good evening welcome to UC Berkeley in the spring 2014 Horace M Albright lecture in conservation with Professor Jared Diamond I'm Keith Gillis Dean of the College of Natural Resources and a professor of forest economics here before we begin let's take a minute to make sure that our technology is quiet technology and I'd like to ask you please no photography or recording during the presentation it's totally unnecessary we are taping this event and it will be available in much better sound and visual quality on the website within a few days there will be time for some questions and answers at the end of professor diamonds causes presentation since we have such a large audience we want to make the most of the time that we have for question and answer so we're asking you to please write your questions clearly on one of the index cards that our Usher's are collecting and distributing if you have a question you haven't done so already please raise your hand in the store so make sure you get a card and they'll be collecting them that's it for housekeeping and logistics on to the whole reason we're really here which is not housekeeping logistics so for over 50 years the Albright lecture series has brought to Berkeley some of the most thought-provoking and innovative leaders in conservation and sustainability the series today is a marvelous tribute to Horace Albright and his lifetime of achievement as many of you probably know given that we are a self-selected crowd when we attend events like this Horace Albright is the person to whom we probably all owe the greatest collective debt for the creation of the National Park Service we're delighted to partner this evening on the lecture with two very important programs that are keeping the legacy of Horace Albright alive the master of development practice which is celebrating the graduation of its first cohort of and the Department of Environmental Science policy and management which is celebrating its 20th anniversary the master of development practice or MDP as we say in an institution that loves to speak in acronyms is a two-year degree program that provides students with the skills and knowledge required to better identify and address the global challenges of sustainable development such as poverty population health conservation climate change agricultural productivity the MDP students that are here tonight a great group and their orientation to solving those issues really resonates I believe with what our speaker is saying to us tonight the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation committed more than 15 million dollars to create a network of MD pre programs at 20 universities worldwide and Berkeley is very honored to have been selected as a part of that network of MDP programs because it helps us in part realize our aspirations to increase our engagement in professionally oriented graduate education in the areas where our faculty have a long history of both doing research and engaging in practice the MDP program here wouldn't be possible without the dedication and capable leadership of my colleague the distinguished agricultural economist and Robinson professor of agriculture and food economics David Silberman David would you please stand for a moment David is the only person I've ever met that when you raise any topic can say honestly oh I wrote a paper and he has on anything you name will all members of the master of development practice program in attendance tonight raise your hands they deserve applause they're the future leaders that are going to implement the new ideas that help us meet the challenge of sustainable development they're going to go on from Berkeley to take on roles in global nonprofits private enterprise innovative startups governments economic and public policy think tanks international firms you're going to see these people and you're going to hear their name our second partner in putting on tonight's event is the department of environmental science policy and management just so that their acronym doesn't get slighted it's s p'm or es p.m. if you care to draw it out which is celebrating its 20th anniversary it was formed in 1994 as we were thinking what makes us relevant and well poised to exploit our position on the Berkeley campus to address a mission which we feel is the modern land-grant mission the Q&A session tonight will be moderated by the chair of that department professor Ron Amundsen Ron would you stand up for a second and say I think the work that is going to be discussed this evening by the speaker really epitomizes the work done by our students and faculty in the MDP program and ESP M and the College of Natural Resources more generally professor diamonds latest book of the world until yesterday shows the importance of development experts being students of both science and customs tradition and history of the traditional cultures in which they work they need essentially to be engaged in a continuous co-learning process with the cultures that they work with as I told professor diamond earlier today it wasn't until I was actually engaged in sustainable development work as a professional that I fully understood the wisdom of one of my major professors having me read a lot of cultural anthropology economists need to know this so it's a great pleasure to welcome to the spring Albright scientist and author Jared Diamond I think everyone in this audience must know at least one probably several of his popular science books the third chimpanzee Guns Germs and Steel for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 collapse and the focus of his talk tonight