good afternoon everybody I'm Jeff Sachs director of the Earth Institute and thrilled to be here as I know all of you are there's been a lot of buzz around waiting for today's AI distinguished the Earth Institute Distinguished Lecture it's the final one of the year and we're ending the year in fabulous style with the most remarkable scholar and practitioner of sustainable development - professor Jared Diamond probably it's true for almost everybody here Guns Germs and Steel and collapse are not your two favorite books I don't know what you're reading but they ought to be and they've had a huge effect on thinking all over the world they are the kinds of studies and just representative of Professor diamonds work that you read them and it changes your view of of the world it changes your view of the intellectual enterprise and your understanding of the earth society history and and a lot more I was just saying to Professor diamond as we were coming in that were facing the challenge of the earth Institute of bringing together six or seven major disciplines and learning to talk to each other and it's something he can appreciate because when he sits down to lunch alone he's also bringing together six or seven disciplines he's a one-person Earth Institute and an inspiration for us and also a member of our external advisory board for which we are enormous ly grateful Jared Diamond is now professor of geography at the University of California and that's a wonderful thing because there's also a resurgence of geography as a core scientific field in this country which of course professor diamonds work is helping to inspire he was previously professor of physiology at the UCLA School of mad so there you have two of them of these disciplines he is of course the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns Germs and Steel the fates of human societies which also is a winner of the 1998 Rome palanca science book prize and of course we're here to hear about and also celebrate his recent book collapse how societies choose to fail or succeed he's author of countless other wonderful popular books and innumerable breakthrough scientific studies some of the other popular books include a human anthropology in the third chimpanzee also a much awarded book and also why is sex fun and maybe we'll get into that as well Jared Diamond is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius award countless research prizes from the American Physiological society National Geographic Society the Zoological Society of San Diego and many many other awards and membership and honorary societies including the National Academy of Sciences the end the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society he is also with all of that a practitioner of human ecology and sustainable development his field studies in ecology have been focused I well and not focused there in many places of the world but one area of tremendous focuses in Papua New Guinea where he has been studying ecology and evolution of birds he was his field work led to the rediscovery of new guineas long lost golden fronted bowerbird he has many other field projects in other parts of the world in North America South America Africa Asia and Australia that just about covers covers it and he is working with the major companies oil companies and others in Papua New Guinea to find practical approaches for combining Economic Development and ecological sustainability and that is absolutely at the heart of the mission of the earth Institute as well to find how to achieve not only sustainability not only development but truly sustainable development so we're privileged today to have with us one of the world's leading thinkers and a great friend of the earth Institute professor Jared Diamond [Applause] let me first check whether you'll be able to hear me okay in back it's a great privilege for me to be here at the invitation of an institution and a person whom I admire greatly at the invitation of the Earth Institute and of Jeffrey Sachs - real pleasure to be here it would be a pleasure to be in New York on any basis you'll be able to figure out from my accent that I was not born in New York I was said born in Boston and I grew up in Boston but my parents were both born and grew up in New York my mother graduated Hunter College in 1927 I had two uncles who were superintendents principals in the New York Public School System then my sister for her first job and worked at the New York Magazine for quite a few years and so I visited Susan in New York in New York at the same time I also spent years working in the American Museum of Natural History in the Byrd Department on New Guinea birds since then since Susan moved to Los Angeles my visits to New York my wife's and my visits have been less frequent and therefore the reasons therefore some of the reasons that induce you to live here mainly the Opera the restaurants the cultural opportunities it's very nice to be here on this occasion however briefly this evening I wanted to talk about what might seem a depressing thing namely collapses of authorities the collapses are the flip side of a encouraging being namely the successes of societies people often ask why on earth did you write a book on this subject of collapse and the answer is simple it's because it was the most fascinating important and central subject I could think of to write about to me it started out as the appeal of a romantic when I was in my teens and twenties my guess is that many of you - in your teens and twenties were attracted by the romantic mystery of societies in the past that have collapsed leaving behind monuments such as abandoned cities and temples and pyramids often in areas where nobody is trying to make a living today in deserts or in jungles and you probably asked yourself why on earth did people build cities and temples in these remote places and why haven't gone to the effort of doing so did they then abandon their cities and pyramids for example the statue building society of Easter Island famous for its gigantic statues which I'll tell you more about but a society that eventually tore down and broke all of its statues or another Pacific Island Society Pitcairn Island famous as the island to which the mutineers from the British ship HMS Bounty fled in 1790 to escape the long vengeful arm of the Admiralty the Bounty mutineers wanted a really remote uninhabited island and with picky and they found it but as soon as they scrambled up to the top of Pitkin they would have seen there the platforms and temples and statues of a Polynesian society that had previously settled Pitkin and ended up all dead or abandoning the island what happened to those first tip ko Islanders coming closer to home cross Americans there's the most advanced Society of Native Americans in the new world before Columbus the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula Guatemala Honduras and Mexico who built wonderful cities with temples they had writing they had astronomical observatories the gorgeous cities now have become tourist destinations because many of them are surrounded by jungle where a few people are trying to live today yet the Maya prospered there and then sometime around starting around the year roughly a d800 in the Classic Maya lowlands the Maya gradually abandoned the cities into which they'd put such effort why why did they collapse or even close at home for us Americans in the four corners the area of the u.s. Southwest we Arizona New Mexico Colorado in Utah need thrived the most complex society in North America before Columbus the Anasazi whose starting around ad 700 developed an agricultural society in desert II areas where nobody farms today they built towns and they began to erect higher and higher buildings those were the highest skyscrapers in the United States before the skyscrapers that