ABSTRACT
Fortunately, many of the reasons for the collapse of civilisations are captured well by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.1 Diamond analyses a number of civilisations that either did not see, or failed to understand, the warning signs facing them and argues that many societies, threatened with catastrophic failure, recognized their predicament but chose not to act until too late. What are the main reasons for collapse? Sometimes they are destroyed by social and political changes. Many times, however, they have been driven by environmental changes, and a failure to address these, such as the degradation of the water supplies in the Fertile Crescent.
