What Do You Think The Easter Islander Who Chopped Down The Last Tree Said

2005 September 22, Thursday, 19:40

Professor Jared Diamond, Spoke About The History Of The World's Lost Civilisations

One particular bloke, Professor Jared Diamond, spoke about the history of the world's lost civilisations, the lost cities and lost nations of the not so very distant past, why are they deserted and left uninhabited and depopulated? Basically cause they all cut down their fertile forests and destroyed their food resources, that is, they ruined their environments, which is what I been saying for yonks... You've got all these religious wankers carrying on about the biblical lands which is where the Fertile Crescent allowed them to get started on farming and domesticating animals, not so fortuitous as it turned out, cause today it's the worst hell on earth, and a cruel god divined desert...

What Do You Think The Easter Islander Who Chopped Down The Last Tree Said

Here's some extracts off the ABC transcript from the author of "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" which explain so much:

Why On Earth Did These People Do Such Dumb Things? My students at the University of California asked me a question whose significance I hadn’t appreciated as yet. Why on earth did these people do such dumb things, chop down trees, too many trees. Why didn’t they realise that they were getting into trouble? What do you think the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree said as he was doing it? And my students suggested various answers. One answer was, maybe that islander said: ‘Never fear, technology will solve our problems by finding a substitute for wood’. Or maybe he said: ‘Keep big government of the federal chiefs off my back, this is my private property and I can do what I want with it’. Or perhaps he said: ‘Your fears are exaggerated; your ecological models are untested; we need more research; a ban on logging would be premature’. Or the week before last – remember, I’m from the United States where we have a large evangelical portion of our population. So the week before last someone suggested to me maybe the person who chopped down the last tree said: ‘Never fear, have faith, God will provide for us’. Professor Jared Diamond

 

The Role Of The Elite In A Society.

The Wealthy People In A Society Are Able To Insulate Themselves From The Consequences Of Their Own Actions When I was trying to understand again why some societies solve their problems and other fail to solve their problems, I eventually realised that the societies that failed to solve their problems often contain a blueprint for failure. And that blueprint for failure is when the elite, the politicians and the wealthy people in a society are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions. If the leading politicians and the rich can insulate themselves from their actions then they are removed from the motivation, they aren’t healing the problems of society and they’re not motivated to solve societies’ problems until it’s too late. ‘The Gated Community’ That’s a problem that concerns people increasingly in the United States today. In the last ten years in the US there has been a proliferation of a phenomenon that we call in the US, ‘the gated community’. It’s a living arrangement in which wealthy people live in a separate neighbourhood surrounded by a fence with a gate, cutting themselves off from the problems of society. Within the gate, people are wealthy, powerful Americans Who hire their own private security patrol, so they’re not concerned with the problems of the public police force; They drink bottled water, so they’re not concerned with the municipal water supply; Send their kids to private schools where they’re not worried about the problems of our public schools. They have private pension plans, so they’re not concerned with problems of our social security and national retirement system, And they also have private health insurance plans, so they’re not concerned with problems of our Medicare, our national medical insurance. Professor Jared Diamond

 

‘The Only People Who Think That It’s Possible To Sustain Growth Indefinitely Are Idiots And Economists’.

Question from audience: A lot of people want to live in this country from around the world and a lot of people want to live in America. Instead of shutting them out, how can we take advantage of potential population growth, sustainably? Jared Diamond: By definition you cannot. You cannot have sustainable population growth just as you cannot have fuel-efficient Hummers and you cannot have jumbo shrimp and other oxymorons. One cannot have population growth sustainably in a word of finite resources. There is a book written by a famous economist whose front page carried the slogan, ‘The only people who think that it’s possible in a world of finite resources to sustain growth indefinitely are idiots and economists’. Professor Jared Diamond

 

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