went up with steel girders and reinforced concrete in the loop of Chicago in the 1870s the Anasazi skyscrapers went up to six storeys but construction ceased in the year eighty 1118 we know exactly from tree-ring dendrochronology and over the following decades the Anasazi abandoned the towns and skyscrapers into which stayed for such effort why at this point you may be starting to suspect the collapse of something that happens only to remote exotic people like Polynesians so a counterexample is what happened to Norwegian Vikings who in the year 89 84 settled the world's largest island Greenland where these Norwegians developed the most remote outpost of Christian Europe a society based on herding with a wonderful stone cathedral that God or whose foundations are still there and a dozen stone churches the Norwegians in Greenland carried on for nearly five hundred years so we shouldn't write them off as a failure because they thrive for longer than has European society in North America now but eventually sometime around the Year 1440 they ended up called dead thereby demonstrating that collapse that happens not just to Polynesians but it's also a risk for blue-eyed blonde-haired European Christians literate in Latin and in wounds I still have the sketch that I prepared of my book collapse it was on my yellow paper disorder paper and the sketch was going to be of 18 chapters on 18 societies that collapsed I showed my sketch to my editor my wife Marie for her opinion and reads reaction was quick she said Jared to heaven sakes what are you thinking of a book of 18 chapters on 18 failures how depressing how boring who on earth is going to want to read that to heaven sakes lighten up and I realized that not only would a book of 18 chapters on 18th a is be depressing and boring but it would leave unanswered the main question in this area which is it's not the case that all societies in the past have been doomed to collapse in many parts of the world societies have been going on for hundreds thousands tens of thousands of years without any sign of collapse so why is it that some societies have succeeded in solving the problems that did in the Easter Islanders and the Maya and many of the other most of it advanced societies of their times hence my book also considered some of the park warming success stories and you won't find it depressing he is Iceland another group of Norwegian Vikings who settled Iceland in the year ad 871 where they encountered the most difficult environment in Europe and so for a long time Iceland was the poorest country in Europe but the Icelanders eventually mastered their environmental and all the problems so well than on a per capita basis Iceland today is something like the seventh richest country in the world and Iceland has been going strong now for 1136 years there is a real success story or a longer success story as Japan where there have been complex societies about 14,000 years and again no sign of collapse except for the military defeat of World War two why did the Japanese succeed in solving their problems so well or an even longer track record of success is in the New Guinea Highlands where I do my fieldwork we have people who have been living for 46,000 years without any sign of collapse and we are in fact about 1200 years ago they managed to solve problems of renewable forestry that defeated the Maya and the Easter Islanders and many other people at the same time it's not enough to look at successes and failures in the past because today modern societies are facing all the problems that these past societies faced today we are still facing problems of water and topsoil and fish and wood plus today we are facing new problems such as problems of energy and toxic chemicals so is there something that we can learn from the past that could help us become one of the success stories rather than one of the failures I began my book in fact with the American state of Montana and one might wonder in fact the first readers of my book wondered what on earth is a book entitled collapse doing beginning with the most beautiful christine underpopulated forest-covered state of the richest country in the world montana is of no risk of collapse any of you though who into montana or in fact anywheres of me into Montaigne West know that when you scratch the surface of this beautiful underpopulated state you find the problems by setting the rest of the world Montana has the worst problems of toxic wastes in the United States it has big problems of soil erosion and salinization big problems of water even problems of air quality Missoula Montana near which my wife and kids and I spent parts of our summers often has air quality worse than my own City Los Angeles and then as for climate change Montana is outstanding tourist attraction is Glacier National Park which is miss named when first seen by Europeans in the 1800s glacial the area of Glacier National Park had about 150 glaciers now they're down to about 14 glaciers and if you want to see them you better hurry because of the rate that global warming is going now it's expected that the glaciers of Glacier National Park will have melted by about 13 years from now 2020 so that's Montana then in the modern world is the African country of Rwanda which carried out the worst nightmares of the British demographer Thomas Malthus who warned us that human population problems will get solved one way or another either in pleasant ways of our choice or in unpleasant ways that we don't choose in Rwanda the most densely populated country of Africa with some of the most serious problems of deforestation and soil erosion in Africa population built up throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s at the same time farms were shrinking and the forests would be knocked down and finally in 1994 rwandan strands and lea saw if I can use that word their population problems in a grisly way when six million Rwandan mostly with machetes killed nearly 1 million Rwandan xan drove another 2 million into exile coming close at home cross Americans there's the island of Hispaniola about 100 miles off Florida Hispaniola is as close as one gets in the in history to a controlled experiment in chemistry or in molecular biology one learns clean things through manipulative experiments with controls for example a chemist trying to understand the effect with some particular compound would take two test tubes with identical solutions and add one compound to one of those tubes and maintain the other tube as a control in history we can't do those neat controlled experiments but sometimes history carries out natural experiments for us one such natural experiment has taken place on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola which through accidents of history got divided between two countries Haiti in the West the Dominican Republic in the East which have had quite different projector ease with different consequences today Haiti in the West on the western half of the island of Hispaniola is the poorest country of the new world and one of the poorest countries in the world more than 99% deforested massive soil erosion a government in a virtual state of collapse unable to provide basic services such as water and electricity and sewage and education to many of its citizens and then the eastern half of the same island is the Dominican Republic which granted is still a developing country but on a per capita basis the dr is about six times richer than haiti about one-third covered with forests with the most comprehensive national park system of the new world considerably lower population density than 80 the dr is the world's third leading exporter of avocados and all of you who like myself grew up in boston and a boston red sox fans and admire the great Pedro Martinez will know that the dr is the world's leading exporter