Colapso

¿Por qué determinadas civilizaciones sobreviven y se imponen, mientras que otras acaban desapareciendo? A partir de estudios de varios casos concretos de sociedades pasadas y presentes, Diamond describe con gran rigor y amenidad los principales problemas a que se exponen las sociedades actuales; tanto en él ámbito medioambientalcomo en los aspectos sociales y culturales. La globalización, con sus grandezas y sus miserias, plantea grandes desafíos que el autor afronta con sagacidad, espíritu crítico y optimismo. "In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond examined how & why Western civilizations developed the technologies & immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, & what can we learn from their fates?" As in Guns, Germs & Steel, he weaves an all-encompassing global thesis thru a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi & the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, & finally to the modern world, he traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, & when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners & pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems & persisted.