Significance of Collapse The reason Jerad Diamond wrote Collapse is the social, political and economic belief in the immunity of human society to environmental collapse . This interesting sentiment comes from a society that, 80 years ago, suffered the effects of poor habitat management, the Dust Bowl. Jared Diamond uses the experiments that killed past societies to warn current societies. Many interesting parallels exist between the politics of past societies and those of today. A simple example is the collapse of Anasazi culture. Jared Diamonds' explanation for the plight of the Anasazi was that they existed as a consumer society that expanded beyond the limits the environment could support in drought. When droughts came, the Anasazi society's trading partners first provided for their own needs, thus triggering the collapse of the Anasazi society. The reader might also notice the parallels with some present-day societies living in places poorly suited to agriculture, where environmental damage has destroyed the few good agricultural lands in the area. Historically, this usually resulted in the inhabitants starving. Jared could just as easily have used the dust bowl, communist Russia's agricultural policies, and current US agricultural policies in eastern Montana to replace Viking Greenland. The parallels between past societies that have collapsed and current societies that are experiencing economic downturns may seem surprising. Until we realize that “what experiences and history teach us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted according to the principles that have been deducted”. (Georg Friedrich Hegal). Perhaps the truest words ever spoken. Jared Diamond shows impacts middle of paper......church. The same money that bought the priests' silks could have been spent on iron tools and weapons. They could have even attracted immigrants, which could have helped settle Vineland, where people could actually grow plants. What does this have to do with today's United States? Currently, no one in the United States would support churches or anything like Easter Island statues above their own well-being. The current recession is the result of many factors, the main one being that people bought a lot of "stuff" they didn't need and paid for those things with money they couldn't pay back. The limited resource that caused this economic recession was money instead of something else like sheep. Works Cited “Quotes by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.” Smart Quotes. March 28, 2010http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/georg_wilhelm_friedrich_h.html