JDG said: > At the end of the day, this chapter seems like a laundry list of > environmental problems facing Montana. That's all well and good, but a > similar list of problems could probably be produced for almost any > location you care to name. What doesn't happen is that this list of > problems isn't really connected to collapse. I think it would be more > surprising if any civilization did not have any problems, but the > existence of imperfection hardly implies potential collapse.
My reading of the entire book is that humans have had a substantial environmental impact wherever and whenever they've settled, and whether societies thrive or fail comes down in large part to whether they detect such problems and how (or even if) they try to solve them. I think the analogy that he was aiming for was between our globalised civilisation and any of his model cases, rather than merely between a local part of our civilisation - such as Montana or Australia - and one of those earlier models. What really surprised me was how optimistic the book was in the face of the many problems that Diamond outlines. Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