his book the world until yesterday originally trained in Physiology diamonds work draws from a wide variety of fields including anthropology ecology geography evolutionary biology in addition to his Pulitzer Prize Diamond received a National Science Medal in 1999 and in 2013 the prestigious Wolf Prize in agriculture which those of us in agricultural economics with called the nobel prize in agriculture for his pioneering work on theories of crop domestication the rise of agriculture and its influences on the development and demise of human societies as well as its impact on the ecology of the environment born in Boston Dimond obtained his BA from Harvard his PhD in physiology from Cambridge Dimon returned to Harvard then moved on to become a professor of physiology at the UCLA Medical School in 68 while still in his 20s he developed a parallel career in ornithology and ecology specialize in in New Guinea and nearby islands which was a part of the topic of discussion from professor bison jur another ornithologist on our faculty oh when they had a chance to reconnect earlier this evening later in his 50s Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became professor of geography at UCLA where he is today please join me in welcoming professor Jared Diamond to the podium let me first check whether you can hear me okay and back can you hear it back more technology now can you hear and back can you hear no is there someone controlling the microphone who can push it up a few amps now can you hear can you hear and DAC yes all right it's a pleasure for me to be back at Berkeley I grew up in Boston I had never been to California until just about 50 years ago when I made my first trip to California it was to Berkeley I stayed in the Faculty Club and I decided then that I wanted to move to California the only missing element was job negotiations and the result of those was that I moved to UCLA in 1966 to the medical school where for many years for 36 years I was a specialist in gallbladder sodium transport I taught medical students about gall bladder intestine kidney and finally in 2002 I moved to our College to the Geography Department where I now teach just undergraduates and that gives me an opportunity to write books about big questions of human societies and to try out the material for books on my UCLA undergraduates yesterday I was giving a lecture in what will be my next book to come out in four or five years I find the teaching undergraduates is a quick way to discover whether or not what I'm saying will interest and educate your audience whether or not I'm explaining in a way that they can understand and whether I understand it at all myself so it's wonderful to teach undergraduates my most recent book was about traditional societies I've been working on the island of New Guinea since 1964 studying birds and in the process to do anything in New Guinea including to study birds you have to be with New Guineans who are wonderful interesting people members of so-called traditional societies all of us here today are accustomed to living in big industrial societies so that we're accustomed to permanent housing a centralized government to make decisions writing and books and the internet societies where most people live past age 70 and we're we are accustomed to meeting strangers and not freaking out or getting killed as is the case this evening I have not noticed anyone yet trying to kill me and I assure you that I have not tried to kill anyone but if this were a traditional society where one is not accustomed to dealing with strangers being with strangers as a scary experience we forget that all of those things living in permanent housing centralized government not having to deal with strangers all of those things arose very recently in human history humans have constituted a distinct evolutionary line separate from the evolutionary line of chimpanzees for about 6 million years but almost all of those things that I mentioned dealing with strangers eating food grown by other people living in permanent housing having centralized governments all those things didn't exist anywhere in the world 11,000 years ago they arose only within the last 11,000 years and some of them such as the internet and the phenomenon of most people living power stayed 70 developed only within the last century or so that is the ancestors of all of us here today we're living under traditional conditions until virtually yesterday measured against the time scale the six million year time scale of human evolution until five hundred years ago traditional tribal societies still occupied large parts of the world but tribal societies has recently been coming under increasing pressure from modern societies with state governments to the point where today the last tribal societies not yet under state control are confined to small areas of New Guinea and of the Amazon basin those tribal societies which constituted all human societies for most of human history are far more diverse than our our modern big societies all big societies that have governments and we are most people are strangers to each other are similar to each other and different from tribal societies in many basic ways regardless of whether the big societies are American Chinese Japanese or Israeli tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society they constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn for example if today you think that modern American children enjoy too much freedom or else are not given enough freedom you cannot perform the decisive experiment of designating seventeen American States