Worth a read

I have been reading Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse’ for quite some time now. There are a few books that you breeze through and there are some that take for ever. Collapse took a while to get through, but I must say it has left an imprint on my mind. The author of the Pulitzer Prize winner ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ presents a theory backed by years of research on ‘how societies choose to fail or succeed’. Starting with the inconspicuous Easter Islands to bigger countries like Greenland and China, he takes the readers through a tour of civilizations and how its people made choices and how those choices shaped their fate. It’s amazing to read that the ancient world had huge cities with millions of people living together for hundreds and thousands of years. And it’s scary to read how communal mentality or irrational practices cost them their downfall.

The book touches on various sensitive issues like population control, environmental damage, free trade, religious practices, climate change, and colonization. The practices that we feel are perfectly right and essential today sometimes turn out to be more harmful than beneficial in the long run. This book is a must-read to understand our place in the whole scheme of things. It will change the way you view the world today… we live as if we will live for ever and exploit our resources to support our lifestyle…but history proves that if we do so, our collapse is inevitable. The book also has some success stories about ancient civilizations who managed to survive for thousands of years in-sync with their surrounding because they understood the importance of nature and used their resources responsibly. Our “modern world” is just a couple of hundred years old and we have managed to create nuclear waste, irreversible environmental damage, produce non-degradable waste in just the past century …we are speeding up our impact on our environment every year. The message is clear… that it’s inevitable that one day our civilization will collapse too…unless we take a lesson from the past.