Jared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.

Diamond’s celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs andSteel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.

The question lurking in Diamond’s work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias’s trunkless legs of stone?

Such thoughts are not top of my mind as I swing, in a bright yellow cab, past the splendid mansions of Bel Air under a cloudless Los Angeles sky. I had proposed meeting Diamond in Papua New Guinea, the place where his background in anthropology and evolutionary biology began to converge. Diamond had replied that he rarely made it to Papua New Guinea these days, and why didn’t we have lunch at his Californian home instead.

After graduating from Harvard and then Cambridge, where he studied membrane biophysics, Diamond devoted years to researching the way substances, such as sugar, find their way in and out of cells. “I was the world’s gall bladder expert,” is how the 71-year-old describes his early years in academia. The gall bladder proved too confined a world. In his 20s, he studied the ornithology of New Guinea, publishing his first book, Avifauna of the EasternHighlands of New Guinea, in 1972. Over the next two decades he began to apply multi-scientific disciplines – including linguistics, evolutionary biology and environmental history – to big questions. The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992 about human development, was followed by Why Sex isFun, the subject of which is pretty self-explanatory, and in 1998, Guns, Germs andSteel, the breakthrough work that brought him plaudits from scientists and generalists alike.

Set back from the road behind a white picket fence, Diamond’s home is smaller and less gaudy than the surrounding mansions and mock châteaux. Nonetheless, it is quietly splendid. The professor of geography at UCLA, who is working on a book about what modern civilisation can learn from tribal societies, is waiting at the threshold to greet me. He is wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and casual slacks. Even from a distance I spot his white-peppered beard, neatly trimmed, in almost Amish style.

We make our way through a large hallway to the spacious kitchen at the rear. Diamond’s wife is on her way out. Calling her “sweetie”, he gives her a kiss and then, opening the cavernous refrigerator, announces in town-crier fashion: “Jared Diamond declares that he is about to pull out the California speciality of pomegranate juice, to which a story attaches. And then it is salmon, and orzo with spinach and bacon, and mixed vegetables that include squash with sage. And there is also yoghurt and there is an avocado and there is grapefruit.”

I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything. Diamond ferries dishes to the large wooden table at which I am seated, my back to a pristine lawn. The plates he sets before me include one bearing a strikingly large wedge of chilled, delicately pink salmon that turns out to be the most succulent I have ever tasted.

As he moves between fridge and table, he launches into his pomegranate story. “Pomegranate was one of the first fruits domesticated in the world. It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 4000 BC,” he says. “A friend of mine, a very successful businessman, bought farm acreage in the central valley of California, which is the most productive agricultural area in the US. And there happened to be 100 acres of pomegranates, about which he knew very little. So he started learning about them and discovered how healthy they are, that they are full of vitamins and full of antioxidants and that they may be a treatment for prostate cancer.”

OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson

Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and forGuns, Germs and Steel(1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for CriticalMass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year’s prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:

Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
“This is Gould’s most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould’s views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance.”

Guns, Germs and Steel(1998), by Jared Diamond
“This isn’t just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic.”

Right Hand, Left Hand(2003), by Chris McManus
“Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn’t afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It’s my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
“Just what science needs: the ideal beginner’s guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider’s perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too.”

The 2009 shortlist is atwww.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks

The friend, Stewart Resnick, had the capital and commercial acumen to spread the message to the US consumer. Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend’s financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.

There is no obvious segue between pomegranates and the recent shock to Anglo-Saxon capitalism but we get there via a discussion of collapsing fish stocks, a subject prompted by the salmon. Diamond knows I used to live in Japan and says, “If I was Japan’s worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years’ time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein.” Humans’ ability to destroy the basis of their own livelihood is a recurring Diamond theme.

“There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we’re seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya,” he continues. “The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.”

He helps himself to a mouthful of vegetables, bought from the supermarket but as fresh-tasting as if he had dug them from the garden. Chewing slowly, he continues: “The Maya collapse began in the late 700s, and then simply the most advanced society in the New World collapsed over the course of several decades. They were mostly gone a century later,” he says wistfully. “When a complex structure like that starts collapsing, you are pulling out dominoes in the whole structure.”

