Societies rise and collapse in history. The author, Jared diamond compared many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility; relations with neighbors, political institutions… His goal was to find out the influence of possible input variables on collapses. He found out deforestation might be one of the main reasons. His examples included 81 Pacific islands, medieval Vikings from Norway etc. History may repeat as modern Rwandans and Chinese are doing the same thing.
At the first few paragraph, he gave a scary example: the tale of two farms. One farm is a typical American farm and the other one was Gardar barn in Greenland was abandoned over 500 years ago. The society collapsed completely: thousands of inhabitants starved to death, were killed in civil unrest or war against an enemy, or emigrated, until nobody remained alive. No one back than ever thought about the society would collapse. They were expending their farmlands, just like the modern American farmers do.
By learning from the past, we can predict the future. However, the path would not be easy. Nowadays, there are new problems we face today: human caused climate change, build up of toxic chemical, energy shortage... According to the Jared, we would not able to apply the solution from the past directly to solve the problem we are facing today.
P.S. It was unexpected that according to Jared, the big businesses found it in their interests to adopt environmental safeguards more draconian and effective than national parks.
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