of great baseball players any of you who've taken the plane flight from Miami to Santo Domingo will have flown over the border between Haiti in the dr the island looks as if it was cut by a knife with a straight line and as you look this way it's brown as you look this way it's green and if you actually stand on that border and you look this way you see the muddy treeless brown fields of haiti and then you turn around and 30 yards from you stop the mean pine forest of the dominican republic different choices different histories very different consequences a virtual controlled experiment then there's China the most populous country in the world with perhaps most rapidly growing economy among major countries China with so many people in such a big economy that China's environmental problems automatically become problems of the rest of the world if only because China is putting out its waste into the same oceans and the same atmosphere that they the rest of us and also because China is now competing with the United States Japan Europe and Australia for limited supplies of essential resources notably oil seafood and metals and then finally there's Australia the first world country which rivals Iceland as being in the most fragile first world environment but as a result of spans today or the first world society considering the most radical solutions to their environmental problems when I started out trying to understand success to a failure of society I thought that I was going to look at human environmental impacts and I eventually realized that it's more complex than that of course so eventually I arrived at a checklist of five factors that I go over now when trying to understand why any given society collapses or fails to collapse in no particular water one background that checklist is the one that I first had in mind namely human environmental impacts all societies require some natural resources water topsoil wood fish etc and it's difficult to manage natural resources so society often inadvertently over exploit the resources on which they depend and maybe a buy drive themselves to collapse by over exploiting essential resources and committing ecological suicide so human environmental impacts of one factor on my checklist second factor is climate change and expression today that we associate with global warming caused by humans but in the past the climate has always and changing getting colder warmer drier weather and those climate changes are variously better or worse for humans and interact with the effects of human environmental impacts so that the people that are hammering the way at their environment may get away with it as long as the climate is in their favor and then when the climate gets cold or dry or too wet or too hot the combination of climate change and human environmental impacts pushes the society over the brink that's happened to the Anasazi and the Maya then a third item on my checklist is enemies most societies are not isolated but they have neighbors with some of which they're intermittently at war or on hostile terms and naturally when a society gets weakened for any reason for example for its own internal economic problems or political problems that's the time when the hostile neighbors take advantage of the weakened society and walking on it and can't conquer it making it regularly difficult for historians to decide whether the collapse of some past society was because of military conquest or whether the real reason was underlying internal problems of the society the most miliar example of that today concerns the fall of the Western Roman Empire we all know that Rome fell somewhat arbitrarily in around the year 80 476 when the last Roman Emperor was deposed by a Germanic barbarian chief but we also know that Rome had been fighting very successfully against the barbarians for centuries and beating them and keeping away from Rome's borders so why is it the barbarians eventually won after Rome had been winning for centuries was the real cause of the fall of the Roman Empire those barbarians perhaps because the barians got more numerous or better armed or better organized or was instead the real cause of Rome's for Rome's the internal economic political social problems and the barbarians the same old barbarians were always there at the borders and they just took advantage Rome's weakness to conquer Rome but in that case one would have to say that the fundamental cause of Rome school was not the enemies but was internal problems that debate still goes on among historians then a fourth item on my checklist is friends most societies are not self-sufficient but depend on friendly trade partners for some essential imports just as the United States today imports a substantial fraction of our oil and we also import metals and other products that means that a society that is managing its own internal problems perfectly well may be threatened if it depends for essential imports on friendly trade partners that have their own problems and so the import seats that's a risk familiar to us Americans or at least to anyone here old enough to remember the 1973-74 Gulf oil crisis when the American economy was threatened not because the messes we were making at home but because of issues and problems with our trade partners supplying us with much of our petroleum and then finally the fifth and last factor on my checklist to understand collapses or successes is a society's institutions its economic cultural social political institutions that result in the society either perceiving and solving or ignoring or failing to solve those first four sets of problems all of this may seem abstract so let me now give you a concrete example of a society that collapsed and it's one of the most instructive cases the collapse of the Polynesian Society on Easter Island Easter the most remote capital scrap of land in the world an island of 60 square miles 2,300 miles west of the coast of Chile and 1400 miles east of the nearest inhabited Polynesian island famous for the gigantic stone statues weighing up to 90 tons and up to 33 feet tall erected by Polynesians with just stone tools no metal tools no graft animals no heels and yet they managed to carve and transport these statues up to 12 miles and dipping into an upright position ask yourself if you were given the task of transporting a 90-ton statue twelve miles and tipping it upright and you had no wheels or metal tools or draught animals think how you would do it it's been a long-standing mystery how the Islanders transported their statues and then why after wrecking hundreds of them their society collapsed and they pull down and broke all of those statues the mystery was acute obvious already to the first European who quotes discovered Easter Island meaning he found an island teeming with Polynesians the Dutch navigated Jakob Rhoda beam who in 1722 came to Easter Island saw the statues and was struck by not only the statutes but also by the fact that Easter was the most barren island of the tropical Pacific there were no trees on the island and yet Brogan being reasoned perfectly correctly that whatever those Islanders had done to transport an erect 90-ton statues they would have needed trees trees to get the wood with which to make Weaver's or roles or sleds to transport the statues and also trees from whose bark to make the rope with which to pull the statues on the rolls or whatever they were pulled on and yet he was in Ireland without any trees so Roga being concluded perfectly correctly that there was no way that the Islanders could have erected and transported their statues given how Easter Island looked in 1722 that was mysterious Zach so mysterious that the Swiss novelist Erich von däniken postulated that the statues of easter island since they couldn't have been erected by the Islanders given how the island