Posts tagged “Jared Diamond”
The privilege of the wealthy
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: in the United States … wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual [communities], use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities […]
Terrible myths
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: “The environment has to be balanced against the economy.” This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolvd to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth […]
All together now
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Today the world no longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter Island society or Maya homeland collapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. Instead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline. […]
The future awaits
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: …the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not […]
Who cares if some scraggly weed goes extinct?
I mentioned in the first Extinction Thursday why you should care about the extinction of seemingly insignificant plants. Jared Diamond puts it much better in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, “Who cares? Do you really care less for humans […]
Overpopulation
From Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: The Norse were undone by the same social glue that had enabled them to master Greenland’s difficulties. That proves to be a common theme throughout history and also in the modern world … : The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate […]