You really think Collapse is insightful? Collapse is probably the least original of his works and rehashes sometimes historically and/or scientifically disproved theories. It doesn't explain the dynamics of genocide really at all (except for a slight attempt with Rwanda) and instead tries to shoehorn nearly everything as environmental collapse. Here is just a listing of a few chapters in Collapse that are downright wrong:
- 2 (Easter Island, No one really views the population collapse anymore as a tragedy of the commons result and Hunt and Lipo's research from the last 2 decades coupled with the historical record shows that the decline of population came from Spanish contact with the written record and obsidian, biological, and habitat records demonstrating the population remained stable before and after first contact with the Dutch.)
- 4 Anasazi "collapse". Another factually incorrect example and he tries to enforce his point via packrat middens that are not only notoriously unreliable but whose biological nature make it that those findings are pretty much guaranteed useless. Plus we know quite a few of the sites where greenery was cut for the sites and none of them are even remotely close to the Anasazi sites. Diamond completely ignores the people who continued to live using the same canals, "colonies", etc. of the main Anasazi sites that continued well after the gradual decline of more famous sites ie at Mesa Verde and Chaco.
- 5 And don't get me started on the Maya. Where to begin - the whitewashing of native history and really history in general to fit an environmental narrative often discredits people simply to score the modern day west to try and fix its environmental programs. Unfortunately it means a rewriting (and whitewashing) of history - this has become the case for the Maya too. In only examining the classical transition and completely ignoring the pre-classical transition and other transitions in the Mesoamerican world, Diamond completely ignores any historical, archaeological, or scientific context when it comes to the historical movement of populations in Mesoamerica. In claiming that deforestation damaged the Maya environment "repeatedly" he completely ignores any context about what my ancestors did in order to manage deforestation and degradation of the land. We created narrow but long aqueducts, rebuilt eroded limestone karsts, rotated fields, etc. As it is, every few years archaeologists have to revise population numbers upwards of Maya sites because they are stuck in the idea that we "slash and burnt" or mismanaged fields and other more primitive means of agriculture. If you look at forests that grew back around the fields of various sites that eventually declined, one could see a hundred years ago different ages/years from when some of these 300-500 year old trees came from via these field rotations. The practice continued for a while although it has declined today. Or if you look at the south, field rotation still happens all the time today. The cities of Kaminaljuyu and other southern cities aren't looked at by Diamond at all - but they present a good case of centuries, even millennia of extensive land management.
And it gets even more aggravating the more you look at his "details" that are just plain factually inaccurate. From English pastoral systems, to Mycenae Greece, to Greenland, to Australia he continues to get detail after detail wrong. Collapse is easily his most useless book and contributes pretty much nothing to anyone.