looked in 1722 the statues were instead he suggested erected by some super intelligent beings from outer space with highly evolved tools beings who descended to earth and with their tools erected the statues and then floated off into space again the real explanation for what happened on Easter Island has emerged from studies of archaeologists and paleontologists reconstruction it turns out that when Easter was first settled by Polynesians about a thousand years ago the island was not the treeless wasteland that we see today but it was instead covered with a lush subtropical forest of several dozen tree species including the world's biggest palm tree and the Islanders began to chop down trees for the same reason that all of us chop down trees namely to clear land for gardens and agriculture and to have wood for construction and for heating and for cooking and to have wood and make rope to transport and wreck the statues and also to cause dugout canoes with which to go out to sea on the open ocean and harpoon tuna and dolphins because in the oldest archaeological layers on Easter Island the main bones they're making clear what was the main source of meat for the first Easter Islanders are bones of tuna dolphins the Islanders continue to chop down trees until sometime around the Year 1680 they chopped down the last tree on the island at which point they could no longer transport or erect statues but they had bigger problems without any trees there was no longer a source of green fertilizer to fertilize the fields also without a forest cover the soil would have been subject to wind and water erosion and Easter Island society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war as the 12 gravel clans of Easter Island fought each other too many people for a shrinking resource pie and victorious clans would then pull down and break at the neck the statues of defeated clans it went on until 18:44 the last of the hundreds of statues that the Easter Islanders that the ancestors had erected at such effort was torn down and broken any of you've actually visited Easter Island will understand the sense of tragedy that you get going around this island with just hundreds of broken statues broken by the descendants of the very people who erected them of all the collapses of past authorities I found that the collapse of Easter Island is the one that grabs people to votes because the metaphor is so clear Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean is a metaphor of a planet earth isolated in space today when the Easter Island has messed up their own Island and we're out of canoes there was no other island to which they could flee no other people whom they could summon to help in the same way that if we unplanted earth today mess up our own island planet there's no other planet or galaxy to which will be able to flee and no other green extraterrestrials who will be able to summon to health when I've talked to my undergraduate geography students at UCLA about state societies including the collapse of Easter Island my UCLA students recognized a question whose significance until then escaped me my UCLA students asked me why on earth do people do such dumb things as chop down all the trees on their Island when they are a would dependent Society how could they be so blind well just a place in and perspective if there's still a complex societies on earth 100 years from now you can bet the people in the future will look back at what we are doing the year 2007 and ask how on earth could we be have been so dumb to do the things they were doing today but my UCLA students asked what do you think the person who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island said as he or she was chopping down that tree my UCLA students offered suggestions one student said probably the person who chopped down that last tree shouted out never fear technology we'll saw our problems by discovering a substitute for wood and another student said no probably the person chopped down that last tree was a political conservative who shouted out this land is mine this tree is mine I can do with it what I want respect my private property rights and keep the big government of the Chiefs off my back until another student said perhaps the person chopped down that last tree was a logger who would have shouted out I am just so sick and tired of you tree hugging lily-livered greeny environmentalists who came off of these lousy trees and you do care for the jobs of us loggers and for the livelihood of my children your fears are exaggerated as always I'm sure that there are plenty of trees left over there in the next Valley a ban on logging would be premature and what we instead need is more research those were the suggestions alive UCLA students the case of Easter Island oh and any of these other collapses illustrates that there are obvious lessons and also some less obvious lessons in these fakes of past societies perhaps the most transparent lesson we can get from these collapses in the past is to take environmental problems seriously environmental problems dragged down contributed to dragging down many of the most advanced societies in the past you better believe that they can and they're in the process of dragging down many societies today and yet when one talks about the risks of environmental problems now one is often greeted by a dismissive one-liner which says but-but-but you have to balance the environment against the economy so balance the environment against the economy the tacit assumption of this one line is that taking care of the environment is a drain on the economy the net effect is to cost money environmental safeguards odds are a luxury that we can afford only when we've got our economy in good shape in fact that one liner down combined against the economy has it exactly reversed or upside down the strongest reason for taking good care of the environment is economic reasons namely environmental problems become so horribly expensive and they even become insoluble if you wait to wait till a late stage whereas if you catch environmental problems at an early stage they're cheaper and much more feasible to solve so that strong reasons for taking environmental problems seriously are economic reasons this is a lesson that was rubbed into the faces of us Americans something like what two years ago August when because for ten years various governmental agencies had considered it too expensive to invest a few hundred million dollars into fixing up the dikes around one of our major cities we instead found ourselves after Hurricane Katrina faced with a repair bill not of several hundred million dollars but several hundred billion dollars the costs of insurance and the cost of rebuilding one of our nature cities not to mention a few thousand dead Americans of all because we balanced the environment against the economy and didn't want to fix up the dikes when it would have been relatively cheap and easier to do so that then is a simple transparent lesson that we can learn from the states of past societies namely to take environmental problems seriously but there are deeper lessons and one of those deeper lessons is one that I appreciated only in the late stages of work on my book I was continually asking myself why did some societies solve problems that destroyed other societies why did the leaders of some society make good decisions and not in other cases and eventually struck me that I think a distinction between societies that succeed or fail to solve their problems on the average has to do with the role of the elite the politicians the wealthy people in a society a society whose decision-makers whose wealthy people are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions for the broader society such a society has a recipe for disaster because the elite are likely to make decisions