Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Read Online Free PDF

New Guineans, and other people. I'm more interested in envi ronmental issues because of what I see as their consequences for people than because of their consequences for birds.
    On the other hand, I have much experience, interest, and ongoing in volvement with big businesses and other forces in our society that exploit environmental resources and are often viewed as anti-environmentalist. As a teenager, I worked on large cattle ranches in Montana, to which, as an adult and father, I now regularly take my wife and my sons for summer vacations. I had a job on a crew of Montana copper miners for one summer. I love Montana and my rancher friends, I understand and admire and sym pathize with their agribusinesses and their lifestyles, and I've dedicated this book to them. In recent years I've also had much opportunity to observe and become familiar with other large extractive companies in the mining, logging, fishing, oil, and natural gas industries. For the last seven years I've been monitoring environmental impacts in Papua New Guinea's largest producing oil and natural gas field, where oil companies have engaged World Wildlife Fund to provide independent assessments of the environment. I have often been a guest of extractive businesses on their properties, I've talked a lot with their directors and employees, and I've come to under stand their own perspectives and problems.
    While these relationships with big businesses have given me close-up views of the devastating environmental damage that they often cause, I've also had close-up views of situations where big businesses found it in their interests to adopt environmental safeguards more draconian and effective than I've encountered even in national parks. I'm interested in what moti vates these differing environmental policies of different businesses. My involvement with large oil companies in particular has brought me condemnation from some environmentalists, who use phrases such as "Dia mond has sold out to big business," "He's in bed with big businesses," or "He prostitutes himself to the oil companies."
    In fact, I am not hired by big businesses, and I describe frankly what I see happening on their properties even though I am visiting as their guest.
    On some properties I have seen oil companies and logging companies being destructive, and I have said so; on other properties I have seen them being careful, and that was what I said. My view is that, if environmentalists aren't willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won't be possible to solve the world's envi ronmental problems. Thus, I am writing this book from a middle-of-the- road perspective, with experience of both environmental problems and of business realities.
    How can one study the collapses of societies "scientifically"? Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing repli cated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something much broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world. In some fields, such as chemistry and molecular biology, replicated con trolled experiments in the laboratory are feasible and provide by far the most reliable means to acquire knowledge. My formal training was in two such fields of laboratory biology, biochemistry for my undergraduate de gree and physiology for my Ph.D. From 1955 to 2002 I conducted experi mental laboratory research in physiology, at Harvard University and then at the University of California in Los Angeles.
    When I began studying birds in New Guinea rainforest in 1964, I was immediately confronted with the problem of acquiring reliable knowledge without being able to resort to replicated controlled experiments, whether in the laboratory or outdoors. It's usually neither feasible, legal, nor ethical to gain knowledge about birds by experimentally exterminating or manipu lating their populations at one site while maintaining their