Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed / Jared Diamond.

"With a new afterword"--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 543-574) and index.

Prologue: A tale of two farms -- Under Montana's big sky -- Twilight at Easter -- The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands -- The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors -- The Maya collapses -- The Viking prelude and fugues -- Norse Greenland's flowering -- Norse Greenland's end -- Opposite paths to success -- Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide -- One island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti -- China, lurching giant -- "Mining" Australia -- Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? -- Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes -- The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today? -- Afterword: Angkor's rise and fall.

Who hasn't gazed upon the abandoned temples of Angkor Wat or the jungle-choked cities of the Maya and wondered, could the same fate happen to us? In this riveting book, Jared Diamond--whose Guns, Germs, and Steel revolutionized our understanding of history--explores how humankind's use and abuse of the environment reveal the truth behind the world's great collapses, from the Anasazi of North America to the Vikings of Greenland to modern Montana. What emerges is a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe--one whose warning signs surround us today and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances and a vast historical perspective into a narrative that is impossible to put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.--From publisher description.