in their own short-term interests but disastrous in the long run for society as a whole because the politicians are not in the short-run feeling the consequences of their actions whereas a society whose decision-makers cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions have leaders motivated to solve society's problems because they're affected by them as an example one might wonder why on earth to the Maya Kings not just look out the windows of the palaces around the Year 8800 and see the deforestation on the hillsides and the soil erosion on the hillsides removing agricultural land and soil piling up in the valley bottoms why does the Mayan kings just say stop it invoke the deforestation and soil erosion in time the Maya Kings may not have been motivated to solve those environmental problems of Maya society because the Maya Kings had succeeded in their palaces in insulating themselves from the consequences of their actions namely the Kings were continuing to eat well from food brought to them as tribute by the commoners and the Kings were still building palaces and erecting monuments with the labor of the commoners even while the commoners themselves were getting now lower shim ventually starving until it was too late and the commoners rose and revolt and overthrew the kings and burned their palaces so the Kings had insulated themselves in the short run from broader problems of Maya society but not in the long run the opposite and opposite example of a society whose politicians cannot insulate themselves from the broader problems of society is the Netherlands paalam I never understood why it is that the Dutch are the people of whom the law distraction belonged to environmental organizations like world wildlife or Conservation International more than half of all Dutch belong to environmental organizations and I didn't understand why until my 1997 trip to the Netherlands when I was driving ran with Dutch friends Dutch bird-watching friends in the Dutch countryside and we were watching birds and chatting while going and eventually I asked my Dutch bird-watching friends why is it that you Dutch take environmental problems seriously and so many of you belong to environmental organizations the answer was unforgettable to me they said Garrard look at this land that we're driving through it's flat and you see those dike sphere this flat land it's what we call a polar pol V er it used to be a shallow day of the sea this land here is 23 feet below sea level but it used to be a shallow day around which the Dutch erected dikes and then they pumped out the day to gain more agricultural land in this country the chart of land pumped out the water with windmills and now with power and in in that way one third of the present land area of the Netherlands is these polders these grain bays that are below sea level up to 23 feet below sea level water continues to leak into the dikes and we continue to pump it out with a carefully managed system of pumps and well-maintained dikes but look on tops of the dikes you don't see any mansions on tops of the dikes in the Netherlands everybody rich and poor politicians and voters lives down below in the polders and there's nobody safe up there on the dikes so our politicians know perfectly well that if they did not take our water problem seriously and the dikes fail they would ground along with everybody else - any of you old enough to remember 1953 February 1 1953 that was the day on which a combination of high tides and a storm in the see growth dikes protecting the Dutch province of Zeeland and the floodwaters swept up to 100 miles inland thousands of duck rich people poor people politicians commoners ground and the politicians of this country with a population then of just 10 million the politicians swore never again they invested massively something like six billion dollars into reinforcing making super strong the dikes and the sea walls and they were motivated to do so because the politicians had had the lesson rubbed into their face that if they didn't manage the environment of the Netherlands well there was no way that they could insulate themselves from society's problems they would and they had drowned along with everybody else this problem of the role of the elite the insulation of the elite is one that concerns me increasingly in the United States today as I look at social trends in the u.s. in the last 15 years it seems to me that the wealthier people politicians of the United States have succeeded increasingly in insulating themselves from the broader problems of American society and as a result are separated from the consequences and less motivated to solve society's problems living in Los Angeles since 1966 I've now seen twice that it's not possible for the elite to insulate themselves from the broader problems of society and yet in Los Angeles in the last 15 years we had the proliferation of a phenomenon called the gated community I don't know if there are gated communities around New York but in in the LA area we have a profusion of these communities which literally surrounded by walls and gates in which wealthy people live and within the gated communities wealthy Los Angelenos are able in the short run to insulate themselves from the famous problems of LA and American society within the gated community they're separated from the prop to be understaffed la police force because they got private security guards within the gated community they're separated from the problems of the municipal water supply of LA a big city in the desert because they're drinking bottled water they're also separated from the famous problems of the Los Angeles public school system because the kids from the gated communities go preferentially to private schools and they're also separated from the national problems of our underfunded social security system and are non-existent national health system in the United States national health insurance in the United States because again within the gated community most people have private health insurance and private tensions but as the Maya warned us you can insulate yourself from society's problems for only so long and in my 41 years in Los Angeles twice I've seen the gates nearly breaking down namely two major riots in LA that began in the poorer areas the Watts Riots and the Rodney King riots in both cases the rioters burnt and carried out widespread destruction in the poorer areas and there was concern in Ricci areas that the rioters would spill over into devily hills and the other wealthy parts of LA my wife and I remember very well the more recent riots the Rodney King riots because when those riots broke out we were in Chicago our five year old twin sons were in LA with a babysitter we knew that they were going to school and being brought home from school we happened to turn on the television and we were shocked to say to each other our city is burning we saw the riots in LA and the rioters we didn't know where our kids were eventually he found out that the babysitter yes did bring our kids home on that occasion the rioters did not spill over into the rich areas what the police did to protect devily Hills was to string up strips of yellow plastic police tape across the entrances to the roads of devily Hills to keep out the rioters well you know perfectly well that if the riders had spilled out that far the plastic police tape would have done no good if things carry on as they are now in Los Angeles they will eventually be more riots and sooner or later yellow plastic police tape is not going to suffice to insulate wealthy Los Angelenos from the broader problems of Southern California and American society the United States as a whole seems to me or the first world the United States and Europe and Japan are behaving trying to behave like a gated community towards the rest of the world