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Yet Oxfam's Duncan Green wrote, "As of 2003, Cuba was the only country in the world that managed to live within its environmental footprint while achieving high levels of human development. This is not so: for example, through good forest management, Europe's forest area is growing by about 0.5 million hectares a year.He notes the conflict between the short-term interests of those in power and society's long-term interests, writing, "what makes money for a business, at least in the short run, may be harmful for society as a whole." But he defends capitalism's most powerful bodies, the multinational corporations, while admitting that profit not welfare drives all their activities.The logic of his argument leads him to call for long-term planning and a reconsideration of our core values, but he never says a word against capitalism and never mentions Cuba. But Diamond wrongly asserts that environmental problems are `accelerating exponentially'.
He writes, "This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. Four of those factors - environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, and friendly trade partners - may or may not prove significant for a particular society. Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography and Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The fifth set of factors - the society's responses to its environmental problems - always proves significant."Currently, some countries are indeed depleting their forests, wetlands, coral reefs, wild fish stocks (he fails to mention the EU's disastrous Common Fisheries Policy), species, farmland soil, freshwater underground aquifers and fossil fuels. This was probably due to its unique combination of sound environmental management, excellent health and education provision, and an inability to generate sustained growth in the market economy." (From poverty to power, 2008, page 114). My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies) had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years."Part One looks at the environmental problems of modern Montana, Part Two at some failed societies - Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, the Anasazi civilisation in the US Southwest, the Maya, and Norse Greenland.
Part Three looks at five modern societies, Rwanda, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, China and Australia, Part Four at the lessons.He shows how people have in the past inadvertently destroyed the resources on which their societies depended, by "deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people." Now there are four new threats: "human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity." Diamond outlines "a five-point framework of possible contributing factors that I now consider in trying to understand any putative environmental collapse.
And for that reason, it started to lose my interest about midway through. It's a matter of survival. It's not about being able to go camping. The answer of this book's central question (Why do societies collapse). He also uses varied cases, both in time and place--Pacific Islanders, Anasazi, Vikings, Mayans, modern Rwanda and Australia and his home state of Montana, where the current struggle for land management is critical. To be sure, there are interesting stories.
When a society depletes its resources, through mismanagement or war, or because its population grows so large that its natural resources cannot support it, collapse is eminent. Diamond is probably best known for his book GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES, which dissected the reasons that certain societies thrive while others sputter and die out. And it's hard not to compare this book to that one, as both cover similar territory. The way it happens varies from case to case, and Diamond outlines several factors that can create, or combine to create, natural catastrophe.
And we see this again and again. It's resource management. Diamond does not take a tree-hugger's perspective to the issue of environmentalism, and there is nothing obviously political in his approach.
Because, as the cases illustrate, environmentalism is not a political matter. is that they use up their natural resources. It's a cautionary tale, for certain, but he both criticizes and applauds modern efforts by governments, organizations and corporations for their roles in resource management. But while GUNS continually introduces new principles contributing to the fate of societies throughout the book, Collapse seemed to just introduce new cases to illustrate the same principles repeatedly.
But with all these varied examples, it's the same story over and over. There is no mystery, as the title of the book suggests. I was fascinated by the Easter Island section, in which it seems that those giant statues for which the islanders became so famous were most likely the greatest cause of their demise; so many resources were burned through as different groups on the island competed to build larger monuments that before too long, there were no trees and the environment was in shambles. And perhaps that's why it felt monotonous to me at parts.
If we can do this to a once lush and beautiful island like Santo Domingo, how can we avoid doing it everywhere as our numbers grow.He dutifully reports the devastation to be found in modern China, too, though offering a few salutary examples of societies which managed to recognize and reverse the process such as Shogunate Japan which, self-isolated from the rest of the world and with a powerful central government, managed to impose strict rules upon its constituent states to halt the stripping of that country's natural forests. And that's pretty depressing because I share with Diamond a passion for the natural world we humans seem bent on washing away under our feet.Stuart W. When he gets to modern Haiti and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Dominican Republic (two nations which share the same island of Santo Domingo) the damage that man has done to his habitat is nearly terrifying. Alas, as Diamond reminds us, Japan is less protective when it comes to plundering the planet's resources outside its borders and that is ultimately a problem since we're all on this one hunk of rock together, hurtling through space with no immediate prospects of anywhere else to go.The problem, unfortunately, is that Diamond's moderate optimism in the final chapter (that we can all do what the Japanese shoguns did in their country and what some New Guinea natives managed to do in theirs to halt the depredations of the entire planet) falters on the realization that his ultimate prescription is for massive change in how we live and in the level of prosperity we have become used to.
In the present book Diamond returns to this earlier theme of human ecological rapaciousness and shows how archaeology and paleontology provide ample evidence of human societies repeatedly bringing about their own collapse through the ages. Our own country, he notes is rapidly losing its forests, clean water and native species, too.If the Third Chimpanzee is invariably destructive, Diamond wants to tell us we can only change the outcome by altering what we are. How "green" must we be. People in the third world have to voluntarily surrender their potential to live like today's first worlders and those of us in the so-called first world have to set the example by accepting lower living standards than we have become accustomed to. While many societies have obviously survived and prospered to date (or we wouldn't now be threatening the entire planet, as Diamond sees it), our societies tend to rapidly consume the more fragile environments in which they take root, bringing on their own collapse.
