How Civilizations Fail

How Civilizations FailUCLA professor Jared Diamond takes the long view--what he calls "the 13,000-year perspective"--on the big questions, having drawn on physiology, evolutionary biology and biogeography over the course of his career. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel, and in his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he argues that large-scale decline almost always has to do with resource management. For instance, the Easter Islanders d...