namely enjoying a living standard consumption rates on the average 32 times consumption rates in the third world and hoping that they can continue to live we can continue to live in a gated community not be affected by what's going on out there in the third world but September 11 2001 and other things warn us that the first world is no longer going to be able in the long run to carry on as a gated community immune from the problems affecting the rest of the world finally whenever one tries as I have to draw lessons from history that could help us in dealing with problems we face today if we would like our modern society to solve problems as did successful past societies and not to fall into the errors that dragged down other past societies you have to be aware of differences between the past and present it's not straightforward to extrapolate lessons from the past to the present because one could say today we got a whole whole new ball game the present is unlike the past there are big differences and it's true you can't just straightforwardly reason from the past to the present without taking account of the differences between the past and present some of those differences between past societies and present societies are ones that make our current situation much more dangerous in the past and would incline us towards pessimism or even fatalism for example one difference between the past and present or a pair of differences is that today we have far more people packing far more potent destructive technology than at any time in the past Easter Ireland had about 10,000 people with stone tools on an island of 60 square miles and took them about 800 years to chop down every tree on the island today we have not 10,000 people about six and a half billion and we've got not stone tools but metal tools bulldozers chainsaws nuclear power and as a result we are deforesting the whole earth much faster than the Easter Islanders the forests of their little 60 square mile island that difference more people more potent destructive technology makes our present situation much more dangerous than at any time in the past another difference between the past and present is captured by that familiar term globalization which to us in the first world we often interpret to mean us we here in the first world sending them out there in the third world our good stuff like coca-cola and email messages but globalization just means improve communications - the communications this way and that way and not just good things but also bad things moving back and forth and so globalization also means not just the BCAM coca-cola but they can send us things some of which we don't want including terrorists and unstoppable waves of immigration and emerging diseases the consequences of globalization are that today it's difficult for a society to collapse in isolation in the past when Easter Island collapse nobody else in the world knew about it nobody was affected by it but today when any remote society collapses it may have consequences for the rest of the world and in fact American troops may go in when in the last 15 years among the countries that have gotten in trouble or even collapsed are we the remote poorer countries like Somalia or landlocked Afghanistan or Iraq which is poor except for soil and nevertheless globalization has meant that the United States has seen fit have found it necessary to send troops even to such remote poor countries illustrating that today the risk we face is not of isolated Easter Island like collapses individual societies winking out one by one but instead the risk of a global collapse if those two differences were the main differences between past and present at this point we would I would be really Tessa mysticum desperate and I would invite you all to join me outside for janestown like mass suicide because it would really be hopeless but instead there are two other differences between the past and present that give us an advantage and make me cautiously optimistic one of those differences is again related to globalization namely mass communications today we have newspapers radio and television and so in the morning you turn on your television set and you see what is happening today anyway is around the world you see what's happening this morning in Haiti and Iraq and you can choose to learn from these disaster areas of the modern world and you can also see in your television what's happening today in Norway or Iceland and we can choose to emulate these success stories so we have the opportunity to learn from society's remote from us in space we're the first society world history with this advantage in contrast when the Easter Islanders were debating whether or not to chop down the last trees in 1680 they had no television sets to teach them that then in 1680 the Haitians were just getting embarked on their disastrous cause of deforestation while the Japanese under the Tokugawa Shogun were embarking on a program of reforestation that would make Japan self-sufficient in wood these 2 Islanders didn't have that opportunity to from society's elope from them in space and our other great advantage is that we are the first Society in world history with the opportunity to learn from society's remote from us in time we have archaeologists and historians and so we know what happened to all these past societies we can choose to emulate the examples of the past success stories and we can choose to avoid the examples of past disasters we have that opportunity we're the first Society in world history with that opportunity but again the Easter Islanders as they were debating whether to chop down those last trees in 1680 these two Islanders had no archaeologists or historians so they had no way of knowing that the experiment had already been done different ways with different outcomes Easter Islanders couldn't know that 800 years previously New Guinea Highlanders had encountered a crisis of deforestation like the one facing Easter in 1680 but the New Guinea Highlanders figured out how to transplant Kaziranga trees into their villages and so the New Guinea Highlanders carried on became self-sufficient in wood while also 800 years previously the Maya taking the same questions about whether to chop down trees the Maya had made the opposite decision carry down chopping carrion chopping down the trees with disastrous consequences so we are then the first society in world history with these opportunities to learn from society remote from us in space and in time that's what makes us cautiously optimistic we have the choice my hope is that we will exercise this choice learn from past authorities and so end up in a world like Norway or Iceland rather than a world like Haiti or Easter Island thank thank you very much for a wonderful and insightful lecture we have time for Question and Answer until half past the hour and then a reception and book signing to which everybody is welcome through the doors on my left to your right thank you for so many insights let me if I could just make a couple of observations and while I do those who want to ask questions please go to the microphones and these are for questions not for speeches also please when you do ask the question identify yourself first to give your name and and where you are affiliated with our community but if I could just myself make a couple of points about your wonderful lecture your observation about the gated community reminded me of the wonderfully wise words of John Kennedy's inaugural address when when he said famously that if and I quote if a free society cannot help the many who are poor it cannot save the few who are rich and what you've done is offer a very important model of why that is beyond the obvious one of simply the widening pressures and gaps of rich and poor but the destruction of the signals to the rich