Importance of Collapse
The reason that Jerad Diamond wrote collapse is the social, political, and economic believe in the immunity of human society to environmental collapse. This interesting sentiment hails from a society that 80 years ago endured the effects that result from poor habitat management The Dust Bowl. Jared Diamond utilizes the experiences that killed past societies to warn the current societies.
Many interesting parallels exist between politics in past societies and current societies. A simple example is the collapse of the Anasazi culture. Jared diamonds explanation for the fate of the Anasazi was that they existed as a consumer society that expanded past the boundaries that the environment could support in droughts. When the droughts came, the Anasazi society’s trading partners supplied their own needs first triggering the Anasazi’s collapse. A reader might also notice the parallels to some current societies living in places marginally suited for agriculture were environmental damage destroyed the little good farm land in the area. This historically commonly resulted in the starvation of the inhabitants. Jared could have just as well and used the dust bowl, communist Russia’s agriculture policies, and the current policies of united states agriculture in eastern Montana as a replacement for Viking Greenland. The parallels between past societies that did collapse and current ones experiencing economic downturns may seem surprising. Until one realizes that, “what experiences and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.” (Georg Friedrich Hegal). Possibly truest words ever spoke. Jared Diamond shows the impacts th...
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...hurch. The same money that bought priests silks could have been spent for iron tools and weapons. They even could have attracted immigrants, which could have helped colonize Vineland where people can actually grow stuff. How is this remotely related to the present United States? Currently no one in the United States would support churches or something like the Easter Islands statues above their own well being. The current recession resulted from many factors but the chief one being people bought lots of “stuff” that was unneeded and paid for that stuff with money that they could not pay back. The limited resource that caused this economic recession being money instead of something else like sheep.
Works Cited
“Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Quotes.” Brainy Quotes. March 28, 2010
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/georg_wilhelm_friedrich_h.html
Jared Diamond is born in Boston on 1937. He is a physiologist, ecologist, and a prolific writer. Diamond has published hundreds of articles that is about science. Not only that Diamond is a writer, but he also received his Bachelor’s Degree at Harvard University in 1958 and PHD at Cambridge University in 1961. Diamond is currently working at UCLA as a professor of geography and physiology. He has done many research about ecology and the evolutionary of biology in New Guinea and many other southwest Pacific islands. Diamond has done many projects in his career. He is also a field researcher and director of the World Wildlife Fund. No only he published hundreds of articles, but he also wrote many essay in his life. One of his essay that he shared to the public is called, “The Last Americans: Environmental Collapse and the End of Civilization.” Diamond wrote this essay on June 2003. The essay that Diamond wrote is about the environment and how it is failing miserably.
The period 1550 to 1660 was a period of extreme dislocation and major change, within which saw periods boom and bust in various regions across Europe. This was followed by a much quieter period in the later 17th century that most economic historians would call recessionary. Along with the religious consequences of the Reformation and Counter Reformation came deep and lasting political changes. Northern Europe’s new religious and political freedoms came at a great cost, with decades of rebellions, wars and bloody
In history, it seems inarguably true that when a nation advanced in power and wealth, changes will soon followed. These changes affected the political, economic and social system of that nation, and often came as an advantage for wealthy individuals, while detrimental to others less fortunate. An example of this notion can be seen in American History. After the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era, America quickly surpassed Great Britain in industrial production thus became the leading nation in industrialization. However, great things do not come without a cost; the rapid technological expansion in the US would initiate the crisis of the 1890s. The crisis of the 1890s was the shift from the rural and agrarian society to a modern urban and industrial society.
The fall of Rome in 476 A.D. to people needing protection against invaders and attackers. This was a great struggle for many people, either find protection, fight for yourself, or get killed by invaders. In the legend of Robin Hood, Robin protected the people with his master archery and gave them support by giving them money that he stole from the rich. The fall of Rome also contributed to no central government which caused most of daily life to be disorganised, since there is no clear set of rules and no basic schedule for people to do what. Economic problems also rose from the fall of Rome, since established trading systems were forgotten since the government isn’t there to enforce them. In this time it was truly a struggle for people to have normal lives, let alone survive. After this actual governmental systems b...
Throughout history, social and economic affairs have separated people into the rich and poor, with those in authoritative roles struggling to defend their position. Those in power have often taken advantage of those under them. In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, severe droughts led to massive agricultural collapse in Oklahoma. The Joads were forced to leave their home in search of employment opportunities in California. Migrants often faced prejudice and aggression from the Californians. Landowners, taking advantage of the migrants desperate need for work, often treated them poorly, paying them wages too low to live on and containing them within dirty camps. Workers suffering was not only evoked the failing land, but by human heartlessness towards one another. Large banks and businesses ignored the fact that “… a majority of the people are hungry and cold…” (Steinbeck 238) Large corporations were only concerned with their own financial prospects and not the well being of the people. In Miller’s Deat...
When Europe fell into its depression, many European peasants were struggling to live. It was not a struggle of providing good lives for their families, it was a strug...
