Content area
Full Text
The dozen most serious environmental problems and what we can do about them
Editors' note: The following excerpt comes from the final chapter of Collapse, Jared Diamond's sequel to bis runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. In his previous volume, Diamond traced the history of civilization in an attempt to answer the question of why some civilizations developed so much more rapidly than other societies, thus accounting for the vast disparities seen today between so many of the planet's peoples. In Collapse, Diamond analyzes how different societies squandered or conserved their natural and human resources, and the often catastrophic consequences of their choices. Diamond explores such past societies as Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, the Anasazi of the Southwestern United States, the Maya, and the Vikings; and such modern societies as Rwanda, Haiti, China, Australia, and Montana. In his final chapter Diamond summarizes what he sees as the dozen more serious environmental challenges facing the modern world, as well as what we can do now to prevent our own civilization from collapsing.
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE MOST SERIOUS environmental problems facing past and present societies fall into a dozen groups. Eight of the 12 were significant already in the past, while four (numbers 5, 7, 8, and 10: energy, the photosyntlietic ceiling, toxic chemicals, and atmospheric changes) became serious only recently. The first four of the 12 consist of destruction or losses of natural resources; the next three involve ceilings on natural resources; the three after that consist of harmful things that we produce or move around; and the last two are population issues.
* Let's begin with the natural resources that we are destroying or losing: natural habitats, wild food sources, biological diversity, and soil.
1. At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to humanmade habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads, and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the ocean bottom. More than half of the world's original area of forest has already been converted to other uses, and at present conversion rates, one-quarter of the forests that remain will become converted within the next half-century. Those losses of forests...