Book Description
大ベストセラーとなった『Guns, Germs, and Steel』（邦題『銃・病原菌・鉄』）で、ジャレド・ダイアモンドは西洋文明が世界の大半を支配するにいたった状況を見事に検証してみせた。今作では、その方程式の反対側を探っている。過去の偉大な文明が破滅したのはなぜなのか？ その運命から我々は何を学べるのだろうか？ イースター島からマヤ文明、グリーンランドのバイキング、現代のモンタナまで、年代的にも地理的にも壮大な視点を駆使して、ダイアモンドは環境激変の基本的なパターンをたどっていく――その警鐘は現代の世界にも見ることができるが、危機的状況にもかかわらず、我々はそれを無視している。最新の研究成果が、なんとも形容しがたい語り口と混ざりあう『Collapse』は、過去のもっとも深いところにある謎を暴きながらも、未来へ向けた希望を与えてくれる1冊だ。
From Publishers Weekly
生物地理学者ジャレド・ダイアモンドは、ピューリッツァー賞受賞のベストセラー『Guns, Germs and Steel』（邦題『銃・病原菌・鉄』）の中で、人類のさまざまな文明の根本的ルーツを植物相、動物相、気象、地理に求める壮大な見解を展開した。自らの環境基盤を時には致命的なまでに蝕んでしまう社会を比較研究した魅力的な本書では、そのビジョンが終末論的な含みを帯びている。著者は、イースター島、古代マヤ文明、グリーンランドのバイキング植民地など、太古の人々の経済的・社会的崩壊や滅亡の事例を詳しく検証し、そこに見られる人口増加、過剰農耕、過放牧、乱獲のパターンを探っている。これらは、干ばつや寒さ、厳格な社会規範、戦争などによって助長されることが多く、やがて森林伐採、土壌侵食、飢餓などの悪循環をもたらし、食糧源となる動植物の消滅によってその悪循環にいっそう拍車がかかるのだという。彼はさらに、米国モンタナ州、中国、オーストラリアなど現在環境問題を抱えている地域を取り上げ、技術的に進歩した今日の地球規模の文明は、太古の原始的な孤立コミュニティーを苦しめた諸問題に対してほとんど手つかずの状態だと指摘する。工業化著しい地球を覆い尽くさんばかりの大規模な環境破壊については、かなり悲観的な見解も述べているが、その一方で、ニューギニア高地の旧式ながらじつに多様で効率のいい農業や、日本の徹底した森林保護プログラムなどに見られる環境維持の事例、また多少説得力に欠けるものの、近年の緑の消費主義（環境問題を考慮した購買活動）構想に希望を託している。人類学から動物学まであらゆる事柄の優れた解説者であるダイアモンドは、こうした数多くの衰退と崩壊の歴史を刺激的に鋭く語るだけでなく、その背景を科学的に明快に説き明かしてもくれる。読む者の興味と不安をかき立てながら、人間と自然を結びつける固い絆を思い出させる1冊である。
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内容説明
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller
Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos.
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著者について
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
