Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive Jared Diamond Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 575pp, £20 ISBN 0713992867

The end, when it came for the inhabitants of Easter Island, was not pretty. Modern archaeologists were surprised to find, scattered among the detritus of ancient rubbish piles, human bones that had been boiled, cracked to extract the marrow and then carelessly discarded. Clearly some awful calamity had overtaken the inhabitants, who in more plentiful times had carved and erected the huge stone figures for which Easter Island is today famous. Evidence of cannibalism is not unusual among the remains of collapsed soci- eties. The 18th-century inhabitants of the Pacific island of Mangareva became so desperate that they even dug up and ate long-buried corpses.

The evidence from these and other civilisations suggests that the degradation of environmental resources has played a major role in precipitating societal collapses throughout history. The rubbish dumps on Easter Island show that large fish and porpoises dropped out of people's diets once the last trees had been chopped down. The inhabitants in effect marooned themselves, becoming unable to build the boats that allowed them to fish in deep waters, or leave the island. In other cases, a more complicated mix of environmental factors led to social collapse. The fate of the Mayan people of central America was probably sealed by a combination of overpopulation, soil erosion and drought.

Yet a basic pattern can be traced in all such situations. Environmental degradation results in social and economic crisis; and this in turn leads to political chaos and warfare. Instead of uniting to confront common problems, the members of past societies have fallen back on conflict and barbarism - even to the extent of boiling each other's bones in cooking pots.

Jared Diamond devotes more than half of his superb and timely study to analysing societies of the past - many of which lasted considerably longer than our "modern" civilisation has so far managed. (Even the doomed Greenland Norsemen survived for four and a half centuries, despite their refusal to adopt such un-European habits as wearing Eskimo-style parkas and eating fish.) But the real purpose of his book is more immediate. Diamond wants us to use the lessons of the past in order to head off the crises that threaten us today on a global scale. The parallels could hardly be clearer: we are cutting down forests, destroying soils, eliminating fisheries, overusing water, poisoning the air and changing the climate with greater impact than ever before. Each of these on its own would present the world with a major challenge. Instead, we are facing all these time bombs at once.

"The world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today," Diamond writes. "The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies." The Rwandan genocide, he points out, owed a lot to chronic overpopulation and conflict over scarce land for food production.

So is there hope? Yes, the author insists - but only if we face up to the realities of our predicament. That means abandoning some of our most cherished notions, especially the belief that ever-increasing human consumption of scarce resources is desirable or even possible. Diamond points out a truth that seems to have evaded most economists: human welfare indicators may have improved drastically in recent decades (in rich countries at least), but our prosperity is based on depleting environmental capital, not generating sustainable wealth. Were the entire human population to achieve first-world standards of living, our impact on the planet would increase by a factor of 12 - which would be physically impossible to maintain.

Past societies failed because they refused to change, denied the problems confron-ting them, or were simply unaware that they existed. Today, thanks to the huge amount of scientific information gathered from satellites and field research, we have the chance to make rational decisions about our future. Yet for some reason, we seem unable to do so. With the Bush administration having just slashed the budgets of its climate monitoring programmes to free more cash for its war on terror, the omens are not good.

Mark Lynas's High Tide: news from a warming world is out in paperback from Perennial in March. www.marklynas.org

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