Although I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed shortly after its release in 2005, I find myself coming back to this influential work time and time again. I have three copies in my home and routinely refer to it in conversations.

UCLA professor of Geography Jared Diamond is an anthropologist, physiologist, ornithologist in addition to a geographer. He has written numerous books, but Collapse may well be the most significant. Collapse provides a look back at how various groups have dealt with the challenges of survival throughout recorded history. Diamond focuses on a dozen societies, some that failed to survive and others that flourished. He distills the major challenges down to the following five factors:

1. Damage that people inadvertently inflict on the environment
2. Climate change – “climate may become hotter or colder, wetter or drier, or more or less variable between months or between years, because of changes in natural forces that drive climate and that have nothing to do with humans”
3. Hostile neighbors
4. Loss of support from neighboring friendly societies
5. The society’s responses to its environmental problems

The first, second, and fifth factors have obvious implications for how we can move forward as a society with regards to environmental impacts. The third and fourth can also be tied to access to resources. Collapse starts with Diamond drawing a parallel between a modern day dairy farm in Montana and an excavated one in Greenland. He goes on to look at civilizations throughout the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Throughout all of his case studies, Diamond comes back to these five factors. While all five do not have to be present for the collapse, or success, of a society, a combination often leads a civilization down one path or the other.

Being a professor, Diamond discusses how he wrote this book after a series of lectures he delivered to an undergraduate course he taught. One of the most pertinent pieces of feedback he received from these students revolved around the question of “How can we learn from the mistakes of past civilizations?” This question looms large, especially as the population continues to grow and finite resources dwindle. If Thomas Friedman is right and the world is becoming flat, we may be facing the collapse of more than an isolated society.

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