Diamond makes a powerful case for the importance of a robust natural environment but everything he presents tells us we humans are devastating to that. It's much, much bigger and more resilient but, as he notes, it's not infinite and a large enough human population will certainly exhaust it. From modern Montana in the United States to the disasters that befell the Easter Islanders and their Polynesian kinsman on other fairly isolated islands (Pitcairn, Henderson and Mangareva) to the collapse of the southwest Pueblo native Americans to the Mayans, and on to the failed Norse experiment of Greenland and the destruction their Norse kinsmen wreaked on their fragile environment of Iceland. The main theme of this lengthy and substantial book is that human beings invariably leave too great a footprint and that, given current human population levels, we've now just about infested the entire planet with nowhere else to go (barring substantial advances in space travel and better opportunities out there).
If he's right, then refusing to change and adapt must inevitably do us in as it did the Norse "chieftains" of Greenland who, he tells us, hoarded resources and refused to change their mode of living in order to continue as "Europeans" in a most non-European environment, an environment that offered survival only to those prepared to live more like the Innuit (Eskimos).Diamond wants us to go green but, more than that, he wants us to recognize the destruction we humans bring with us everywhere and change it by changing ourselves. Nor, he reminds us, will we necessarily know when we cross the point of no return as the Easter Islanders did not know on their little homeland which hasn't regenerated itself to this day. Diamond's prescriptions don't work unless the vast majority of mankind signs on or a strong enough centralized state takes over and forces the issue the way the Chinese government forced massive population control. Of course, the planet is not Easter Island. Mirskyauthor of The King of Vinland's Saga
As Jared Diamond shows again and again, through a large number of fairly well documented and examined examples, human societies tend to consume the environments in which they are established. Now, as Diamond notes at this book's end, we've reached the point where we're testing the fragility of the Earth itself.In an earlier work (The Third Chimpanzee) Diamond focused on the kind of destructive primate that humans are as seen by an imaginary visitor from the stars. We cannot be "green" enough, he seems to be telling us, and that looks like a problem because people don't change their values easily nor is it always clear to all that they should, even if it seems clear to some. I wanted to see if the Greenland he depicted matched the country I had envisioned based on the research I had done and, to my pleasant surprise, it did. Nor, he reminds us, has Iceland, where humans have managed to persist.
And there is the problem. The reasons Diamond gave for the Norse collapse there largely mirrored the society I had depicted in its formative stage with all the problems already inherent in its system, prompting me to a certain respect for Diamond's assessment, even if I think his thesis overly grim and his proposed solutions nearly unlikely, at least at this stage in human history. But aside from the challenge of achieving such change (movement away from fossil fuels, reduction in populations, reduction in the agricultural use of land, etc)., what about the cost of altering our values enough to accept a larger, more powerful, more intrusive state.On a different front, I was especially interested to see what Diamond had to say about Greenland because, a few years back, I wrote an historical novel partly set there. But it may well take a much more imminent disaster than we're currently facing and a much more powerful central state than the old Japanese Shogunate.
Ouch.While everything comes to an end, and it's not unrealistic to expect our world to do so as well at some point in the future, Diamond argues that we can stave that off longer than would otherwise be the case and make those salvaged years more rewarding for our posterity by bequeathing them a green world instead of a denuded planet. We would, he suggested, be looked on, not as a unique species, but as one (and, of course, the most successful) of three chimp species because we're so close in genetic makeup to chimps (of which there are two distinct species in the natural world, making us, of course, the third). We need central controls and plans to save the planet that can be enforced and, most importantly, we need to stop hungering for more and accept a less consumption-oriented global civilization. In the end, Diamond's argument is for humans to change their values, their preferences, their goals and even their beliefs about themselves, a prescription diametrically opposed to the values of individual freedom that have made us successful.If he's right, then such values are anachronisms just as the competitiveness that drove the Easter Island chiefs to plunder their tiny homeland in vain competition to outshine their fellows was and, ultimately is, disastrous.
As Diamond demonstrates, the more fragile the environment, the more certain that humans will wreak havoc upon it.After reading the book through, though, it's hard to see how we could do anything else. Diamond is right to note that if the globe is teetering on the precipice of collapse, as Easter Island and the Mayan city states were in their era, then radical rethinking and massive behavioral changes are required.
For the price, I would have thought someone could have at least used grammar checker.I am glad I didn't pay for it. And to make his whole pontifical tone more annoying, it is poorly edited and poorly proofread. I have thrown the book away to be sure that at least one copy of his pretentious, superficial tripe goes no further. This pompous person, i.e., liberal professor, makes silly assumptions and writes them in a bombastic style. The usual professorial position is taken: you must think as I think or you are demented, stupid and/or dangerous.
Highly recommended. Providing a framework of five major factors that led the greatest civilization to collapse, the author warns that all five factors are not only present in the modern world but eerily and recklessly ignored by the societies who based on the accumulated knowledge about the history of past should probably know better. You almost can feel the frustration the author pours into this book. As you would expect from Jared Diamond, the book is a well-researched, well-supported,scientific study with a peculiar sense of humor which I must admit I came to like.
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