Assistive Technology for the Disabled

Summary of Collapse by Jared Diamond

On garbage day, I can look up and down each side of my street and see that my house is one of the very few that has recycling bins out front. I can also look at the number of garbage bags families on my street produce. There are many, and all of this garbage goes "somewhere." Where the garbage goes, or the ecological effects of what happens to the garbage after it goes is not something that the people on my street want to hear about; I know because I've tried to talk to them about it. They don't consider the fact that the piles of bags of trash has to be put down somewhere other than in front of their homes. What matters most to the residents on my street is that the garbage is no longer in their homes and no longer in front of their home or anyone else's. The choices that the residents of my street have made include: to not recycle and throw everything away, to be ignorant of the crisis of where the garbage goes, to fail to consider the ecological impacts their garbage has on the planet, and to ignore what happens years from now because of the garbage they throw away.

Jared Diamond's Collapse is about these same types of choices – the choices that people have made over the course of our centuries of existence and whether or not those choices have led to our propagation or destruction. Past collapses in this book include discussions about Easter Island, Pitcairn & Henderson Islands, The Anasazi, The Maya, The Vikings, and Norse Greenland. He also discusses some modern collapses, either currently occurring or about to occur, and of which include Africa & Rwanda, The Dominican Republic & Haiti, China, and Australia. To Jared Diamond, a collapse means "a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity over a considerable area, for an extended time." Diamond states that environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and society's response to its problems, as well as what he deems the twelve most serious environmental problems facing the world today, connect to each other. Diamond also describes twelve environmental issues that he believes will lead to a collapse during modern times unless we change our paradigmatic thinking. These twelve factors are natural habitat destruction, loss of wild food proteins, fish in particular, loss of biodiversity, farmland soil erosion, the ceiling on energy sources, loss of potable water, loss of photosynthetic ability, toxic chemicals, non-native species and their impact, atmospheric damage, population growth, and human impact on the environment. Diamond tells us that the twelve problems link to one another: the loss of wild food proteins causes higher reliance on farm-based proteins, which leads to more farmland soil erosion and a greater depletion of potable water, for example. Much like