Top science writer chronicles fallen civilisations

What do all these people have in common? The Vikings, who established a colony on Greenland more than 1,000 years ago, the Polynesians who lived on Easter Island in the Pacific and the Maya of Central America.

The simple answer is that they all went from boom to bust - from a period of success and plenty to one of miserable decline and ultimate failure.

There are, of course, more complicated reasons to explain the decline and fall of each of these societies.

Some of them are cogently set out in Collapse, the latest work of the polymath anthropologist Jared Diamond to be shortlisted for the prestigious Aventis Prize for Science Books.

Diamond is no stranger to the science book prize, having won the award twice already, and his latest entry on the shortlist of five is already the bookies' favourite to win next week's award.

Few who have read the book could fail to be impressed by Diamond's ambitious attempt to explain how some societies - past and present - chose, by their action or inaction, to fail or survive.

Many mysteries about failed civilisations still remain.

Why, for instance, did the Greenland Norse not catch and eat the plentiful cod in the surrounding sea when they themselves were clearly starving to death? Why did the Maya suddenly disappear, apparently consumed by the encroaching jungle? And what was behind the huge stone statues erected at great environmental cost by the inhabitants of Easter Island?

Diamond, a professor of physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, attempts to bring together the common themes that could explain why these and other societies have collapsed.

In doing so, he tries to formulate a strategy for our own society's future survival.

He sums up what we have to do towards the end of his book with a checklist of the 12 most serious environmental problems facing the world today.

Top of the list comes the destruction of natural habitats, or at best the conversion of them into something that is fundamentally man-made.

"At the rate at which we are going now, the world's tropical rainforests, outside maybe the Amazon and Congo basins, will be gone by 2030," Diamond says.

"But look at the countries that depend on tropical rainforests for their economies. Indonesia, the world's most populous country, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Gabon - what's goingto happen to all these countries by 2030 when the major source of their economies is knocked out?" he says.

Another pressing problem is the burgeoning human population, which many analysts see as being the root cause of the other problems.

It is not a view that Diamond shares.

"People regularly make the mistake of looking for a root cause. The root cause is looking for a root cause, and that's because we have a dozen problems and we have to solve them all," he says.

It is not so much the total number of people living on the planet that matters, he insists, it is the impact or "footprint" that each and every one of us has on the Earth's limited resources.

"China catching up to the First World would double the human impact. The whole of the Third World catching up would increase human impact by a factor of 11, which in effect means we have 6.5 times 11 billion - this would be equivalent to a global population of 71.5 billion people," Diamond says.

"I'm less concerned at 6.5 billion going up to 9 billion if nothing else changed, whereas I'm much more concerned about the whole world going up in effect to the equivalent of 71.5 billion people," he says.

So in his estimation, does civilisation at the beginning of the 21st century have a chance of surviving? "Yes, I think there is a chance to be alive, but I would say for sure we will not have a First-World lifestyle, such as we have now, in 50 years from now if we carry on as we are," Diamond says.

"If within the next 50 years we can get ourselves on to a sustainable course, then we can go on indefinitely," he says.

- INDEPENDENT