where children will be given the freedom to do whatever they want including to play with sharp knives from the age of two and designate another 17 States where children have to remain strictly subsea subservient to their parents and grandchildren grandparents and then 16 other states where children continue to be treated as they are today if we could only carry out that controlled experiment we could come back in 40 years compare the kids from those three sets of states compare kids with less more and equal freedom and quickly settle whether American children would be better off with less more the same freedom that they have today unfortunately it's impossible immoral and illegal to carry out that decisive experiment in the United States but there are thousands of traditional societies in which children already grow up with either much more freedom or much less freedom than in the modern US by examining what actually does happen to children in traditional societies that are much more varied than modern American Society we may be able to learn things a practical value to us practical value in deciding how to raise our own kids how to treat older people how to remain healthy how to deal with danger and other things we care a lot about tribal society should not be scorned as primitive and miserable but also they shouldn't be idealized as happy and peaceful when we learn of tribal practices some of them will horrify us but there are other tribal practices which when we hear about them we may admire and envy them and we may wonder whether we could adopt those practices for ourselves the example of tribal practices that I wanted to discuss this evening is something of practical interest to all of us namely how to deal with danger and to illustrate issues of dealing with danger let me begin with an incident that happened to me in New Guinea in my earliest years there I was studying birds surveying birds with a group of New Guineans on a mountain and we're moving our camp from low elevation up to high elevation on the mountain and in the afternoon we arrived at a suitable altitude I picked what I thought would be a gorgeous campsite it was underneath a magnificent tall tree at a flat place in the ridge we I went are plenty of space for bird-watching the ridge had a sharp drop-off where I'd be able to look out and watch Swift's and parrots and Hawks fly by and so I told them games with me let's camp out here and could you please put up our tents underneath this big tree at that time I was inexperienced and in cautious about the specific dangers of New Guinea that I didn't have New Guineans general attitude towards danger to me that tree seemed perfectly safe to sleep under but not to my New Guinea friends they refused to sleep there they said rather than sleep under that tree they were going to move 100 yards down the ridge and even sleep out in the open and I asked what's what's the matter was sleeping under this tree they said look at it the tree is dead and yes I looked up at or near the tree was dead but heaven's sakes it's a gigantic tree I said that's been standing there for decades and it's gonna stand there for another decade and it's not decades and it's not going to fall over on us and kill us precisely tonight while we're camped out under it so heaven's sakes let's put up our tents underneath this beautiful tree but my New Guinea friends absolutely refused to sleep there I thought that their fears were exaggerated veering on paranoia which is the technical term for exaggerated fear well as I got more experience in New Guinea it was the case we spent a week there and in the week the treed I slept under the tree the New Guinean slept further away and the tree did not fall over on me during that week so I thought that proves that the affair is a paranoid and and I was behaving appropriately but as I got more experience in New Guinea every night that you sleep out in New Guinea forests you hear a tree fall somewhere and as you walk around in New Guinea forests during the day every now and then during the day you hear trees falling somewheres in the forest and eventually I did the calculation if the risk of a dead tree falling on you the particular night that you choose to sleep under it is only one in 1,000 which sounds like nothing but if you sleep every night under a dead tree then within three years which is 1095 nights if your risk of the tree falling over on you pro night is one in 1,000 you can expect to be dead within three years if you have the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees the paranoia the apparent paranoia of the New Guineans then made perfect sense to me I now think of it as constructive paranoia that's to say a watchful outlook essential to survival in traditional societies and that's the most important lesson that I've learned from New Guineans about dealing with danger namely the cumulative risk of repeatedly doing something that each time you do it your chances of encountering disaster are low but if you repeat it often enough the chances will catch up with you the cautious attitude towards danger that I've learned from my New Guinea friends drives many of my American friends crazy the Americans who understand my the Americans and Europeans who understand my attitude towards danger or friends who've like whose lifestyle exposes them repeatedly to danger and who learned as did I from seeing the deaths of enclosures friends one was a friend who was an unarmed Bobby on the streets of London another is a whitewater rafting guide in the United States and a third is a friend who pilot small airplanes and all of them