Sunday, January 02, 2005
Collapse:
I read a post at marginal revolutions a few days ago that's stayed on my mind.
Yglesias discussion link.
Tyler Cowen reviews a review of Collapse, a book about how societies fall apart.
Examples are greenland, in which the vikings died out around 1400, and easter island.
The book covers other places, but these are the ones the blog posts have covered.
What they have in common is that a) they are islands and b) they are fragile ecologically.
I want to point to two more islands where there has been collapse: sitka, and island where the hobbits lived in harmony with little elephants. On sitka, 4,500 years ago,
pygmy mammoths were the last of their kind, until found by people, and eaten. Apparently the same thing happened to the hobbits and their pachyderm buddies.
Mammoths may or may not come back as a result of unfreezing and cloning.
On both easter island and greenland, people cut down the trees and overgrazed the pastures, turning forests into deserts. The smaller the island,the quicker an exotic parasite can destroy an ecology. Rabbits, rats, mongeese, but mostly people.
England is bigger, well maybe not bigger, let's say warmer, than greenland. Cultural practices that destroyed greenland, leading to collapse and starvation, did not utterly destroy england and scotland and wales, but did throughtly transform the ecology. Sherwood Forest is now Sherwood lawn. The kind of old growth oak forest in which Robin Hood fought the law now exists in a small patch in Poland on the border with Russia, but it was hard hit during WWII.
The dodo, the passenger pigeon, the Sumatran tiger, gone.
The panda, the bengal tiger, the manatee, the gorilla, the chimp, threatened.
Since about earth day 1970 some of us have been shocked and appalled, seeing the collapse going on, walking around dazed and freaked out, while others are just oblivious. Yes, there's a space program and yes there's cloning and dna mapping,and some progress being made to save a few of the endangered here and there.
But the collapse continues. It is madness to eat beef when doing so kills the planet.
Madness. So I live among cannibals, who look at me funny when I freak out when they eat each other. OK, that's the rant for the day, going back to my book now.
I read a post at marginal revolutions a few days ago that's stayed on my mind.
Yglesias discussion link.
Tyler Cowen reviews a review of Collapse, a book about how societies fall apart.
Examples are greenland, in which the vikings died out around 1400, and easter island.
The book covers other places, but these are the ones the blog posts have covered.
What they have in common is that a) they are islands and b) they are fragile ecologically.
I want to point to two more islands where there has been collapse: sitka, and island where the hobbits lived in harmony with little elephants. On sitka, 4,500 years ago,
pygmy mammoths were the last of their kind, until found by people, and eaten. Apparently the same thing happened to the hobbits and their pachyderm buddies.
Mammoths may or may not come back as a result of unfreezing and cloning.
On both easter island and greenland, people cut down the trees and overgrazed the pastures, turning forests into deserts. The smaller the island,the quicker an exotic parasite can destroy an ecology. Rabbits, rats, mongeese, but mostly people.
England is bigger, well maybe not bigger, let's say warmer, than greenland. Cultural practices that destroyed greenland, leading to collapse and starvation, did not utterly destroy england and scotland and wales, but did throughtly transform the ecology. Sherwood Forest is now Sherwood lawn. The kind of old growth oak forest in which Robin Hood fought the law now exists in a small patch in Poland on the border with Russia, but it was hard hit during WWII.
The dodo, the passenger pigeon, the Sumatran tiger, gone.
The panda, the bengal tiger, the manatee, the gorilla, the chimp, threatened.
Since about earth day 1970 some of us have been shocked and appalled, seeing the collapse going on, walking around dazed and freaked out, while others are just oblivious. Yes, there's a space program and yes there's cloning and dna mapping,and some progress being made to save a few of the endangered here and there.
But the collapse continues. It is madness to eat beef when doing so kills the planet.
Madness. So I live among cannibals, who look at me funny when I freak out when they eat each other. OK, that's the rant for the day, going back to my book now.
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