In 1997 Jared Diamond published Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. The book was a best seller, won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered wide acclaim. It was panned by some academics whose niche claims to fame and pet theories Diamond demolished. However, for most who read the book, it was an important milestone in understanding how a few Spanish, English, French and Dutch ‘explorers’ wiped out millions of humans and dozens of advanced societies in Africa, East Asia and ‘the new world.’

Since 1997 new research including that in the Amazon Basin and in Southeastern US – The People of One Fire, History Revealed Media and others – has filled in many gaps in Diamond’s sweeping rendition of why Mandarin is NOT the official language of the Americas.

In 2005 Diamond published a second major work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Collapse was a New York Times Best Seller but received a less enthusiastic response. Why? It stepped on the toes of Business-As-Usual.

See https://www.baconsrebellion.com/Issues05/08-08/Risse.php

Now Penguin has released a revised edition of Collapse. The cover suggests – and without a page by page comparison it is not possible to tell for sure – that the only ‘new’ part of the revised edition is a 22 page Afterword on the Collapse of Angkor. Angkor is in present day Cambodia and was the capital of the Khmer Empire.

The Khmer Empire was the largest empire in Southeast Asia during most of a five hundred year span from 800 AD to 1300 AD. The Khmer Empire rivaled the Tang and Song Dynasty Empires of China with which it maintained an arms length relationship.

What is special about Angkor is that over this five century span Angkor was the largest Urban agglomeration on the planet. Until the end of the 19th century at 250,000 acres Angkor was the largest Urban agglomeration that EVER existed on the planet.

Angkor was a ‘lower density’ Urban agglomeration but still had a population comparable to Imperial Rome, Medieval Constantinople (Istanbul), Edo (Tokyo) and Peking (Beijing). Angkor had an Urbanized area ten times the area of any of these more familiar imperial capitals.

Angkor’s environmental context and low density is larger than, but similar to, Urban agglomerations such as those recently found in the Amazon and previously found in Central America (the Lowland Maya cities of Tikal and Copan) and in Sri Lank as well as a few others in South East Asia and perhaps some smaller examples in Southeastern US. The difference between Angkor and the other Urban places was the Critical Mass of Angkor and the massive engineering projects that made the Urban agglomeration possible.

Diamond summarizes the enormous, complex water management infrastructure designed to irrigate rice, prevent floods and bridge the gap during droughts. The ‘water works’ – lakes, canals and hydraulic works – rival the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China in scale and surpass them in complexity.

After the Collapse that started in the late 1300s – and before the first Europeans arrived – what was left were, not yet clearly understood structures that are called ‘temples’ such as Angkor Wat.

EMR will not spoil the ending for readers but notes that Diamond identifies five causes of the Collapse of Angkor. They fit neatly into the categories that he identified in the first edition:

● Inflicting damage on the environment.

● Climate change

● Unfriendly neighbors

● Friendly trading partners

● Commitment to and dependence upon “an increasingly huge, complex and hard to maintain infrastructure.”

EMR suggests that it does not take a great leap of imagination to go from:

A. The Angkor water management infrastructure that became to Too Big, Too Dominate and Too Expensive to maintain on one hand, To

B. The Autonomobile-centric infrastructure necessary to support settlement patterns dependent upon Large Private Vehicles.

EMR

NB: Please do not bother attack the last paragraph until you at least read the new Afterword to Collapse as well as the above cited column on the original book. Otherwise it is just tossing rocks at empty pigeon holes.

The Afterword is worth the price of the Revised Edition. (Note to those who love Kindle et. al.: The print version is less than a dollar more than the Kindle edition from Amazon – including free shipping for Prime customers.)

Because this post specifically addresses the topic of human settlement patterns it is subject to The Litmus Test in Chapter 5 of CITIZEN MEDIA, THE NEXT STEP.