Additional Reading

If any of you are interested in additional readings regarding environmental degradation and its effects on future generations there are two books by Jared Diamond, which are really interesting! (He won the Pulitzer Prize for one of them.) The author does a really good job of explaining past environmental consequences effects on the modern world and relates them to problems we are facing today. (My favorite is Easter Island and his research in New Guinea.) They are not easy books to get through, but are well worth the time!

I’ve given a synopsis (taken from Amazon.Com) below:

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: Describes how and why western societies developed immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Most of this work deals with non-Europeans, but Diamond's thesis sheds light on why Western civilization became hegemonic: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." Those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs.

Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass his follow-up book. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. This book also spells out what happens when we squander our resources, ignore the signals the environment gives us, and we reproduce too fast, or cut down too many trees. What makes one environment more fragile than another?