It may come to that, because China and India, who together represent almost half of humanity, have first-world aspirations and are getting closer and closer to achieving them. China’s economy consistently grows by seven or eight percent a year these days. Get out your pocket calculator and see what that adds up to over twenty years. They’re going to be able to outbid us for oil and food. Think about that the next time you buy those bargain tools at Wal-Mart.

Which brings us to leadership issues. Diamond shows how poor leadership, usually in the persons of chieftains dedicated to the prestige of their ancestors, clan, or themselves, led to the destruction of the societies that supported them. Resources vital to the well-being of the society were squandered to build the giant funerary statues on Easter Island. The Maya exhausted themselves in clan warfare. The Vikings of Greenland stuck to a deeply conservative social order that wouldn’t allow them to stop the destruction of their soil or the expenditure of their limited resources on European luxury goods. In Rwanda, opportunistic petty politicians turned overpopulation into genocide. In Australia, devotion to the ways of green England prevented adaptation to a desert. In every case, a small group of leaders put their well-being and their worldview ahead of the survival of the culture.

Here in America, we’ve elected Bush again, and I think Diamond sees that Bush is an appropriate leader for a civilization about to collapse. Bush is deeply conservative, which means he will meet new challenges with old methods. He’s loyal to his class, which means that he will put the needs of his own people ahead of the needs of the broader civilization, and as things get tougher, his own people will be a smaller and smaller group. He’s able to ignore or deny environmental problems because of a belief system that puts those problems in the hands of the Christian God. That God also happens to be the God of Armageddon, which fits well into Diamond’s thesis.

Diamond looks at Montana’s Bitterroot Valley as a case where a high civilization of technology, trophy homes, and recreation depend on an external resource base of pension funds, accrued wealth, government money, jet transport, and imported food. But the Bitterroot Valley is like a lot of other valleys in the American West, where the carrying capacity of the land is smaller than the number of people on it. If anything happens to disturb the worldwide system of trade, resource extraction, or finance, then the people of those valleys will have to live with the resources at hand.

Collapse ends on a high note, listing fourteen problems that we can solve so humanity can survive. The catch is that we have to solve all fourteen, which include human population growth and increasing human impact on the world as individual humans want more material wealth. That’s all well and good, but now that I’m almost 55, if Diamond thinks that I’m going to give up my rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle or my SUV or my snowmobile or vote for some liberal enviro-freak like the Democrats will run next time, he can go pound sand down a rat-hole. He should be able to find ample supplies of both.