reflects a popular view that is reinforced by environmental campaigning in Australia, but is not supported by evidence, and argues that many of his claims are easily disproved. In his review in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell highlights the way Diamond's approach differs from traditional historians by focusing on environmental issues rather than cultural questions. While Diamond does not reject the approach of traditional historians, his book, according to Gladwell, vividly illustrates the limitations of that approach. Gladwell demonstrates this with his own example of a recent ballot initiative in Oregon, where questions of property rights and other freedoms were subject to a free and healthy debate, but serious ecological questions were given scant attention. In 2006 the book was shortlisted for The Aventis Prizes for Science Books award, eventually losing out to David Bodanis's Electric Universe. Criticisms Jared Diamond's thesis that Easter Island society collapsed in isolation entirely due to environmental damage and cultural inflexibility is contested by some ethnographers and archaeologists, who argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and slave raiding, which devastated the population in the 19th century, had a much greater social impact than environmental decline, and that introduced animals—first rats and then sheep—were greatly responsible for the island's loss of native flora, which came closest to deforestation as late as 1930–1960. The book Questioning Collapse (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a collection of essays by fifteen archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians criticizing various aspects of Diamond's books Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel. The book was a result of 2006 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in response to the misinformation that Diamond's popular science publications were causing and the association decided to combine experts from multiple fields of research to cover the claims made in Diamond's and debunk them. The book includes research from indigenous peoples of the societies Diamond discussed as collapsed and also vignettes of living examples of those communities, in order to showcase the main theme of the book on how societies are resilient and change into new forms over time, rather than collapsing. Film In 2010, National Geographic released the documentary film Collapse based on Diamond's book. See also List of environmental books List of important publications in anthropology Creeping normality Decline of the Roman Empire Deforestation during the Roman period Ecocide Environmental disaster Global catastrophic risk Global warming Human impact on the environment Societal collapse