Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By Jared Diamond
Download Audiobook (.torrent)
Narrated by Christopher Murney
Abridged; 9hrs, 30mins - 8CD’s
ISBN: 0143057189
Format: MP3, ABR, 64kbs, Stereo
Size: 219mb
Ripper: trick
Collapse is divided into four parts.
Part One describes the environment of the US state of Montana, focusing on the lives of several individuals in order to put a human face on the interplay between society and the environment
Part Two describes past societies that collapsed. Diamond uses a “framework” when considering the collapse of a society, consisting of five “sets of factors” that may affect what happens to a society: environmental damage, climatic change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and the society’s own responses to its environmental problems. The societies Diamond describes are:
- Easter Island (a society that collapsed entirely due to environmental damage)
- The Polynesians of Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners)
- The Anasazi of the Southwestern USA (environmental damage and climate change)
- The Maya of Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbours)
- The Greenland Norse, whose society collapsed owing to all five factors, including the final one (unwillingness to change in the face of social collapse).Finally, Diamond discusses three past success stories:
- The tiny Pacific island of Tikopia
- The agricultural success of central New Guinea
- The Tokugawa-era forest management in Japan.
Part Three examines modern societies, including:
- The collapse into genocide of Rwanda, caused in part by overpopulation
- The failure of Haiti compared with the relative success of its neighbour, the Dominican Republic
- The problems facing a Third World nation, China
- The problems facing a First World nation, Australia
Part Four concludes the study by considering such subjects as business and globalization, and “extracts practical lessons for us today”
In the prologue, Diamond previews Collapse in one paragraph, as follows.
This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on instead of collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other “input” variables postulated to influence a society’s stability. The “output” variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I am to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses.
This sounds interesting but my download mixes up different parts of the book - gets very confusing.
Comment by Bob — put October 30, 2005 @ 1:58 am
When you’ve completed the download use the included m3u file. The M3U is a media queue format (playlist) and will play the cd’s and chapters in correct order.
Comment by Dr Grey — put October 30, 2005 @ 2:27 am
i can’t download it
Comment by meetaazneveryday@hotmail.com — put September 3, 2007 @ 9:56 pm