On Tuesday night I went to see Jared Diamond speak at the historic Wheeler Opera House, a beautiful theater built in 1889, with seats in rich Moroccan leather and an azure ceiling with silver stars that appear as though they are popping out of an early evening sky.

Diamond, a professor of Geography and Physiology at the University of California, was being presented by  the Aspen’s Writers Foundation Winter Word Series as one of America’s most celebrated scholars.

The lights went down and the spotlight landed on Diamond, who would be speaking for the next hour about his latest book titled, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

I was immediately taken in by Diamond, an avuncular man dressed in hiking boots and high wasted brown pants with a tucked in pink Oxford shirt and I sat mesmerized as he spoke about how and why whole societies have lost their way in the past and descended into chaos.

He spoke of the demise of highly advanced civilizations like the Maya who developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing as far back as 200-400 AD and who were noted for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples. Source.

Diamond also referred to the prehistoric Native American Anasazi Indians that lived from 200 to 1300 AD, in the Four Corners of the southwest United States. The Anasazi Indians were adept hunters and food gatherers discovering how to cultivate maize, squash and beans. They were also astute pottery makers.

He continued to talk about the people of Easter Island, “who in just a few centuries, wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?”

“Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York’s skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.”

Diamond was by no means taking an apocalyptic stance about the state of the world, giving us glimpses of hope by speaking of the people in Papua New Guinnea who have been around for 46,000 years because they have learned how to sustain themselves by reserving and transplanting their resources.

On my drive home in a blinding snowstorm with black iced roads, I thought about the message that this extremely fluent and amicable author was giving to us, a message that I have heard repeatedly that has always left me in a stone cold sweat.

If we don’t make the choice now to study the past and fix the problems that exist today, than in a mere fifty years time it is quite possible that we will be following in the footsteps of those intelligent civilizations who either were destroyed by civil wars or who committed “serial ecoside, straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise” and we will not be the ones to suffer but instead it will be our children and grandchildren.

At the end of his lecture Diamond directed his last sentence to the younger people in the audience and said, “It’s your choice on whether you want to make a world that is worth living in,” but it is our responsibility as well and we must take the environmental problems of today seriously and make the right choices together, now.