Collapse: A Review

I finally finished reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. It took me over a month to get through this book-- not because I didn't like it, I did, but man, it is intense. For one, the book pretty much reads as a series of essays. The writing is not dry, but, the subject matter is historical fiction and science, so its not exactly an action packed romance either. The subject matter is also pretty depressing. Important, extremely so, but depressing nonetheless. I found that most days my brain just couldn't handle more than 20 pages or so.
The first section of Diamond's book discusses several ancient civilizations that have collapsed (including Easter Island, the Maya, the Greenland Norse and several others), and discusses reasons for their collapse.  The second section discusses modern societies that are either on the brink of collapse or at least having some major issues, including Rwanda, Haiti, China and Australia. The last section talks about why societies make mistakes that lead to their failures and how this relates to our modern day world. He relates our current day world to an ancient society before a collapse happened, and shows that we are at a turning point where we either need to fix ourselves and our planet before it is too late, or we will be destined to suffer the fate of the many ancient civilizations that have fallen before us... except this time it will be on a global scale, not just  the loss of a single island-based civilization.
Diamond makes some convincing arguments and basically scared the pants off of me. Even for someone like me, who teaches these same depressing issues to college students, the points he made were pretty depressing.
However, on a good note, Diamond is a self-pronounced cautious-optomist and based on his research, he doesn't think that things are too late for us yet. Do we need to make some serious changes and revisions in the ways that we choose to live? Yes. Do we need to rethink our management strategies for our natural resource use? Yes. We have some serious work ahead of us, but all is not yet lost. But, as Diamond says, if we don't start to choose to make changes to the way we are living, and to live more simply, than the Earth (through global warming, pollution, resource depletion, etc.) is going to start to make those changes for us. And, it seems to be like we would be better off in control of our own destiny and not just waiting to see what changes lie ahead of us.
This is a great read that I would recommend to all. But, give yourself time to read it in and process is. This stuff is too intense for a simple skim-through.