Pulitzer-prizewinning scientist Jared Diamond delivered a powerful lecture to close this season’s Richmond Forum. He drew on recent findings on societal shift and meltdown described in his books Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel to warn us as we stumble into our future.
Diamond’s books tap the world’s greatest scientific minds and most recent, mind-boggling advances like DNA analysis and paleobotany to answer some of the largest questions about humanity imaginable. His life work is truly the consilience E.O. Wilson called for in his book of the same name.
No longer is humanity limited to blind faith in the fantasies woven for us by priests and kings to fatten themselves and their empires. Today humanity can increasingly access the evidence and learn the truth for ourselves. Indeed, Americans are morally obligated, since our wealth so impacts the world. In our churches and sealed offices and TV-lit living rooms, we are cut off from the only thing which is truly real, the natural world, on which we depend and which gives our life meaning infinitely more than we know.
We should know better now, and we have no excuse. Scientists and historians who are also gifted communicators are making the lessons of the past and the evidence of today accessible to us all. Each of us can now access objective truths to an unprecedented degree and no longer must rely on revealed truth. This is empowering beyond belief.
And what is the empowering truth? Diamond and others have uncovered the startling evidence that the history of society and collapse is a history of HUMAN CHOICES. This is sobering news, but with it comes reason to hope. For with science and history to guide us; our decisions can be wiser. The evidence is now beyond doubt that our success as a society and as a species depends on our environment.
What, Diamond asked the audience, could the Easter Islander possibly have been thinking who cut down the island’s last tree, dooming his society to starvation and extinction? No longer would his people have the rich nuts, the wood for shelter and fuel, the dugout canoes to reach fish, the shade and roots protecting their soil and crops. Diamond half-joked that the foolish treecutter probably announced as the tree fell: People are more important than trees. Or the popular, though tragically false, dichotomy of: We must balance the environment against the economy. Or the arrogant self-righteousness of “Don’t let the treehuggers interfere with my God-given right as a logger to do my job."
I find it fascinating to read on the Internet the indignant voices of many who have made cults of Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, the Maya and other vanished societies as “spiritual teachers” and recoil at this new evidence. We cop out when we prefer to think of these peoples, and by extension ourselves, as powerless victims.
Diamond decried our leaders' short-term thinking and insularity from the consequences of their decisions, these modern Maya kings unable to see past their palace walls to the looming catastrophe beyond. When asked what we should do, he had one command: "Vote." As citizens of the planet’s most powerful nation in an era of recounts, he said, each American's choice at the polls matters enormously to the world.
