been farming for generations and they knew about preserving their environment.  Unfortunately, since no one today can read Mayan, the exact truth may never be known by anthropologists or historians.  



Diamond also speculates that the Rapa Nui of Easter Island were destroyed by their ability to deforest their island.  This population growth and collapse on this small island is why it is largely uninhabited with the exception of ceremonial statues and tourists.  Diamond's theory has been called into question as well, as radiocarbon dating shows that the Rapa Nui lived on the island much later than thought (around 1200 A.D. instead of thousands of years previously) and European visitors as late as the nineteenth century said that the island had coconut trees and bananas. The first Easter Islanders brought rats to the island, and the rats had no natural predators, other than humans.  They quickly overran the island; their numbers only collapsed when they ran out of food.  This may have affected the first Easter Island civilization.  Another possible reason would be an influx of Western explorers and settlers, who used guns to subdue the people and disease to ultimately wipe them out.  



Diamond makes good arguments, and indeed the environment does play a role in the health of a society.  However, he does not look at all of the factors and says that the environment is the cause of all of the collapses mentioned in his book.  He discounts outside factors such as disease and human conflict.  Since it is hard to point at one factor and say that this is what caused a civilization to collapse, Diamond's theories are interesting, but must be read as that--only theories.  His work serves better as a cautionary tale for residents of the developed world to take care of their surroundings.  

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