What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland and finally to the modern world, the author traces a pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us.

Includes index.