learned constructor paranoia by seeing what happened to other pilots and and other guides and other policemen who are not equally cautious obviously they have to be big differences between how one thinks about dangers in New Guinea and other traditional societies on the one hand compared to how we think about dangers in the US for example the types of dangers are of course different in New Guinea and other traditional societies the principal dangers include accidents of the natural environment such as lions dangerous insects fallen trees and exposure to cold or rain those environmental hazards are much less important in the West we are we've tamed and modify the natural environment nevertheless my wife and I were nearly killed by a fallen tree in Montana last year other dangers of traditional life are violence infectious diseases and starvation all of those are much less significant as threats in the West instead we face a new set of dangers such as cars step ladders heart attacks cancers and other non communicable diseases so partly we've just traded one set of dangers of traditional dangers for another new set of modern dangers but it's not just the case that the types of dangers in the u.s. differ from the types of dangers in New Guinea the overall level of danger the risk of death each year is lower in Western society as measured by our average life span of nearly 80 years compared to 50 years or less in traditional societies and a third difference is that the consequences of accidents can be repaired much more easily in the u.s. than in New Guinea for example my only broken leg bone in my life came when I slipped on the ice in Harvard Square in Cambridge Mass I stumbled over to a telephone booth 10 feet away called up my physician father who came and picked me up took me to the hospital where the surgeons set my foot and I got fixed completely whereas if you break a leg bone in New Guinea when you are three days walk away from the nearest airstrip the odds are against you are being able to get out to the airstrip at all and also in traditional societies there are not surgeons to set a pro grow can bond so you're likely to end up crippled for the rest of your life hence we in the West are not so concerned about dangers because even if an accident we know it's much more likely to be fixable for us than if it happened in New Guinea that lower level of danger in the modern world combined with our expectation that damage caused by dangers can be repaired has consequences for our thinking about danger in the modern world our thinking is muddled and confused we obsess about the wrong risks we worry too much about dangers that really are very unlikely to befall us and that kill vanishingly few Americans and conversely we don't pay enough attention to the dangers that really are likely to materialize we Americans obsess about terrorists and plane crashes while we brush off the danger of falling while coming up a steep Berkeley stair while falling more on it while on a stepladder now confused thinking about dangers emerges from comparing our ratings of various hazards compared with the numbers of actual deaths or potential deaths caused by those same hazards there's big discrepancy but in such comparisons you have to be careful the number of actual deaths caused by a particular type of hazard may not be a good measure of the seriousness of that hazard the hazards number of resulting deaths may be low precisely because the hazard crops up frequently and it's likely to be fatal and we recognize it and take precautions against them in that case the hazard has a big influence on our behavior we're very careful about it it changes our lifestyle and as a result it caused a few deaths an example of that effect in traditional societies arises among the young people hunter-gatherers of southern Africa with regard to lions the cool live in deserts where there are lots of Lions Lions nevertheless cause very few come deaths only five out of every thousand Kong deaths is due to a lion does that mean that lions are not dangerous no of course not Lions cause few deaths precisely because lions are so dead and there encountered so frequently that the Cong are extremely careful about them and they make big changes in their behavior to reduce the hazard of liens to voice the come don't go out at night during the day they walk around in groups rather than singly they talk constantly so the toys will alert a lion and they won't surprise and stumble on a lion and they keep their eyes out for animal tracks an example for us moderns of a real and recognized danger causing few deaths precisely because some of us recognize it and adopt countermeasures involves experienced airplane pilots who do a lot of flying airplane pilots know perfectly well that their mistakes are likely to be fatal and so every time that they are about to fly an airplane they go around the plane and they check it out carefully in contrast most of us when we get into a rental car or when we get into our own car we don't go around the car and check it carefully because mistakes or structural problems are much less likely to kill you when driving a car then when piloting an airplane so you can simply take the number of deaths caused by a hazard as a measure of the seriousness and frequency of the hazard you have to estimate what the number of deaths would be if you are not careful but even when you take that consideration into account there's still a big mismatch between our subjective ranking of risks and the actual seriousness of risks it turns out that the hazards that we Americans rank highly or the hazard