Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond Read Free Book Online

to do with global ization, which lies at the heart of the strongest reasons both for pessimism and for optimism about our ability to solve our current environmental problems. Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to col lapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote —think of Somalia and Afghanistan as examples—can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents, and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global de cline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book.

    PART ONE
    MODERN MONTANA

    CHAPTER 1
    Under Montana's Big Sky
    Stan Falkow's story m Montana and me ■ Why begin with Montana? ■
    Montana's economic history it Mining ■ Forests ■ Soil ■ Water ■
    Native and non-native species ■ Differing visions ■
    Attitudes towards regulation ■ Rick Laible's story ■
    Chip Pigman's story 11 Tim Huls's story ■ John Cook's story ■
    Montana, model of the world ■
    When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of mi crobiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me how it had fitted into the story of his life:
    "I was born in New York State and then moved to Rhode Island. That meant that, as a child, I knew nothing about mountains. While I was in my early 20s, just after graduating college, I took off a couple of years from my education to work on the night shift in a hospital autopsy room. For a young person like myself without previous experience of death, it was very stressful. A friend who had just returned from the Korean War and had seen a lot of stress there took one look at me and said, 'Stan, you look nervous; you need to reduce your stress level. Try fly-fishing!'
    "So I started fly-fishing to catch bass. I learned how to tie my own flies, really got into it, and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right: it did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation. A fellow graduate student told me that bass weren't the only fish that one could catch by fly-fishing: I could also fly-fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So I took up trout-fishing. My thesis supervisor loved to eat fish, and he encouraged me to go fishing: those were the only occasions when he didn't frown at my taking time off from work in the laboratory.
    "Around the time that I turned 50, it was another stressful period of my life, because of a difficult divorce and other things. By then, I was taking off time to go fly-fishing only three times a year. Fiftieth birthdays make many of us reflect on what we want to do with what's left of our lives. I reflected  on my own father's life, and I remembered that he had died at age 58.1 realized with a jolt that, if I were to live only as long as he did, I could count on only 24 more fly-fishing trips before I died. That felt like very few times to do something that I enjoyed so much. The realization made me start think ing about how I could spend more of my time doing what I really liked during the years that I had left, including fly-fishing.
    "At that point, I happened to be asked to go evaluate a research labora tory in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. I had never been to Montana before; in fact, I had never even been west of the Mississippi River until I was 40 years old. I flew into Missoula airport, picked up a rental car, and began to drive south to the town of Hamilton where the lab was located. A dozen miles south of Missoula is a long straight stretch of road where the valley floor is flat and covered with farmland, and