Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. NY: Viking Penguin, 2005. 525 pages, "Further Readings," Index.

An incredible book analyzing how societies use (or fail to use) measurement and feedback and exercise (or fail to exercise) leadership is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond who also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California in Los Angeles who began his career in physiology and then expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has received multiple honors including the prized MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and election to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

In Collapse, Diamond presents evidence obtained from scientific examination of pollen deposits, DNA, tree growth rings, stomach contents, bones, etc., of the true causes of decline and disappearance of many grand cultures including the Maya and of many smaller cultures including Easter Island. Using this analysis of ancient cultures he identifies the factors that led to success or failure and uses these to analyze modern societies, often in stark comparisons, China to Japan, Haiti to the Dominican Republic.

By analyzing how the environment interacted with farming practices to produce success in one culture and failure in another he makes a convincing case for success as the result of a society's ability to adapt to changes in the environment and to learn from their mistakes. By looking at a wide range of cultures, past and present, first and third world, Diamond shows how responsive governance is crucial to a society's ability to enforce sustainable practices and literally save the life of its people.

Diamond deftly analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of top-down and bottom-up power structures -- what a strong president can accomplish compared to what a strong grass-roots environmental group can accomplish. As a sociocrat, the reader is anxious to say, "Yes, get your double-links working!" He doesn't go quite that far but the examples he gives are rich for adding to the understanding of why they are important. Power moving in only one direction or the other does not create long lasting change. Top-down power can more quickly gather and allocate resources but bottom-up power is longer lasting and more pervasive. (Chapter 14, "Why Do Some Societies Make Disasterous Decisions?" and Chapter 16, "The World as Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?")

While Diamond's concern is to show how cultures must adopt life supporting environmental practices if they want to survive, he presents numerous examples that illustrate the importance of the principles of sociocracy. Listening to the argument, to the facts, has enabled him to surface some surprising results: "I expected to find enironmental policies much more advanced under the virtuous democracy than under the evil dictatorship. Instead I had to acknowledge that the reverse was true" (p. 349). Under the ruthless dictator Balaguer, the Dominican Republic actually reversed a disasterous environmental policies that still plague Haiti: deforestation, death of the coral reefs, loss of marine habitats, and salinization of the soil.

Remarkable examples of the importance of leadership in both disaster and success. Strong leaders are important but require the balance of measurement and feedback.

Some of the countries discussed: Polynesian Islands, Montana, the Anasazi, the Maya, the Viking, Norse Greenland, New Guinea (a bright spot), Rwanda, Dominican Republic and Haiti (Hispaniola), Japan, China, and Australia.

Diamond examines the economic and social choices these cultures made that destroyed their environments. The Easter Islanders, for example, ended up eating each other for lack of natural resources, not just lack of food but lack of wood to build canoes to get off the island. Don't miss this book!

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed