{"id":26354,"date":"2005-01-31T12:44:39","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T17:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arlingtoninstitute.org\/?p=26354"},"modified":"2020-10-02T10:39:46","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T14:39:46","slug":"volume-8-number-2-january-31-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arlingtoninstitute.org\/volume-8-number-2-january-31-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Volume 8, Number 2 – January 31 , 2005"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Volume 8, Number 2
\nJanuary 31 , 2005
\nEdited by John L. Petersen
\njohnp@arlingtoninstitute.org<\/a><\/p>\n

See past issues in the Archives<\/a><\/p>\n

In This Issue:<\/span><\/p>\n

Book Review<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed<\/em>
\nFuture Facts<\/span><\/a>\u00a0– from Think Links
\nThink Links<\/span><\/a>\u00a0– The Future in the News\u2026Today
\nA Final Quote<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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At The Arlington Institute, we believe that to understand the future, you need to have an open mind and cast a very wide net. To that end,\u00a0FUTUREdition<\/strong>\u00a0explores a cross-disciplinary palette of issues, from the frontiers of science and technology to major developments in mass media, geopolitics, the environment, and social perspectives.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>Book review of\u00a0Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed<\/em>\u00a0by Jared Diamond, reviewed by Malcom Gladwell and published on December 29, 2004 by\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0magazine.
\nhttp:\/\/www.energybulletin.net\/newswire.php?id=3782<\/a><\/p>\n

In his previous best-seller\u00a0Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/em>, which won a Pulitzer Prize, Jared Diamond looked at environmental and structural factors to explain why Western societies came to dominate the world. In\u00a0Collapse<\/em>, he continues that approach, only this time he looks at history\u2019s losers\u2014like the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans.<\/p>\n

We live in an era preoccupied with the ways in which ideology, culture, politics and economics help shape the course of history. But Diamond isn\u2019t particularly interested in any of those things\u2014or, at least, he\u2019s interested in them only insofar as they bear on what to him is the far more important question, which is a society\u2019s relationship to its climate, geography, natural resources and neighbors.\u00a0Collapse<\/em>\u00a0is a book about the most prosaic elements of the earth\u2019s ecosystem\u2014soil, trees, and water\u2014because societies fail, in Diamond\u2019s view, when they mismanage those environmental factors.<\/p>\n

Diamond\u2019s argument stands in sharp contrast to the conventional explanations for a society\u2019s collapse. Usually, we look for some kind of cataclysmic event. But Diamond\u2019s perspective and the lesson of\u00a0Collapse<\/em>\u00a0is that societies, as often as not, aren\u2019t \u201cmurdered\u201d. They commit suicide: they slit their wrists and then, in the course of many decades, stand by passively and watch themselves bleed to death. However, Diamond quite convincingly defends himself against the charge of environmental determinism. His discussions are always nuanced, and he gives political and ideological factors their due.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>FUTURE FACTS – FROM THINK LINKS<\/span>
\nDID YOU KNOW THAT…<\/span><\/p>\n