January 11, 2005
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Jared Diamond, author of the best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel, delivers the lecture Collapse—How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Jared Diamond
- Collapse—How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- Diamond will lecture about what we can learn from the collapses of great cultures from history
- He is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel
- Thursday, February 17 / 8 pm
- UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public: $10 / UCSB students: $8
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, will examine the downfall of some of history’s greatest civilizations in his lecture Collapse—How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, on Thursday, February 17 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. This talk, based on his just published and best-selling book of the same name, will examine the question: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Brilliant, illuminating and immensely absorbing, this lecture will raise the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
In his 1997 million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. In his own words, Diamond set himself “the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for people of different continents?”
In Collapse, released by Viking Press in January 2005, Diamond focuses on the other side of the equation. He shows how, historically, societies have either squandered or savored their natural and human resources, and how these different choices have led some to catastrophe, others to survival and even success. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted.
Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana. Publishers Weekly writes, in a starred review, “Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble link that binds humans to nature.”
After training in laboratory biological science at Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Diamond became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School in 1966. He has also developed parallel careers in the ecology and evolution of New Guinea birds and in environmental history, sealed by switching his UCLA appointment at age 65 to become Professor of Geography and of Environmental Health Sciences.
In the academic world he has published over 500 technical articles and seven books, garnering honors such as the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and election to the National Academy of Sciences. In addition, he has authored over a hundred popular magazine articles in publications such as Discover, Natural History and Harper’s. The broad range of disciplines that he has mastered and weaves into his writing—linguistics, genetics, animal behavior, molecular biology, and others—led one reviewer to joke, “‘Jared Diamond’ is suspected of actually being a pseudonym for a committee of experts.”
Courtesy of Borders, copies of books by Jared Diamond will be available for purchase and signing.
Jared Diamond is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures. Tickets for the event are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students, who must show valid ID when purchasing tickets and at the door. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.