“Collapse? — Are we next?” ask the flags attached to the streetlights as you cruise down Sunset Boulevard. And as you attempt to drive along the freeways, moving ever more slowly across a city faced with increasing water shortages, random gunfire and neighbouring districts that are racially and culturally divided, the appropriate response seems to be: “You bet!”

Looking ahead: a series of experts outline some of the problems facing southern California. Credit: B. ROGERS/NAT. HIST. MUS. OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY

The flags promote an exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County that provides a strong taste of the threats to our survival, and a sobering sense of past civilizations' failures to meet them. Stimulated by Jared Diamond's book Collapse (Viking/Allen Lane, 2005; reviewed in Nature 433, 15–16; 2005), the exhibition is an excellent attempt to persuade citizens to face up to the problems that increasingly confront them. The reality is that Angelenos have little to fear, provided that they and their nation avoid the mistakes highlighted in the exhibition.

If there is one message that emerges clearly from Diamond's comprehensive survey of past and present societies in trouble, it is the importance of anticipating and responding appropriately to the portents of collapse. This means you need to capture a population's attention. Ruefully, Vanda Vitali, the exhibition's originator, acknowledges that Los Angeles is not a museum-going city, at least in comparison with Europe. But the exhibition has attracted strong media coverage and a healthy attendance, not least from schools. The museum is set to launch an interactive extension to accommodate feedback and spontaneous discussions, alongside monthly debates involving citizens and their leaders.

Diamond's unusual approach to history, as previously exhibited in the phenomenally successful Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1997), is to treat it in a scientific fashion akin to evolutionary biology and cosmology. Unable to tweak the world in order to test theories, he conducts copious surveys and analyses in order to discern key principles. Thus Collapse surveys many past societies, from Easter Island to Greenland, analysing in detail how each failed or succeeded in coping with some or all of five factors: climate change; decline in support from neighbours or trading partners; hostile neighbours; loss of environmental services; and, critically, how the society dealt with the problems facing it.

In contrast to Diamond's comprehensive coverage, Vitali and her team have achieved a triumph of economy. The failure of the Mayas is highlighted by a sizeable reconstruction of the pyramid and temple of Tikal, set starkly alongside blown-up photos of the ruins, taken before they were excavated. This is in mournful and salutary contrast to the richness of Mayan life as portrayed on its plates and vessels.

Comfortingly, the exhibition depicts a past success, too: the top-down management of forest resources by the Shogun of Japan's Tokugawa region in the nineteenth century. This is effectively represented by the simplicity of a Japanese domestic interior decorated with scrolls describing Japanese forest management and emblems of Samurai leadership.

The visitor is then transported to a contemporary society under threat: Australia. Here I feel that the exhibition failed to convey just how daunting is the litany of threats now facing that arid and hypersaline continent.

At this point the exhibition turns from the concrete to the conceptual, focusing one by one on the five factors identified by Diamond. Anyone familiar with museums knows of that sense of fraying patience and concentration when overly didactic exhibitors confront the visitor with text piled on text. This exhibition takes a radical step to avoid that risk: the concepts are illustrated with almost no text and with the most simple Bayeux tapestry-like cartoon narratives. This controversial strategy pays off. The concepts are explicit enough and are easily comprehended. And they are popular, according to Vitali. As one grandmother said to her: “It allows me to look intelligent to my grandchildren as I tell them the stories.”

So far, so good. But these displays would leave little lasting impression were the exhibition not framed by today's people, captured on video for the exhibition. At the outset, Montana is depicted, the place from where Diamond embarks on his own narrative: spacious, inspiring nature undermined by the quietly devastating effects of logging, mining and holiday-home ownership by people with no stake in the area. And at the end of the exhibition, there is southern California: a 12-minute cycle of voices from experts on water, power, climate and planning, explaining the choices that need to be made if the region is to cope with the increasing pressures on support systems that its citizens could all too easily take for granted. Encouragingly, Vitali tells of visitors staying and listening several times over.

Diamond's book showed that the threat to southern California is as nothing compared with the grave dangers that ultimately extinguished the Mayans — and, for that matter, the Easter Islanders, the Chaco culture of what is now the southwest United States and Mexico, and the Greenlanders. It also shows, however, how relationships with neighbours, threats to water from climate change, and environmental degradation are unavoidable challenges. It is hard to imagine a more successful illumination of those challenges than this exhibition.

Travelling exhibitions are money-losers. But this exhibition deserves to be seen beyond Los Angeles. Southern California is famous enough, thanks to Hollywood, for a presentation of its problems to serve a purpose even outside the United States. Better still would be for local museums to adapt the exhibition, soliciting video narratives of foreseeable threats from their local citizens and leaders. Next stop Australia?