about what's happening in the common environment and I think that that's an extremely important message and it does suggest that we ought to move the capital to the lower ninth of New Orleans both to get it built and then to take care of the risks of climate change afterwards and the second thing that I wanted to commend to all of us in our community is the wisdom of the checklist that you proposed I've in a different context too called it the differential diagnosis but the key point is that there is no one factor to complex phenomena there are many and it's absolutely crucial systematic about the physical and the social the ecological the political and understand that in a complex of a set of systemic changes and inter-linkages that one needs that kind of differential diagnosis at least five points on the checklist that Jared Diamond mentioned and and many within each of those categories let me now invite people from our community to ask questions and ask Jared Diamond to come back up the tape take the questions and I will sit back down and will continue until half past and then the book signing and reception out in the faculty room to your right please yes thank you very much for coming I appreciate it Joe ADEA meteorologist the this begs the question order your views on the challenges we face with global warming then what are my views on the challenges we face with global warming I see it as one of the dozen major problems that we face today there are some people who would say it's the most important problem we face today no I would not say that global warming can do us in but even if we solve global warming there are other problems such as water and toxic chemicals and topsoil that could do us in but yes global warming is a major problem and we've got to get it right or we are in deep trouble if the world fifty years from now is five degrees on the average warmer than it is now there will be big trouble but global warming is a problem that we're capable of solving now hi I'm Stan Johnson undergraduate student as you say there's there is hope you know in light of our environmental problems but do you think that in addition to trying to avoid some sort of global collapse we should also be considering what happens and what we should do if things don't turn out so well if we have for example at least a partial collapse I mean when the Roman Empire fell everyone didn't die I mean what happens to them and if so do you think we can use lessons from Pasteur's nineties collapsed like you observe in your book thank you should we not only try to ensure a good outcome but also prepare ourselves for a bad outcome personally I would rather put more effort into ensuring a good outcome but I am perfectly willing to speculate about what form of bad outcome could take there are many possible forms but one one form in which humans were not wiped out completely would be an outcome in which first world society can no longer be sustained if that were the case it would be difficult to rebuild first world society because complex societies were built in the past when iron and copper and tin were readily available at the surface but we've mined away the Accrediting accessible minerals we've removed the readily accessible oil so if we destroyed first world society it would be difficult to put it back together again who will survive in that case I would bet on life trends in the New Guinea Highlands because until recently some of my friends still made stone tools and know how to make stone tools and had a subsistence economy I doubt that there's anyone in this audience here who if they were collapsed the first world society would be able to make a living with stone tools as can New Guineans so my dad in the worst case scenario is New Guinea Highlands Robert Klinsmann from the medical school in the school Public Health thank you very much for your comments I have just a question about one of your conclusions that seemed a source of optimism which is in terms of how we're different from the past it seems to me that since Gibbons both the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and certainly since the Renaissance when there was a sort of historical awareness of the fact that Rome had fallen and why at least some reasons why I'm struck that we hadn't learned from that in other words that what happened in Haiti still happened in Haiti and there were probably other examples of collapses since you know the 1400s or 1500 I'm wondering what may may make us different than the fact that we hadn't learned from those historical examples before one mark one might indeed say if we haven't learned our lesson by now what makes you think we're going to learn it now why might we why might be learn the lesson that one might hope you would learn because we've got far more information from history in archeology you've got far more powerful social sciences but they actually are amidst all the depressing trends some trends that make me hopeful and among those trends does make me hopeful are the policies of some of the forces in first world society most hated by the general public mainly big businesses about a month ago I was astonished dealt with Walmart in the last year and learned a lot about Walmart Walmart is one of those subjects that it's one of the few subjects that my wife and I cannot discuss calmly because my views about Walmart more sympathetic than my wives but about a month ago I was surprised to read in the newspaper of that Walmart had announced that over the next about four years they're going to phase out all their purchases of non sustainably managed fisheries and they're going to convert all their seafood purchasers to sustainably manage fisheries now I've been interested in the efforts of the Marine Stewardship Council for the last decade to switch fish purchases to sustainably manage fisheries and I've been aware of efforts to convince governments to do something about it but there is no more potent force that I could have imagined towards saying fishery practices than a decision on the part of Walmart to stop buying from the bad fisheries and to start buying from the good fisheries that's Walmart there have been similar encouraging decisions by Home Depot leader of the timber industry by Chevron and some other oil companies so that's a big reason why despite all the reasons to be pessimistic and despite our having rough the opportunity to learn before now I see some potent forces that seem to be learning dr. diamond thank you for your insights is Daniel Peterson I'm an adjunct professor and transportation here following on the undergraduates assertion that basically we will and run out of the natural resources that fuel our economy and that have developed the 6.5 billion people that we have today what do you see once we no longer have carbon and nuclear fuel to be able to fuel the economy to be our carrying capacity on this planet will we be back to the 1 billion and we were before the pre-industrial era and if so following on your other comments will we be able to sustain these kinds of institutions two good questions what will be our carrying capacity and we'll be able to understand institution like this on the second question can we support Columbia University and first world Society on an economy that is consuming must much less yes I think we can I came back from Europe a couple of weeks ago and I frequently go to Europe and so I've seen that in in Europe Europeans sustain a standard of living which by most reasonable measures health or leisure pensions etc Europeans enjoy a standard of living at least as high as and perhaps higher than that in the United States and yet consumption rates in Europe on the average about half those in the United States and Europeans can still do a good deal to save debt to reduce their consumption my German and Dutch friends they