Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed

Prologue : a tale of two farms

Two farms

Collapses, past and present

Vanished Edens?

A five-point framework

Businesses and the environment

The comparative method

Plan of the book

pt. 1. Modern Montana

1. Under Montana's big sky

Stan Falkow's story

Montana and me

Why begin with Montana?

Montana's economic history

Mining

Forests

Soil

Water

Native and non-native species

Differing visions

Attitudes towards regulation

Rick Laible's story

Chip Pigman's story

Tim Huls's story

John Cook's story

Montana, model of the world.

pt. 2. Past societies

2. Twilight at Easter

The quarry's mysteries

Easter's geography and history

People and food

Chiefs, clans, and commoners

Platforms and statues

Carving, transporting, erecting

The vanished forest

Consequences for society

Europeans and explanations

Why was Easter fragile?

Easter as metaphor

3. The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

Pitcairn before the Bounty

Three dissimilar islands

Trade

The movie's ending

4. The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors

Desert farmers

Tree rings

Agricultural strategies

Chaco's problems and packrats

Regional integration

Chaco's decline and end

Chaco's message

5. The Maya collapses

Mysteries of lost cities

The Maya environment

Maya agriculture

Maya history

Copán

Complexities of collapses

Wars and droughts

Collapse in the southern lowlands

The Maya message

6. The Viking prelude and fugues

Experiments in the Atlantic

The Viking explosion

Autocatalysis

Viking agriculture

Iron

Viking chiefs

Viking religion

Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes

Iceland's environment

Iceland's history

Iceland in context

Vinland

7. Norse Greenland's flowering

Europe's outpost

Greenland's climate today

Climate in the past

Native plants and animals

Norse settlement

Farming

Hunting and fishing

An integrated economy

Society

Trade with Europe

Self-image

8. Norse Greenland's end

Introduction to the end

Deforestation

Soil and turf damage

The Inuit's predecessors

Inuit subsistence

Inuit/Norse relations

The end

Ultimate causes of the end

9. Opposite paths to success

Bottom up, top down

New Guinea highlands

Tikopia

Tokugawa problems

Tokugawa solutions

Why Japan succeeded

Other successes.

pt. 3. Modern societies

10. Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide

A dilemma

Events in Rwanda

More than ethnic hatred

Buildup in Kanama

Explosion in Kanama

Why it happened

11. One island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti

Differences

Histories

Causes of divergence

Dominican environmental impacts

Balaguer

The Dominican environment today

The future

12. China, lurching giant

China's significance

Background

Air, water, soil

Habitat, species, megaprojects

Consequences

Connections

The future

13. "Mining" Australia

Australia's significance

Soils

Water

Distance

Early history

Imported values

Trade and immigration

Land degradation

Other environmental problems

Signs of hope and change.

pt. 4. Practical lessons

14. Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?

Road map for success

Failure to anticipate

Failure to perceive

Rational bad behavior

Disastrous values

Other irrational failures

Unsuccessful solutions

Signs of hope

15. Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes

Resource extraction

Two oil fields

Oil company motives

Hardrock mining operations

Mining company motives

Differences among mining companies

The logging industry

Forest Stewardship Council

The seafood industry

Businesses and the public

16. The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today?

Introduction

The most serious problems

If we don't solve them ...

Life in Los Angeles

One-liner objections

The past and the present

Reasons for hope.