Jared Diamond spoke last night to a sold out crowd for the Long Now Foundation.
In Jared Diamond's best-selling book, Collapse, he tells of the collapse of Easter Island, a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world.
But the Easter Islanders also cut down their rich rain forest and doomed themselves. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.
Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes:
"Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem."
"This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it."
"Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research."
"Just have faith. God will provide."
The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer.
He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests--- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past.
Overall, it's a failure to think long term.
That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops. Thus the American wealthy these days can enjoy private security, private education, and private retirement money. Thus America itself can act like a gated community in relation to the rest of the world, imagining that events in remote Somalia or Afghanistan have nothing to do with us. Isolation, Diamond declared, is never a solution to long-term problems.
SOURCE: Long Now Foundation