of terrorists plane crashes for passengers nuclear accidents DNA based technologies genetically modified crops and spray cans though in fact all of those things kill very very few Americans conversely we Americans underestimate the hazards of alcohol cars poking slipping and falling and home appliances all of which do kill lots of people what things are shared between hazards that we overestimate and what things are shared between hazards that we underestimate it turns out that we overestimate the danger of hazards that lie beyond our control and we overestimate the hazard of things about which we have no choice and events that kill many people at a time and has that killed people in visible spectacular ways that make newspaper headlines and new unfamiliar risks such as DNA that's why we overestimate the hazards of terrorists nuclear accidents plane crashes for passengers and DNA based technologies those dangers happen to us and we can't control them conversely we underestimate the hazards of events that are under our control things that we choose or accept voluntarily things that kill only one individual at a time in ways that don't make newspaper headlines and familiar hazards that's why we underestimate the danger of drinking alcohol cars smoking slipping and falling and home appliances we choose to use or do those things and we think that we can limit the risks of them by being careful we underestimate those hazards because the average person thinks I know that those things can kill other people but I am careful and their risk for me is lower than their risk for the average person but that's obviously nonsense because by definition the average person who is sane that faces average risks we tend to think I am careful and strong so those things may kill other people but they are unlikely to kill me that attitude is summed up by the quip we are reluctant to let others do unto us that which we happily do unto ourselves the really serious hazards of everyday life about which we should obsess much more than we obsess about terrorists and GM crops nuclear technology include the danger of slipping and falling in the shower or slipping and falling on a wet sidewalk or on a stepladder or while going down the stairs all that you have to do is to read the obituary column any day in any newspaper and you'll see that for all the people Falls are one of the commonest causes of getting crippled loss of quality of life and even of getting killed with that in mind I reflect that today I've already done the most dangerous thing that I'm going to do all day today namely I took a shower you may say for heaven's sakes Jarrod you are paranoid what is the risk Jarrett of falling in the shower it's only 1 in 1,000 what are you so obsessed about and my answer is 1 in 1,000 risk falling the shower one in 1,000 that's not nearly good enough just do the numbers now that I'm 76 life expectancy Finn American man age 76 is 91 so I have statistically 15 remaining years of average life experiment expectancy but if I shower daily in those 15 years I'm going to take 15 times 365 equals 5475 showers and if every time I take a shower I'm sowing cautious than my risk of falling in the shower is one in 1,000 then it means that by the time I live out my what would otherwise be my life expectancy of aged 91 I'm going to kill myself five and a half times that's why I've learned to pay attention to the risk of dangers that carry only a low risk each time that I do them but that I expect to do frequently for the rest of my life such as taking showers and driving like New Guineans who expect to sleep out in the jungle many Oh most nights for the rest of their life there are some people who object that my attitude of caution that I learned from New Guineans must be paralyzing some of my friends think that I'm always obsessing about what could go wrong and so the result is that I don't do anything no the fact is instead I operate with constructive paranoia like New Guineans despite the hazards of falling trees New Guineans still do camp out in the forest but they're careful never to camp out under a dead tree and similarly I assure you I do not avoid taking showers I still do take my daily shower but I pay attention and I do it carefully I'm concerned about showers you may have noticed that I watched as they came up these stairs I'm concerned about stepladders I'm concerned about cars but I'm not at all concerned about terrorists nuclear accidents GM crops and other bagga tells like that that then is one example of the lessons that one can learn from observing the lifestyle of people in traditional societies and it's one of the examples that I've most incorporated into my own life but there are many other areas where we can watch how people live in traditional societies and learn things that are valuable to us about how to deal with universal human problems all people whether they're in industrial societies or traditional all people are likely to have children to grow old to face dangers to get involved in disputes to think about religion possibly to speak more than one language traditional people have faced those same problems they'd had tens of thousands of years of figuring out thousands of different ways of dealing with those problems for example dispute resolution and traditional societies emphasizes emotional clearance it doesn't focus on right or wrong it doesn't focus on how much that pig is worth it instead recognizes the fact that you're going to deal with that person for the rest of your life and what counts is being able to deal with that person and not having a relationship