Collapse

An impressively careful and thorough analysis, which has first been extremely popular, before being criticized (some of the arguments clearly anticipated, as I note below).

Prologue: A Tale of Two Farms

Part One: Modern Montana

Chapter 1: Under Montana's Big Sky

Forests, p. 41

In order to reestablish uniform even-aged trees of chosen tree species, and thereby to maximize timber yields and increase logging efficiency, logging was carried out by clear-cutting all trees rather than by selective logging of marked individual trees.

Water, p. 48

Salinization provides a large part of the explanation for why applying the term “Fertile Crescent” today to Iraq and Syria, formerly the leading center of world agricuture, would be a cruel joke.

Montana, Model of the World, p. 74

If Montana were an isolated island, as Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean was in Polynesian times before European arrival, its present First World economy would already have collapsed, nor could it have developed that economy in the first place.

Part Two: Past Societies

Chapter 2: Twilight at Easter

The Vanished Forest, pp. 106-107

Every Easter palm nut that has been recovered shows marks from rats gnawing on it and would have been incapable of germinating.
Deforestation must have begun some time after human arrival by A.D. 900, and must have completed by 1722. [...]
There are five types of evidence.

Consequences for Society, p. 107

“All the natives repeated [...] the word miru [...]: this word is the name of the timber used by Polynesians to make their canoes.”

p. 109

Surviving islanders' accounts of starvation are graphically confirmed by the proliferation of little statues called moai kavakava, depicting starving people with hollow cheeks and protruding ribs.

Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands

Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and their Neighbors

Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses

Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues

Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering

Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End

The End, p. 267

About half of Norway's population died when the Black Death struck in 1349-1350. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark became joined in 1397 under one king, who proceeded to neglect Norway as the poorest of his three provinces. The demand by European carvers for walrus ivory, Greenland's principal export, declined as the Crusades gave Christian Europe access again to Asia's and East Africa's elephant ivory. [...]
Finally, the arrival of the Inuit, and the inability or unwillingness of the Norse to make drastic changes, completed the quintet of ultimate factors behind the Greenland colony's demise.

Chapter 9: Opposite Paths to Success

[New Guinea, Tikopia, Tokugawa Japan, Other Successes]

Part Three: Modern Societies

Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide

Explosion in Kanama, pp. 324-325

[Commune exclusively inhabited by Hutus] Even before 1994, Rwanda was experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated especially by hungry landless young people without off-farm income [...] High population density and worse starvation were associated [statistically] with more crime.

p. 326

“It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available resources.”

Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti

Histories, p. 334

French Saint-Domingue became [in 1785] the richest European colony in the New World and contributed one-quarter of France's wealth.

Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant

Background, p. 358

China's environmental problems are among the most severe of any major country and are getting worse. The long list ranges from air pollution, biodiversity losses, cropland losses, desertification, disappearing wetlands, grassland degradation, and increasing scale and frequency of human-induced natural disasters [...]

Air, Water, Soil, p. 360

Per-capita floor area per house increased by nearly three-fold. [...] The net result is that China's human impact is increasing despite its low population growth rate.

Chapter 13: “Mining” Australia

Signs of Hope and Change, p. 409

[Signs of hope] involve changing attitudes, rethinking by Australia's farmers, private initiatives, and the beginning of radical government initiatives.

Part Four: Practical Lessons

Chapter 14: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

Failure to Anticipate, pp. 422-423

No prior experience [impact of introducing rabbits and foxes to Australia, ...].
No record/forgetting [Chaco Canyon Anasazi].
False analogy [heavy clay soils for Norway and Britain, vs Greenland, ...].

Failure to Perceive, pp. 424-425

Salinization; management; noise in the signal.

Rational Bad Behavior, pp. 427-428

“Good for me, bad for you and for everybody else.”
“Tragedy of the commons”. The correct rational behavior is then to harvest before the next consumer can, even though the eventual result may be the destruction of the commons and thus harm for all consumers.

Other Irrational Failures, p. 434

Irrational behaviour: “It's someone else's problem” (ISEP); “90-day focus”.

p. 435

Accumulated investment interest making today's harvest more valuable than future one.

Chapter 15: Big Business and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes

Mining Company Motives, p. 460

The ratio of waste dirt to metal is typically 400 for a copper mine, and 5,000,000 for a gold mine.

Forest Stewardship Council, p. 473

Businesses and the Public, p. 483

When government regulation is effective, and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn't care.

Chapter 16: The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?

Life in Los Angeles, p. 498

“The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem”.

One-liner Objections, p. 512

“Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing.”
This view is one that I have heard mainly from First World yuppies lacking experience of the Third World.

p. 513

Rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last one to starve or to die.