A book worth reading:    Collapse : How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed   by Jared Diamond. Here's a quote from a review.

In Collapse, Jared makes a case for how civilizations died out as a consequence of conflict between the lifestyle they had to uphold in order to ensure their social survival and the lifestyle they should have adopted in order to ensure their biological survival, i.e. he points out how it was a lack of flexibility on the one hand (unwillingness to change their ways) and ignorance on the other that lead whole civilizations to commit a slow suicide by taxing the eco-system beyond the breaking point.

In the first part of the book Jared focuses in on civilizations of the past:   the Norse colonies in Greenland, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Mayans. And in the second part on the modern-day Rwandans.

Throughout the book Jared takes great care to explain everything in great detail (history, ecological factors, geography and archeology) in order to make his case. But besides explaining how ignorance led whole civilizations to commit an involuntary suicide, he takes things one step further and reminds the reader that in a first world country that same ignorance prevails. Which makes the book into more than just an interesting read, it makes it a necessary read. Necessary because just as many civilizations in the past we too are now at the brink of causing more ecological damage to our environment than that environment can handle, i.e. we too are taxing our eco-system to the breaking point. The later is something that Jared rightly brings to our attention with this excellent comparative study.

If you want to read a bit more about it, here's an article in The New Yorker.

Don Firth