Diamond cites multiple factors Essay

A bilgewater of two very similar heightens, 500 years apart in time, in Montana and in Greenland respectively, sets the scene for Jared Diamonds shoo-in round the known world with an ecological bee in his bonnet. One farm prospered, and the other collapsed. Here ends the first reading, and sure enough, another few 12 parables of human folly follow immediately after. The book reads like a sequel to Diamonds Pulitzer Prize winning title of 1997 Guns, Germs and steel The Fates of Human Societies even though the focus this time is more hard on the societies that failed.The same cherry-picking formula is used, and the same breezy tone makes dampen a fairly easy read, despite its heavy theme and cavernous range. The books central thesis is that it is geography, more than history, that at last causes the transfer of individual human communities and societies. This is perhaps not surprising from a professor of geology and physiology at the University of California in Los Angeles. The frozen wastes of Greenland and the striking stone transports of easterly Island are presented as grim re pointers of past civilisations.Diamond cites multiple factors such as environmental change, climate change, hostile neighbours, loss of trading partners and a poor response to emerging environmental problems as the causes of diminish and ultimately the collapse of these societies. He is at his best when he talks astir(predicate) smaller, more isolated and pre-industrial groups, putting us all in mind of an earlier time when people generally lived in villages rather than cities.The book shifts, however, and applies the same kind of analysis to large city-based civilizations like the ancient Maya of randomness America and more mixed modern-day economies such as chinaware and Australia. In these cases, as they say, the plot thickens and when Diamond gets his crystal ball out, he predicts that China, the lurching giant will contract to apply its typical top-down Draconi an pressures to environmental issues in the same way that it enforced a tight curb on the birth rate.Diamonds innocuous interpretation of Chinas brutal one child ruling as family planning policies bold and effectively carried out underplays the culture shift that would posit to occur if ever a western democracy were to try a similar tactic in aid of environmental reforms. One keept help thinking that Diamond has not moreover got his head round the concept of globalization and the astonishing capacity that modern democracies have for technological solutions to the old crises of supply and demand of raw resources.His rather silken conclusion Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in closing off for the first time we face the risk of a global decline simply expands the primitive pattern to a bigger scale. This book is a wake up call. Some of its claims are exaggerated, as when the situation of modern Australia is compared to an exponentially accelerat ing horse race which for Diamond means accelerating in the stylus of a nuclear chain reaction. The metaphors may be hopelessly mixed, exactly the point he is making is clear and critically important.After a leisurely wander through most of human civilisation as we know it, Diamond draws sobering conclusions about the cost of mistakes that we should, theoretically at least, be able to predict and deal with before they become fateful and final errors. While we may not be able to oblige with all of his conclusions, we certainly are in debt to Jared Diamond for providing us with, yet again, a gripping sequence of well-drawn episodes and plenty of food for thought.