Shawn writes:

> Personally I think it is arrogant in the extreme to think that what we've 
> been doing has had a catastrophic and permanent effect on the earth, look 
> at all the other upheavals that happened before we started keeping records, 
> and the earth survived and recovered on its own, thank you very much.

Ah, a man who knows what he thinks and who will not be deterred by facts. A 
quality to be admired. Near presidential, in fact.

On the opposite side of the coin, Jared Diamond is one of those left-leaning, 
wimpy elitist types who teaches physiology, biogeography and human culture at 
UCLA. He earlier wrote "Guns, Germs and Steel" and has recently written 
"Collapse." He was quite recently in Australia giving an invited talk on the 
earlier subject of the collapse of various civilizations. The complete transcript of 
his talk appears here:

     http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1454791.htm

I've heard Diamond give this talk a couple of times before -- and the 
transcript is definitely worth reading if you have the time -- but the following part 
was new to me, and I liked it enough to repeat it here. 

The subject of the snippet is Easter Island. Easter Island was once a densely 
forested island with sufficient productivity that it could support a fairly 
large human population -- that is until the last tree was cut down by the 
Easter Islanders. Soon after that, the human population died.

The only question is: where do Shawn's comments fit in the following list?

========================================

My students at the University of California asked me a question whose 
significance I hadn’t appreciated yet. Why on earth did these [Easter Island] people 
do such dumb things, chop down trees, too many trees. Why didn’t they realise 
that they were getting into trouble? What do you think the Easter Islander who 
chopped down the last tree said as he was doing it? And my students suggested 
various answers. One answer was, maybe that islander said: ‘Never fear, 
technology will solve our problems by finding a substitute for wood’. Or maybe he 
said: ‘Keep big government of the federal chiefs off my back, this is my 
private property and I can do what I want with it’. Or perhaps he said: ‘Your fears 
are exaggerated; your ecological models are untested; we need more research; 
a ban on logging would be premature’. Or the week before last – remember, I’m 
from the United States where we have a large evangelical portion of our 
population. So the week before last someone suggested to me maybe the person who 
chopped down the last tree said: ‘Never fear, have faith, God will provide for 
us’.

========================================

Wirt Atmar

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