Earlier this year scientist Jared Diamond published his book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive. It is a disquieting but riveting account of the collapse of several civilisations due to their peoples’ destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended.

Diamond says there are five factors involved in social collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, friendly trade partners and society’s responses to its environmental problems.

It is this last factor that he says will determine whether a society succeeds or collapses.

“A society’s responses depend on its political, economic and social institutions and on its cultural values,” Diamond writes.

He says there are four main reasons why human beings continue to destroy the environmental resources that keep them alive.

In some cases we fail to anticipate the environmental problem. For instance, we did not foresee the impacts of introducing rabbits and cane toads into the Australian landscape.

In some cases we don’t realise that there is a problem. Soil erosion and climate change are imperceptible from day to day but over time can create enormous environmental impacts and we then wonder why we didn’t notice and act earlier.

In some cases the problem may be beyond our capacity or too expensive to solve.

But in most cases, we know there is a problem and don’t do anything about it.

The reason, according to Diamond, has more to do with our psyches and egos, than logic.

We are more motivated by activities that benefit us directly than activities that benefit the common good.

Thus, if an environmentally damaging activity profits us directly, we are motivated to continue doing it even if, in the process, we destroy our livelihood in the longer term.

We will continue damaging activity if it supports deeply held personal values: For instance, we now realise that clearing land destroys biodiversity and reduces the land’s resilience, but many people believe a cleared landscape reflects good management and a biologically diverse landscape is “untidy” – poor management.

If we have openly supported a particular policy or activity it can e embarrassing to have to admit that it is causing a problem, so we may prefer to continue to support it to save face.

If we dislike the people who are telling us about our environmental damage, we often prefer not to hear their message, no matter how accurate it is.

Sometimes, the scale of the problem can seem so insurmountable that it is easier to ignore it and let someone else deal with it; or it can be so painful to think about, that we deny it even exists.

Jared Diamond says Australia leads the world in the way we are facing up to our substantial environmental problems and changing long held values to try to restore our natural environment.

He believes humans are at an environmental crossroads, where we can choose to face up to and solve the problems that face us, or ignore them and face inevitable collapse.

“That’s the reason I decided to devote most of my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our problems have to be taken seriously and won’t go away otherwise,” he writes.

This story appears Agriculture Today.