poison well in in our modern industrial societies some of the disputes any of you've been in court know that American courts routinely make do not attempt at all to achieve emotional closure between the individuals involved in a civil dispute or in a criminal dispute but American courts care about is right and wrong punishment and setting a good example so any of you who've had the misfortune to appear in court with someone that potentially you're going to deal with for the rest of your life such as any of you who've been in a divorce court or any of you who've had an inheritance dispute with a brother or sister you know that the American courts are likely to produce the result that certainly there's no emotional clearance but instead you are likely to end up angry and not speaking to brother/sister ex spouse for the rest of your life but traditional societies we can learn from traditional societies about how to deal with disputes aiming at emotional closure that's one example in fact there's a movement in California New Zealand Canada and so on to bring together the advantages of modern state-level societies with their courts combined with the emphasis of traditional societies on emotional closure it's called restorative justice another example is child rearing and I speak with some diffidence about what I learned from traditional societies about child rearing given that one of my two sons is in the audience today but but the fact is that in traditional societies children are brought up to be self-confident to be the socially skilled already at five ten years to make their own decisions where does that come from well there are things done in traditional societies bringing up children which are not standard practice in modern state-level societies a tradition in in small level traditional societies for example among the pygmies of Africa hapu we never do hit a child or baby if a husband or wife hits a child once that's considered grounds for divorce in traditional societies babies are carried then are pushed in baby carriages horizontally where they can't see where they're going they're not carried vertically facing backwards where they can't see where they're going they carried vertically facing forwards where they do see where they're going where they've got the same field of view as the parent and so where they feel in control of their environment the result is faster development of normal motor skills in traditional societies usually there's a quicker response to a child crime to to a baby crying there's much debate in modern societies about whether if a baby cries should you pick the baby up or should you let the baby cry itself to sleep even if it takes half an hour well there's none of that nonsense in traditional society if a baby starts crying on the average the baby is picked up and competent within less than ten seconds and on an average within three seconds all of those things contribute to the self-confidence and the security with which children in traditional societies grow up another example has to do with the evolution of religion a religion assumes different functions in different societies religion has had different functions in the past in really small-scale traditional societies in early state-level societies and in modern times and most of us in our lives go through a religious crisis where we reevaluate our religion or reevaluate whether to have a religion at all under those circumstances may be helpful to look at what religion has meant in other societies and to realize that religion is not monolithic it doesn't just have a single function but it served different functions for different people at different times another example involves multilingualism in the United States multilingualism does to say growing up children growing up speaking multiple languages is not just controversial but a prevalent view in the United States is that children should not be brought up should not be confused being brought up as babies learning multiple languages because the concern is that that it will be confusing for kids and you should teach kids just one language but the reality and learn another language later when you go to Berkeley or high school but the reality is that in traditional societies around the world most kids grow up learning multiple languages in New Guinea I personally have never met a New Guinean who spoke fewer than five languages because mother and father are likely to come from different language groups the median New Guinea language is spoken only by two thousand people so other groups around you speak different languages and the result is that you learn the language of your mother and you learn the language of your father and you learn other languages around you perhaps the most in fact the most surprising discovery that I made in the course of work on this recent book the world until yesterday had to do with the benefits of multilingualism a study within the last five years in Toronto Canada in old people's homes looked at the onset of symptoms of the dreaded dimensions of old age such as Alzheimer's disease and in whole people home in Toronto the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer's if they came on at all was measured in a wide variety of subjects and different things were measured out the subjects and it turned out in the case of Alzheimer's there's speculation that you can protect yourself against Alzheimer's by playing grids or by doing Sudoku puzzles but in fact there's no evidence and support support of any of these so so-called modern protective mesh measures against Alzheimer's the only thing