recycle not into three bins as in Los Angeles or into one bin as in Montana but they recycle into six bins and they recycle so accurately that you don't need secondary checking whereas in Los Angeles when we recycle into three bins the city city still needs to hire people to check because Los Angelenos don't sort very accurate in fuel consumption per capita in Europe is about half that in the United States for all the obvious reasons much more fuel-efficient cars that there is not a reward to buying Humvees and huge SUVs but there is a tax penalty for buying Humvees and SUV so that's why I think that it is possible will be possible to sustain UCLA in Colombia with lower consumption rates as for the number of people there's a lot of debate about the Karen Reverb but it usually comes down to is the carrying capacity depends upon the lifestyle of which we try to support that population I would be cautiously optimistic that we can carry on with the populations we've got now that we don't have to drop that to half a billion people but we will certainly be in more trouble the more people we've got thank you hi my name is Jeff from a soon to be graduating a nurse when I asked this question I have Iraq and Haiti in mind while I was reading collapse two years ago I simultaneously was reading the uses of Haiti so that I could get away from how depressing collapse was even though the use of this eighty was ten times over can you go up to a heart site and my question is are you familiar with Paul farmers work the uses of Haiti and do you buy into his argument about the singular ultimate causation being the unfriendly nature of the United States towards places like Haiti and rank I have not read his books so I can't comment on it but when I hear a summary that the singular cause is the problems of the United States I disagree completely the United States is only one of a number of countries the United States is doing some things very well and we're doing something badly some things badly the United States and make big progress in dealing with air quality in the last 3040 years that makes me hopeful that if we can make progress with air quality we can make progress with other things Japan Europe Australia are also part of the problem so no justice Jeffrey Sachs said in effect avoid single factor explanations avoid single factor it avoid single villain explanations there are plenty of villains going around yeah hi Joshua catcher television producer I have two premises from Derek Jensen's book end game that I'd be curious to hear your response to there are two short premises I'll just read them premise one civilization is not and can never be sustainable this is especially true for industrial civilization premise two our way of living civilization is based on it requires and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence I disagree with both that's work as for ad for industrial civilization no I don't see anything fatally flawed about industrial civilization we're doing some things wrong many things wrong if we do do those things right I don't see any reason why we can't carry on indefinitely my name is Pedro Sanchez I'm a soil scientist at the Earth Institute delighted about all what you have written about soils and but my question is totally different my question is speculation how how far off was the world in instead of Columbus quote discovering America the Mayans would have quotes discovered Europe that's a good example of how it's a really interesting question counterfactual history historians nowadays often ask these counterfactual questions what would have happened if the Maya had discovered Europe or perhaps more of more promising case what would have happened if the Aztec emperor Montezuma had discovered Europe because the Aztecs had an empire the Maya were not yet organized in an empire the reasons bsx does not discovered Europe is that they didn't have big boats in the whole economic organization to support those boats but if they had discovered Europe the outcome would would have been the same as it was now namely the Aztecs were susceptible to smallpox measles TB diphtheria pertussis there was no crowd epidemic disease in the New World to threaten Europeans there were a dozen crowd epidemic diseases in the old world Eurasia was several thousand years ahead of the new world as to say developments happened several thousand years earlier in Eurasia as regards metal technology as regards riding as regards the formation of empires and centralized state governments so the head start of the old world of a newer was just too long as for the reasons why that head start that was the subject of my book Guns Germs and Steel and basically I see it happen as having nothing to do with the individual people but everything to do with what geography and biogeography made available to people in certain areas of the old world a new world but there was a greater variety of domesticable wild plants and especially animals in the old world and the new world plus the east-west axis observation so if the maya had discovered the old world the outcome would have been the same in my opinion yes diane Bucksbaum EPA and the Sierra Club - rather disparate groups but anyway first of all thank you for costing me so much money for having to buy my family Guns Germs and Steel and collapse each member of my family but anyway beyond that dr. William Schlesinger is coming to speak at the Sierra Club next month know in a month and a half he's going to be talking about the relationship between population issues and the environmental well probably global warming and other environmental degradation a statement in a recent editorial he had in the Duke University magazine said that no matter what we do to improve the quality of the environment nothing will help if we do not learn to and somehow manner reduce the rate of population or actually equal stabilize the rate of population growth on the planet and I'm just wondering if you have any solutions that you could offer I certainly do have a comment I have a comment on that on the issue of population 30 or 40 years ago population people concerned with environmental population problem considered population as a single most important Trump problem and now I would say we know that that's not the case it's one of the dozen major problems but it's unfair to say that it's major problem a reason why I say that is that number 32 that Jeff has spent a good deal of this time trying to understand the factor of 32 the difference between average consumption rates in the first world and in the third world what counts is not the number of people if all these people were in cold storage or living as in the New Guinea Highlands the world could support 10 billion in Guinea Highlands what counts as human consumption rates which are the product of number of people times consumption rate per capita but the average consumption rate in first world is 32 times that in the third world I'm not worried about the what is that 40 million Kenyans whose population is increasing at 4% per year or whatever it is that is a tragedy and difficulty for Kenya but it's not a problem for the rest of the world I'm much more concerned about the population growth rates in the first world of Americans Europeans and Japanese because one American Japanese or Spain and European equals in consumption rates 32 Kenyans and 32 Zambians that's why I regard population as a issue but not the Trump issue that it used to be considered I'm afraid we've come to the end of the time for the scheduled questions but Professor diamond will be in the next room and I want to invite everybody before you move first let's do it properly I want to invite everybody to the faculty room afterwards for reception and book signing and most importantly let's give a very warm ovation to Professor die [Music] you
