What You Will Learn

Lurking behind the mystery of ancient ruins is the mystery with the nagging thought: might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy society? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the New York skyscrapers, much as we stare at the jungle overgrown ruins of Maya cities? Perhaps we can still learn from the past, but only if we think carefully about its lessons. The book has a 5 point framework of possible contributing collapse to societies: 1 - Environmental damageCould be exceptional imprudence of the people and exceptional fragility in aspects of the environment, or both. 2 - Climate changeToday we refer to human induced. But in the past it was natural climate change, including the advance and retreat of continental ice sheets during ice ages from about 1400-1800 AD, or the global cooling from the enormous volcanic eruption of Indonesia's Mt Tambora on 1815 3 - Hostile neighboursRelationships might be intermittently or chronically hostile. A society may be able to hold off its enemie