Day 14: Kansas, and Collapse…

July 6, 2007 | 10:53 PM

As you can imagine my drive through the central plains states was relatively uneventful and boring, so I spent most of the time focusing on the book. I did manage stops in Kansas at Coronado Castle and Arkansas City and in Oklahoma’s Ponca City to see the Pioneer Woman. My mom was born in Ponca City, and I remember my parents taking me there to see it when I was younger. I’m in Enid tonight, where my dad’s mom lived her last years. Tomorrow I’m going to drive by her old house and stop off at the cemetery before heading south toward Denton.

In honor of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, I listened to the audiobook Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Here’s a description of the book from Wikipedia.

In his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Diamond examines a range of past civilizations and societies, attempting to identify why they collapsed into ruins or survived only in a massively reduced form. He considers what contemporary societies can learn from these societal collapses. As in Guns, Germs and Steel, he dismantles previous ethnocentric explanations for the collapses that he discusses, and focuses instead on ecological factors. He pays particular attention to the Norse settlements in Greenland, which vanished as the climate got colder, while the surrounding Inuit culture thrived. He also has chapters on the collapse of the Maya, Anasazi, and Easter Island civilizations, among others. He cites five factors that often contributed to a collapse, but shows how the one factor that all had in common was mismanagement of natural resources. He follows this with chapters on prospering civilizations that managed their resources very well, such as Tikopia Island and Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate.

You can find a review of the book on Wikipedia here. I definitely felt like the book was appropriate following a tour of our country’s (and Canada’s) best national parks and forests. Here’s a picture of Coronado Castle in Kansas, to leave you with.