Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

I've sometimes said that we live in the age of the expert: there is so much to learn in any given field of knowledge that no individual can hope to master more than a narrow field of expertise. Along with the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the late Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond is one of a breed of daunting, mainly American polymaths who defy that generalization, seeming to know everything about everything. For three decades he ran twin careers in physiology (a chair at UCLA before he was 30) and ornithology before, in his fifties, he more or less invented a new discipline, environmental history: he is now Professor of Geography and Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA. The jacket of Collapse, after a long list of the awards he has won, notes that "in his spare time he... learns languages (he is currently learning his 12th)." I'm not sure this does not cross the line between extolling the author and rubbing the reader's nose in it.

In his last book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond ranged across the entire globe and the past 30,000 years of human history, demonstrating the ways in which societies have been shaped by environmental constraints - most plainly by factors such as climate, soil fertility and the availability of minerals, but also by less obvious phenomena such as the prevalence of disease and the adaptability of local plants and animals for agriculture. The book was remarkable for the clarity of its argument, a quite immense breadth of learning and, importantly, sheer readability. Collapse has all the same qualities. Diamond examines phenomena as diverse as the preserved fecal matter of American packrats, the hunting practices of the Inuit, the lumber industry in 17th-century Japan and cannibalism in New Guinea, in the course of an enquiry into the reasons why, from time to time - and far more frequently than you might realize - some societies fall apart, or simply vanish.

A key example is Easter Island in the Pacific: the first European explorers to arrive on the island were baffled by the question of how an undernourished people scraping a living on a treeless, infertile rock could have erected those giant stone heads. Erich von Daniken thought the answer, must be spacemen: a more likely answer was that when Easter was first settled it had plenty of timber, including the world's tallest palms, and soil fertile enough to support a population of up to 15,000; but over the centuries; population growth and some poor collective decisions led to deforestation, erosion and a slow eating-away of natural resources.

Other cases studied by Diamond include the Anasazi of New Mexico, who built great canyon houses, some several storey's high: spacemen have been implicated in their sudden disappearance, too, at least in The X-Files, but more respectable authorities favor deforestation, soil erosion and drought as explanations.

Though the variables change, the underlying problems in every case remain the same: too much strain being placed on limited resources. Similar environmental constraints underlie, Diamond argues, many problems of the modern world. In one of the most disturbing chapters, he shows how shortages of farmland and declining agricultural productivity preceded, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But ecological catastrophe is not confined to the third world: it looms in overgrazed, increasingly drought-stricken Australia and in the outwardly pristine wildernesses of Montana, where toxic leakage from abandoned mines, inept forestry policies and overpopulation are wrecking what was once an idyllic rural society.

Collapse is far from an environmental jeremiad. Having been accused of "environmental determinism" by some of his critics, Diamond is at pains to make it clear that people negotiate with their environments: environments set constraints, but we decide how to behave. One of the longest sections of the book is devoted to the Norse colony in Greenland, which carried on a marginal pastoral existence for 450 years before succumbing to the harsh winters and short summers. The Inuit, living alongside them, adapted and thrived. Another positive example is Tikopia, a tiny island - 1.8 square miles - in the southwest Pacific that has been continuously occupied for 3,000 years, thanks to micromanagement and co-operation.

We live in a larger, more complex society, where cooperation is harder to obtain - how do you arbitrate between the conflicting but perfectly legitimate demands of farmers, industry and tourists? Diamond is pleasingly alive to the difficulties - he is scathing about environmentalists who won't admit that businesses need to make profits - and at one or two points he seems to verge on recommending benevolent dictatorship. But he does give grounds for cautious optimism that liberal democracies can make the decisions necessary for long-term survival. Reading his book in the shadow of last month's tsunami, it is impossible not to feel how fragile our hold on the earth is, and how closely connected all our lives are. Diamond's message shouldn't be ignored.