that we now know and discover in the last five years that protects you against Alzheimer's symptoms is being multilingual that's to say in this Canadian study people who spoke two or more languages if they developed Alzheimer's symptoms at all developed them on the average five years later that's to say being multilingual what at least being bilingual gives you five years protection gets Alzheimer's why well we all know that that exercising our bodies if you want to develop your shoulders keep your shoulders strong best thing to do is shoulder exercises but the best exercise for the human brain is being multilingual because constantly throughout the day every time you hear someone or every time you talk every time you think you're having to switch back and forth between a couple of sets of rules you're having to switch back and forth between Japanese and English or between Italian German and English and so multilingualism is constant exercise for the brain so it's in retrospect it's not surprising that multilingualism is the only protection that we know now against the symptoms of Alzheimer's what we don't know is whether a multilingual person seems achieves the same benefit as a bilingual person whether you get five years for a second language and no more years protection against multiple languages or whether you get five years for each language and this is something of much interest to me because what will be the last language that I learned my thirteenth language is Italian and if I get five years protection for each language then I got 65 years of protection against Alzheimer's whereas if you get five years of protection for deemed bilingual and no further protection for other languages then I've only got five years of benefits research is still waiting on that and finally from traditional societies we can learn about being healthy the majority the vast majority of us in this room are going to die of a so-called non communicable disease that's to say a non infectious disease like type-2 diabetes stroke hypertension heart disease cancer in traditional societies essentially nobody dies of those non communicable diseases and yet if people in traditional societies adopt the Western lifestyles such as New Guinea villagers moving down to the capital Port Moresby and so I did eat out of supermarkets within a ship within a relatively short time they the people in traditional society start developing these non communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease so it's clear that something about the traditional lifestyle protects us against non communicable diseases we already know a good deal about what are the factors in our lifestyle that get us in trouble and what are the factors and traditional lifestyles that protect us salt intake is one traditional salt intake in the highlands of New Guinea is one twentieth of a gram of soil per day the average American consumes 10 grams of salt per day which means that the average American in one day consumes as much salt as a New Guinean in two hundred days there's a Asian restaurant in Orange County east of Los Angeles which has the record for one dish its spicy noodle dish contains 18 grams of salt which is one year's worth of soil consumption for a New Guinean so given what we know about the relation between salt and blood pressure and hypertension and Stroke it's no surprise that our modern lifestyle predisposes us towards hypertension and stroke and the traditional lifestyle protects against or diabetes again risk factors for type 2 diabetes are eating too much and eating the wrong side touch some types of stuff eating too much sugar eating eating too much the wrong sorts of fats but the risk of diabetes in type 2 diabetes in New Guinea is essentially zero it's a matter of lifestyle so those then are some examples examples from confronting danger examples from dispute resolution examples from rearing children examples from religion examples from multilingualism and examples from staying healthy those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies I hope that you we'll find it as fascinating to read in my book about traditional societies as I found it to live in them thank so I was joking with someone earlier at the reception about the way I teach sustainability for years as I was teaching the introduction to environmental economics and policy on the campus here and I said I'd start my last lecture off with short film clips from original Star Trek Woody Allen's sleeper soya and green and Mad Max and asked the students then as we talked about different ideas as to what even a sustainable future might look like we're at this point after just talking about sustainability in economics with me for a semester they thought Society was headed no one ever picked original Star Trek with with Kirk holding up a large diamond saying well I can make as many of these as I want up on the ship you know so unlimited resources not a future anyone believes that right so I I hope as you're going home tonight you think a bit about what sustainability is what our futures might be and where we might look for inspiration to achieve it and the other thing is based on your your comments tonight I have two choices when I'm going back to the city I've got my spanish-language CDs loaded in my car and I've got the radio and I think I know which which my option is going to be on the wood drive back to San Francisco thank you very much professor diamond for a stimulating talk thank thank you Ron for helping us with the discussion and thank you to the audience as always a Berkeley crowd ask good questions thank you
