Hello, Doomsday, My Old Friend

…So is it all bad news? Dr. Diamond doesn’t think so. He points out that not all societies have been such spendthrifts with their resources. The Dominican Republic sits cheek to jowl with Haiti, sharing the same island, but where Haiti has essentially destroyed the ability of their end of the island to sustain the population, the Dominican Republican is a net exporter of food.

You also have societies that once nearly destroyed their habitats — like the Icelanders — who suffered centuries of poverty as an aftereffect of wrecking their tiny homeland, but who have since nurtured their fragile ecologies back to something approaching health and in the process brought their own societies back from the brink.

However, neither of these cases says anything particularly good for us, either as a nation or as a world. Yes, there are societies which have learned to curb their appetite for expansion and consumption. We are not one of those societies. Instead, we (both in the US, and increasingly in the world) are a society that places the short term above the long, and individual gain above benefit to the group.

Diamond goes through the factors that have kept some societies alive while others have fallen. Few, if any, of the survival factors are in our favor.

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