December 26, 2004
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Jared Diamond in Seed Magazine:
What became of Norse Greenland and the other societies that have been famous victims of full-fledged collapse? How could even one of these societies, once so mighty, end up collapsing? Lurking behind this mystery is a nagging thought: Might such a fate eventually befall our own wealthy societies? Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York City's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Mayan cities?
It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. In recent decades, scientists have confirmed this suspicion of unintended ecological suicide--ecocide.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 07:24 AM | Permalink
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Jared Diamond is right on the money, as he has been for some time. At a global level, humanity is behaving like a giant bacterial colony: exponential growth until possible at the expense of whatever nutrients are available, then collapse. Local populations throughout history have already gone through this process, and now humanity as a whole is doing so on a planetary scale. The main difference between us and a bacterial colony is that we have nowhere else to go, once we consume or degrade the one source of growth medium we have. We seem to behave as if we believed that perpetual growth in both population and standards of living is possible despite limited resources. This is an impossibility, yet humanity does not appear to have internalized the implications of its own success.
To avoid eco-suicide, in addition to giving up unsustainable development and consumption, humanity should develop a wholly new attitude towards procreation and population. Will Homo sapiens be able to do so? We are, alas, smart enough to take over this planet's ecosystem, but will we smart enough not to destroy it? I am not very optimistic, as long as our collective behavior is driven mostly by the same instincts that drive other predatory mammals, only in more sophisticate forms: accumulate goods (hunting drive), conquer or defend "territory" (geographical or cultural, fighting drive), eat whenever and as smuch as possible (food drive) and have sex as much as possible (reproductive drive). In addition, most of us tend to think on a small spatio-temporal scale. In other words, we are wired to react to changes in our own immediate surroundings within a time scale that affects us directly, but we find it far more difficult to see the "big picture" and act upon it. So, each of us can sleep at night without thinking of Indonesian forests going up in smoke or desertification in Africa and Asia, because the consequences of these events do not affect us directly in the short term. These drives and short-term thought patterns are hardwired into our brains by eons of evolution. Reason appeared much later. Will it be able to take the driver's seat? For all the wise thoughts humanity produces, such as the ones appearing in this website, most of us spend our lives doing the exact same thing that bacteria, beetles or mice do: find "food" and reproduce.
I fervently hope to be wrong. The real test of whether we have developed beyond other animals will be this: is our reason capable of overriding our basic instincts and preventing them from bringing about our own collapse?
Posted by: Lucio Miele | Dec 27, 2004 3:27:29 PM
As you read Jared Diamond the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, keep in mind the diversity of his positions, such as his published work in Nature on ethnic differences in testis size.
Posted by: Bob S. | Jan 3, 2005 7:20:34 PM
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