Short-Sighted

'Collapse': How the World Ends

I'm nearly done reading Collapse, which has been "on the nightstand" for a few weeks now. Gregg Easterbrook's review this weekend strikes me as a bit unfair; he accuses Jared Diamond of writing fascinating books with incorrect conclusions.

Diamond argues, based on past collapses of other societies, that we're endangering our world by using up its resources on a grand scale. Many of his examples are islands, as Easterbrook points out. He would use this against Diamond, but in fact it makes his point stronger: in a global society, the Earth is an island, and when its resources are depleted, the same catastrophes that took place on a micro-level will go macro in a hurry.

Easterbrook can afford to take such a view, though, because he believes it's all irrelevant:

Though Diamond endorses ''cautious optimism,'' Collapse comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.

Some people just can't wrap their heads around the idea that we need to learn to sustain ourselves on what we have here, can they? Forgive me, Star Trek fans, but there's a difference between sending a boat halfway around the world to collect oil and sending a starship to another galaxy to harvest resources or plant human colonies. If Easterbrook thinks we're close enough to doing so that it will solve our pressing problem of dwindling resources, I think he may have watched a few too many science fiction movies.