Tim Flannery gave
Collapse the highest praise in
Science, writing:
The Economists review was generally favorable, although the reviewer had two disagreements. First, the reviewer felt Diamond was not optimistic enough about the
future. Secondly, the reviewer claimed
Collapse contains some erroneous statistics: for instance, Diamond purportedly overstated the number of
starving people in the world.
University of British Columbia professor of
ecological planning William Rees wrote that
Collapses most important lesson is that societies most able to avoid collapse are the ones that are most agile, able to adopt practices favorable to their own survival and avoid unfavorable ones. Moreover, Rees wrote that
Collapse is "a necessary antidote" to followers of
Julian Simon, such as
Bjørn Lomborg who authored
The Skeptical Environmentalist. Rees explained this assertion as follows:
Jennifer Marohasy of the coal-mining backed
think-tank Institute of Public Affairs wrote a critical review in
Energy & Environment, in particular its chapter on Australia's
environmental degradation. Marohasy claims that Diamond reflects a popular view that is reinforced by environmental campaigning in Australia, but is not supported by evidence, and argues that many of his claims are easily disproved. In his review in
The New Yorker,
Malcolm Gladwell highlights the way Diamond's approach differs from traditional historians by focusing on environmental issues rather than cultural questions. While Diamond does not reject the approach of traditional historians, his book, according to Gladwell, vividly illustrates the limitations of that approach. Gladwell demonstrates this with his own example of a recent ballot initiative in Oregon, where questions of property rights and other freedoms were subject to a free and healthy debate, but serious ecological questions were given scant attention. In 2006 the book was shortlisted for
The Aventis Prizes for Science Books award, eventually losing out to
David Bodanis's
Electric Universe.
Criticisms Jared Diamond's thesis that Easter Island society collapsed in isolation entirely due to environmental damage and cultural inflexibility is contested by some ethnographers and archaeologists, who argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and
slave raiding, which devastated the population in the 19th century, had a much greater social impact than environmental decline, and that introduced animals—first rats and then sheep—were greatly responsible for the island's loss of native flora, which came closest to deforestation as late as 1930–1960. Diamond's account of the Easter Island collapse is strongly refuted in a chapter of the book
Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019) by Dutch historian
Rutger Bregman. The book
Questioning Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a collection of essays by fifteen archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians criticizing various aspects of Diamond's books
Collapse and
Guns, Germs and Steel. The book was a result of 2006 meeting of the
American Anthropological Association in response to the misinformation that Diamond's popular science publications were causing and the association decided to combine experts from multiple fields of research to cover the claims made in Diamond's and debunk them. The book includes research from indigenous peoples of the societies Diamond discussed as collapsed and also vignettes of living examples of those communities, in order to showcase the main theme of the book on how societies are resilient and change into new forms over time, rather than collapsing. ==Film==