I ask whether Lehman Brothers is such a domino. “The events of last October have crept up seemingly so suddenly,” he replies: “I say ‘seemingly’ because, in a sense, it is not at all sudden. Any idiot knows that if you are drawing more money out of your bank than you are paying into your bank, then eventually something is going to happen. Somehow this lesson escaped the decision-makers in the US government.”

Much of his writing suggests that only those societies able to stamp out unsustainable habits – over-logging, overspending, over-extension – have the ability to survive, I say, helping myself to more pomegranate juice. One might conclude that free-market economies, with less ability to rein in over-consumption of blue-fin tuna or over-leverage of red-blooded bankers, were more vulnerable to sudden failure.

But Diamond rejects the notion that his work can be read as advocating authoritarian central planning. “When people talk about the greater efficiency of dictatorships, they are forgetting that a dictatorship is no more likely than a democracy to make a wise decision,” he says. The Chinese government moved quickly to ban lead in petrol, but it also virtually abolished education during a phase of the Cultural Revolution, he says. A democracy could never do that.

“This is orzo,” he says, his mind turning to the barley-shaped pasta he is spooning onto my plate. As he traipses off to fetch a selection of teas, I notice he is wearing blue cloth sandals. A lawnmower buzzes in the background. In a hutch on the kitchen floor, a large rabbit munches away quietly. “You are welcome to try these,” he says, returning with some fancy-labelled bottles. “We have pomegranate lychee green tea, pomegranate hibiscus green tea, pomegranate white tea.”

Diamond strikes me as such a thoughtful man, so empathetic to other cultures and so obviously liberal in his outlook, that I was surprised to learn that some critics have described him as something close to a racist. According to his detractors, he puts too much emphasis on the environment and too little on social factors, thereby implying that people cannot change their physical inheritance.

But Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that sets out to discover why Europeans conquered the Aztecs, and not the other way around, seems to me a cogent demolition of racism. Dismissing as nonsense the argument that Europeans were racially or culturally superior, the book seeks to find the real reasons.

“Why do they say it is racism?” Diamond winces, clearly upset. “I think mainly because I discussed the subject at all. But I discuss why X conquered Y because it is a big question of history.” He pauses before addressing his imaginary critics: “It is perverse and weird.” Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a swipe at those who suggest his books preclude choice. There is plenty of room for free will, he says. Yet he is sticking to his conviction that geography – the ease with which wild plants can be domesticated, or the prevalence of certain diseases – can have profound effects on a society’s development.

“Was it a cultural choice that the Inuit up in the Arctic did not become farmers? No, it wasn’t. You could not have agriculture in the Arctic,” he bristles. “So it seems to me that the rise of agriculture in the modern world really does involve strong environmental influences. And if you want to call that geographical determinism, you can call it geographical determinism. Except that we are taught to react to that like you should react to wife-beating and incest with your mother: we all know it is not nice, and that it should be stopped.

“I find the easiest way to eat these is just to cut off the top and then break it into segments,” he says, his focus suddenly narrowing from controversies of human agriculture to the single grapefruit before us. The abundance of food in his kitchen prompts me to return to the theme of sustainability.

“The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world,” says Diamond. “That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans.” The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.

Can’t humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? “We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops,” he says. “Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water. So you say, ‘Alright, we’ll get around water by desalinating sea water.’ But then there’s the energy ceiling, and so on.”

With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. “I’m inconsistent,” he shrugs. But if we can’t supply more or consume less, doesn’t that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?

“No. It is our choice,” he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. “If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed,” he says, draining his pomegranate juice. “The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don’t learn to operate sustainably.”

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

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Jared Diamond’s house
Bel Air, Los Angeles

Chilled salmon
Orzo with bacon and spinach
Mixed roast vegetables
One avocado
One grapefruit
One pomegranate lychee green tea
Lots of pomegranate juice