Jared Diamond and the rise and fall of civilizations

A New York Socialist Times article deals with Jared Diamond's interesting theories on the rise and fall of civilizations as detailed in his books "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed "and "Guns, Germs and Steel". I haven't read either book; I've only seen The History Channel's treatment of the latter book. From the NYST:

While “Guns, Germs, and Steel” explored the factors contributing to a society’s rise, “Collapse” tried to account for the downfalls. Here, human agency played a more prominent role. In case after case, Dr. Diamond described how a confluence of factors — fragile ecosystems, climatic change, hostile neighbors and, ultimately, bad decision making — cornered a society into inadvertently damaging or even destroying itself.

In his haunting chapter about Easter Island, he weighed the data — radiocarbon dating, charcoal and pollen analysis and botanical and archaeological surveys — and concluded that the inhabitants had mined the forests to extinction, setting off a cataclysm. What, Dr. Diamond wondered in an often cited passage, was going through the mind of the Easter Islander who cut the last tree?

The story isn't about Jared's theories per se. It talks about opposition to the theories:

But what was intended as a cautionary tale was taken by some readers as blaming the victims. Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii, came to the Amerind conference with a different story. Deforestation, he said, was caused not by people, but by predatory Polynesian rats, with the human population remaining stable until the introduction of European diseases.

Dr. Diamond, he said, “shifts all of the burden to people and their stupidity rather than to a complex ecosystem where these things interact.”

Taken together, the two books struck Frederick K. Errington, an anthropologist at Trinity College in Hartford, as a “one-two punch.” The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise.

Maybe the nature of this opposition is the reason it garnered the attention of a socialist newspaper. According to this article, the opposition doesn't like how the "rich" became successful by luck, while the "poor" made the beds they're lying in. Socialists would be against anything that says the poor have any responsibility whatever for their own situation, and equally disdainful of any theory that suggests the rich didn't rise to their positions by exploiting the toiling masses. (Yes, everything is political.)

At any rate, I highly recommend the story and Diamond's theories. If nothing else, all are very interesting.