Comments on: Jared Diamond on Collapse

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:01:29 +0000

I really enjoyed Jared Diamonds book, we only had to read part II for my upper level history class. I dont really agree with him that the world will suffer the same fate as easter island or the mayans or anasazi but i still think its a great book. One thing that should be on peoples mind is that we all need to take care of our world, we are all brothers and sisters.

By: Helen

Helen — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 11:31:26 +0000

I would recommend to read that book. It deserves an excellent mark.

By: Gringo Goiano

Gringo Goiano — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 05:45:10 +0000

Mr. Jared Diamond (author of that interesting “Collapse” book) suffers from a lack of imagination. He should be wildly optimistic about the future of humanity.

Mr. Diamond shows in his book that the Norwegians in Greenland never ate fish even though they were plentiful. Had they maintained this cultural habit from the homeland, or re-learned it from the competing Inuit, they might have survived a few hundred more years till the Little Ice Age retreated and then I’d be writing this in some Norwegian dialect. Their stupid taboo has doomed me to write this in English instead.

Mr. Diamond also talks about the current drought in Australia, and the continuing devastation wrought by those pesky wabbits the colonists introduced hundreds of years ago that take the precious pasture from that most favorite of all Australian animals, the sheep. When full-time drought and famine strike Australia and the rest of the world, and the Americans, Chinese, Australians, Indians, and sheep all eat each other
and die, the aboriginal population will survive on those wonderful rabbits and come in time to dominate the world. They’ll spread out from their current base of Australia and the highlands of New Guinea, reclaim Southeast Asia, spread west and
north into Eurasia, Africa, make it to the New New World, and dominate.

In the mean time, the last copy of Mr. Diamond’s book will burn along with many others in a Parisian library in some riot over confiscated cheese, and much of Western Thought and Civilization will then be lost forever.

… and so it goes, the chasing after the wind, nothingness in newness under the sun. Introduced foreign species have a role, and kudzu and rabbits will be pivotal in the next surge of civilization. Count on it. The future belongs to the aborigines , New Guineans, and the East Timorese.

By: Murray

Murray — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:35:04 +0000

Australia does have a water problems but Jared Diamond is exagerating it. Australia is a dry country that has regular droughts. Sometimes long, sometimes short. At the moment Melbourne’s water reservoirs are 52% full and water restrictions are in place. This means that you cant wash your driveway or water your lawn between 10am and 6pm. However there is still plenty of water for farming, drinking, pools etc.

There is no crisis.

By: Adina Levin

Adina Levin — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 22:33:07 +0000

Thanks for blogging the talk! I thought about coming up from Palo Alto but saw that it was admission-fee-optional and it would probably be full very early.

By: coturnix

coturnix — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 20:53:47 +0000

Australia chapter is the most worrisome in the book. I have reviewed it at length about a month ago on my blog.

By: Ian Wojtowicz

Ian Wojtowicz — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 18:19:00 +0000

If you’re interested in water, you should talk to Antonia Hirsch and ask her about her maps.

By: Noel

Noel — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:20:36 +0000

Professor Diamond’s work is truly amazing. I’m waiting for the soft cover version of Collapse (I’m running out of book space). I tore through his Guns Germs and Steel and it had a direct impact on some of the work I’m involved in at the moment, forwarding the concept of structural racism in progressive justice philanthropy. Basically SR is a systemic analysis of racism moving away from the tired notion of individual racial animus and race relations and looking at the relationships of institutions and structures that are at the root of and perpetuate inequality. Diamond’s view of history is one of a wave of “natural ordering” in which white Western Europeans got the luck of the draw by virtue of favorable geography, and natural resources, etc. that gave them the advantage and allowed them to colonize the world. I would add that it doesn’t stop there, that just as the world has “ordered” us we continue to order the world (eachother) within racial, ethnic, and cultural hierarchies. The answer to Yali’s question is also the answer to why we have large swathes of concentrated poverty in the U.S. That its not a matter of individual responisbility or innate ability but the result of a mass, spatial ordering of people. I initailly made this comment at the Applied Research Center’s Race and Public Policy Conference at UC Berkeley to noted civil rights scholar john powell (he also spells his name in lower case) Professor powell is the director of the Kirwan Institute for Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He is also an admirer of Diamond’s work as it is not just a recounting of our pre-history but a reflection of our current global situtation. He’s one of the leading thinkers on structural and spatial racism and I’m thrilled to be working with him on these issues.

Anyway, I caught your wonderful essay on The Best Software Writing vol.I and stumbled upon your blog. I’m a librarian/grantmaker for the Open Society Institute working on social justice and civil rights philanthropy and proselytizing the need for our progressive justice movment to embrace the social life of information!

‘Nuff Respect!
-Noel Pinero

By: Irina

Irina — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 15:02:04 +0000

when I used to live in parts where there were lots of aussi’s and kiwi’s, I was always impressed by their tenacity for water-conservation. My friends would wash dishes just so, use the dishwasher only on economy and only when it’s chock full of dishes, insist on making sure all the taps were off, pester me to turn off my water tap while i am brushing my teeth and glare at me for very long showers (if you are gonna spend half an hour in the shower, take a bath instead! one of them told me once). It was both amusing and a little instructive – they have grown up in an area of the world where water was not a given and, at some point not too long, experienced a drought. In the US, they conserved both out of habit and belief even though we were renting and none of us actually paid for the amount of water used (besides, there were 6-ft tall snow banks outside).

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 14:20:37 +0000

Yes. The water situation is Sydney is that drastic and the situation is similar in many other parts of the Australian continent. At the moment there is the world’s largest desalination plant being organized for Kurnell, a coastal suburb in Sydney. Many of the residents do not want it near their houses but the state government representative says the issue is “beyond public debate”.

“The proposed plant has been declared “critical infrastructure”, allowing it to bypass the normal approval process, so that the Government can fast-track its construction.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Maybe that’s what they also said on Easter Island.

A great book on the subject of how humans manage to waste their environment over and over again is “The Future Eaters” (1994) by Dr. Tim Flannery-

“We are all Future Eaters. Together we’ve so upset the balance of life here that we threaten the very land that support us and through that our own survival.”