Even thriving societies can die off if they refuse to recognise the need to change - in some ways we are more at risk now than at any period in history, Jared Diamond tells Shane Hegarty

Jared Diamond is looking out the window of his Covent Garden hotel room, watching the bustle of one of the world's richest, most established, most technologically advanced cities.

"Sitting here in London, I feel as people sitting in Dublin or as I would feel sitting at home in LA: that here I am, in a nice hotel room with water running from the taps and the sky's reasonably clear, food is coming here from the restaurant or supermarket. So part of me says that if anybody like Jared Diamond says it's at risk of collapse, the guy's an idiot."

But he does think it could collapse. London, Britain, Europe. That Ireland or the US could implode after an environmental catastrophe - the sort of scenario exaggerated in the film The Day After Tomorrow. Of course it seems idiotic. That's one of the reasons why societies such as that on Easter Island, the Maya in Mexico or Angkor Wat in Cambodia have collapsed before.

They mismanaged the land, either through arrogance or ignorance, and never believed that what sustained them would eventually destroy them. They never saw it coming, either because they couldn't or, too regularly, because they didn't want to.

Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive looks at those civilisations that have adapted and survived, and those that ended up as ruins to be picked over by archaeologists, and asks what they should teach us about our own chances of survival.

"There's another part of me that says that when they collapsed, societies tended to do so rather quickly from their peak. And the reason is that when a society reaches a peak, a peak of population and peak of power, it means peak demand of the environment, peak vulnerability. So past collapses were sudden."

A geography professor at the University of California in Los Angeles and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Diamond's book outlines the inter-related ecological reasons and economic causes for such disintegration.

He deals with the obvious examples, such as the Mayans and Easter Islanders, and recent cases such as Rwanda, which disintegrated into warfare partly as a result, he says, of overpopulation.

But there are also warnings about environmental devastation in Australia and China and a look at the serious problems facing Montana. It is a dense but accessible read, heavy with insight and detail, but not bogged down by it. Having previously explained in the book Guns, Germs and Steel why societies developed at differing rates across the planet, his study of the reasons why they collapse has become a surprise best-seller in the US.

"To my pleasant astonishment it went to the top of the charts," he says with clear pride, "out-classed only by Harry Potter and the confessions of a murderer." His study of societal suicide clearly appeals to the zeitgeist, partly because of enthralling accounts of the rise and fall of various civilisations.

"As teenagers we were all just fascinated by the collapse of ancient civilisations and cities dead and rising out of the jungle. Now I get to write about it and understand them - it's wonderful." But a book that started out as romantic mystery about abandoned cities developed into a warning from history.

"I realised that it's not the case that all past societies have collapsed. Lots have succeeded, so the book also had to wrestle with the big social problem of why such societies fail and others succeed. And finally I realised that today we're facing essentially the same sort of problems as in the past, plus some new problems. So half the book is also about the modern world and aims to help us learn from the past in order to deal with problems we are now facing."

How, though, can one compare modern First World societies with the collapse of Easter Island, an isolated, primitive culture on a speck of rock in the Pacific?

"People say it's very different and they're right. But some of the ways it's very different make our situation worse rather than better. Now we have 6.5 billion people with steel tools and nuclear technology where there were 20,000 Easter Islanders with stone tools and they still managed to destroy their environment. What we're actually doing today is much more severe. Then another view will say it's different because we are connected to a globalised world, again that makes it worse rather than better because we are dependent on all these remote countries that didn't influence us before."

Societies don't always fall in isolation, and are increasingly likely to drag others down with them. "When you look at the modern world, you look at where the US and Ireland and Britain are importing some of their essential raw materials from. They're coming from countries that are politically unstable. Some of them have already collapsed. Some are in the process of collapsing.

"And at present there are American as well as British troops in several countries that some years ago people would have laughed off as of no possible significance. Why would the US or Britain care about Rwanda or Somalia or Afghanistan or foreign oil in Iraq? That just illustrates that we are at risk from collapse of overseas countries that send us terrorists and demands for troops and illegal immigrants and strains on our economy."

In Collapse, Diamond outlines five factors in society-destroying environmental collapse: failure to understand and to prevent causes of environmental damage; climate change; hostile neighbours; the inability of friendly neighbours to continue trade; and finally, how the society itself deals with the problems raised by the first four factors.

The final one is vital, as the human race has shown a worrying tendency to forget the past and ignore the future. The conflict between economic necessity and environmental concern can get in the way. Sometimes societies prove culturally incapable of adapting, such as when Vikings in Greenland held on to a taboo against eating fish even as it became their most obvious source of food in desperate times. Even those societies that appear to have survived, such as the Inuit who remain in Greenland, did so only after failing several times before that.

Diamond illustrates the lure of short-term thinking to small farmers, governments and big business. There are a lot of problems to be faced: soil erosion, deforestation, overfishing, introductions of alien species, salinisation (the build-up of salt within the soil), climate change, pressure on fresh water supplies, depletion of energy reserves, pollution and population increase.

"I use the expression in the book 'exponential horse race', in which the force of those learning from the past is racing neck-and-neck with the force of those who appear to repeat the errors of the past. And it's not clear which horse is going to win, but I think we have a chance to win the race." Or, as he puts it pithily: "One part of them says 'no worries mate, we'll muddle on through', and the other part is very concerned about the world."

Yet, for all the drama of the title, and the tragedy of some of the people and societies he examines, it is not entirely apocalyptic. Collapse may deliver a certain cataclysmic thrill, but Diamond is at pains to point out that he is a "cautious optimist". It is not inevitable, he insists, that societies will always come and go for one reason or another. There are examples, he points out, of good long-term thinking. Western Europe looked at its situation after the second World War and decided to prevent it from happening again. The Dutch began to manage their environment in an intelligent way, while Japan, Tonga and the tiny Pacific island nation of Tikopea found ways to balance population with resources.

"North-west Europe has had complex societies for 7,000 years now. Europe has had awful setbacks associated with wars but they haven't had a large-scale collapse of society. So there is nothing inevitable about collapse, even in a difficult environment, for example, Iceland. It depends on your choices."

He is encouraged by how some sections of big business are learning to work with environmentalists, and was recently surprised to be told by a member of the US administration ("not known for its receptivity to environmental thinking") that his book was read with interest.

Nevertheless, he believes we are at a crossroads. At 67 years old, he is resigned to the fact that he is unlikely to discover how we deal with these problems, but he knows his twin 17-year-old sons will.

"It is a critical century. If things keep going as they are now, then First World society isn't going to make it to another 50 years."

• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond is published by Penguin/Allen Lane priced £20