His book provides an abundance of quality information from economic reports and statistics as well as migration data, to Dust Bowl songs, photography, and poetry of the time. By doing this, Worster is able to evoke the true atmosphere of the times, appealing to a reader’s social and economic curiosities they may have when choosing to read this book. Worster is able to demonstrate parallels between the economic forces and attitudes that led to the Dust Bowl and those that persist today - capitalism being his main cause and concern. While Worster never really supplies a solid solution to this problem, he does suggest that there this something that needs or needed to be done and that government should have intervened in some way with more controls. For example, he mentions, “These capitalist-minded individuals were still permitted the freedom to live where they chose, to own as much land as they liked, to plant whatever they wanted, and to pursue gain without much hindrance,” (152-154). Worster’s passion toward his area of study is apparent in the pages of this book. He is able to offer us a unique perspective as an actual inhabitant of the area affected by the Dust Bowl while still remaining unbiased and bringing about broader perspectives as well.
The decline of the Han, China, the Roman Empires “Third Century Crisis”, and the United States today occurred (or are occurring- the United States) for many reasons. Economy is one of the most common and often the first domino to send a land into decline. Another mutuality between the three events is population. Also, government is a large contributing factor in any declining society. If a military is not loyal or strong, their home will suffer.
After the end of the World War I in 1920, the United States entered in a period where great changes were made. During this period known as the New Era of the 1920’s, many innovations were taking place as well as many economic developments, which were stimulating the way through a change in America’s society. However, while for some Americans this was an era of better opportunities for living, some others were suffering the consequences. Later on, with an unequal distribution of wealth and low incomes, America’s economy was in a vulnerable point of a catastrophic collapse. And so it was. By the end of the 1920’s, when the stock market crashed, the prosperity of that period disappeared and the nation was sunk into an economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression. Many factors constituted the reasons for this collapse, for example, the Wall Street crash, the oligopolies domination over American industries, the weaknesses in some industries (textile, coal and agriculture), and also the government policies and international economic difficulties. Then, by the early 1930 with the depression spreading and affecting the entire society, the policies, philosophy and optimism that Herbert Hoover had brought to his presidency was being challenged. As a result, by the time of the elections in 1932, Hoover lost the presidency against the candidate of the Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his campaign of what he called the New Deal. Based on this, FDR pushed towards many solutions for the “crises of a collapsing financial system, crippling unemployment, and agricultural and industrial breakdown” (Goldfield, Page 704). Even thought when various changes were made, it was during the period right after the elections of 1936 that polit...
If someone were to look back at civilizations that have collapsed in the past, it may be hard to decipher why. How could societies that were dominant forces in their time just collapse? Societies fall because of corrupt leaders, greed and unfair treatment of citizens. Many great societies, such as Rome and Macedonia, have fallen in the past, but, knowing the reasons behind the downfall can help for the future.
Particularly, one of the probable adverse effects that seemingly emerge from Malthusianism is civil war. It is presumed that citizens of a nation-state become unsettled when resources start to become scarce consequent of rapid population growth and when there are no longer enough resources available to compensate for the growth that the nation-state has experienced. Crops are specific examples of prominent resources that ignite distress and uproar when it grows to be inadequate in supply, considering the fact that food is a substantial resource to maintaining human life and that the harvesting of crops is a means of producing income. There has been evidence that demonstrates that there is a considerably low amount of arable land across the world; however, in the global south evidence provides that developing countries in that area tend to suffer from extreme unattainability of arable land (Map 5.1). Yet, there ser...
The question then was, why did areas of economic development and growth respond positively to a revolution in the Church?... ... middle of paper ... ... The only other source with the resources available to commit to this type of investment would have been the state, which would not necessarily have seen the need to invest in this manner when they already had possession of large quantities of wealth.
Robert D. Kaplan’s article “The Coming Anarchy," is best summarized by the following quote, which identifies the different factors that he evaluates throughout his article, “To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war.” (Kaplan, 1994) This is the framework that he uses to make his supporting arguments and thus this summary will be broken down into these four main parts.
In the life span of one person, a country can go through many wars, it can be the cause of a global economic crisis and come out as the world leader, and somehow fall right back into economic hardship. This is the life that many who lived in the Great Depression have seen. They must wonder how America didn’t see the salient signs pointing to the recession, seeing as almost the same thing happened only eighty years earlier. The commonalities are vast, the differences, few, but it call comes back around to the lesson people are bound to figure out someday: Learn from History, because it always repeats itself.
The factors that lead to the “collapse” of civilizations are almost directly related to those that created it. Archaeologists characterize collapse by a number of elements, some of which we have evidence for, others we do not. Most archaeologists are unsure of exactly what caused the decline of most civilizations in the ancient world, yet there are many clues to some of the events that could have contributed. The collapse of the ancient Roman Empire, the Mesoamerican Mayan, and the Egyptian cultures will be discussed in the following paragraphs, with a focus on the uniqueness of each.