"Collapse" author Jared Diamond starts the book by looking at the challenges facing Montana. How will the state guide its future?

I’ve heard that you were originally going to open "Collapse" with Easter Island, but the book now starts in Montana. Why did you make that choice?

I realized if I begin the book with Easter Island and then go to the Maya and Anasazi, my readers will get the idea this is about past societies: dumb Polynesians and Native Americans doing stupid things that we smart Americans with our technology would never do.

Montana is considered the most pristine state in the lower 48. It’s got a low population and half the area is national and state forest. So you would think that Montana is the state with the fewest ecological and environmental problems. But scratch the surface of Montana and you find a very different story.

Because of global warming, the snow pack that provides the water for the irrigation agriculture of Montana is melting. In 20 years Glacier National Park will have no glaciers, and Montana won’t have irrigation agriculture. Montana has problems of soil erosion and salinization, destruction of soil by too much salt. The state now spends a couple of hundred million dollars every year trying to control introduced weeds. Montana has increasing problems of population in certain parts of the state. Eastern Montana has probably the worst toxic waste problems in the United States because Montana was the copper mining state.

So I began my book with what seems to be the most pristine part of the richest country in the world, but you look carefully at Montana and you find all of the problems that bother these remote romantic people of the past.

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Jared Diamond explains how we can avert catastrophe.

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet.

Full Story: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/23413/

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