Montana's decline

This week's Green Party Bulletin reprints (e-prints?) a book review in Scientific American of Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Diamond is a Pulitzer Prize-winning geography professor at UCLA. Here's an excerpt from the review:

Diamond begins with the failed state of Montana. Montana? Well, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tenured professor can take the liberty of giving priority to his passions. So Diamond the ardent fly-fisherman, defender of ecological pristineness, sympathetic friend of the farming "locals" has come to the sad conclusion that Montana is going to the dogs. Once one of the richest states of the union, it now ranks among the poorest, having squandered its nonrenewable mineral resources and savagely over-logged its forests. Maybe worst of all, some cad put pike into the trout waters.

According to the review, ecological devastation, particularly over-logging, are a major factor in the decline of civilizations, such as the Maya and Anaszai.