Tuesday, 01 March 2005
Jared Diamond: Collapse
FSC Featured in NY Times Bestseller
Jared Diamond, author of the popular 1998 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, released a new book in January, titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The book is currently ranked at no. 2 on the New York Times’ bestsellers list.
In Collapse, Diamond attempts to answer the question: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Throughout his book, Diamond explores patterns of catastrophe in former civilizations, including the Polynesian culture on Easter Island, the Native American cultures on the Anasazi’s and the Mayans, and the medieval Viking colony on Greenland. He explains similarities to the ruins of these cultures with some of those that have already occurred, or may soon occur, in modern civilization. He demonstrates how the waste of valuable resources, including oil, coal, and trees, could lead to the collapse of civilization, as we know it.
In his discussion of issues surrounding deforestation, Diamond explains how forests are a particularly valuable natural resource since they are naturally renewable, unlike oil or coal. He sets the stage for the importance of forests not only for the forest products that first world cultures rely on every day (paper, construction timber, wood for furniture, etc.) but also how many third world cultures rely heavily on forests for significant non-forest products, such as medicines and natural rope. He explains how forests also act as a natural carbon sink, and that deforestation has been directly attributed to global warming, as well as providing habitats for between 50-80% of the world’s terrestrial species of plants and animals.
Diamond goes on to discuss the Forest Stewardship Council as a tool for solving global deforestation. He describes the FSC Principles & Criteria, the certification process, and how consumers can believe in FSC certification because, “it is not an unsubstantiated boast by the company itself, but the result of an examination, against internationally accepted standard of best practice, by trained and experienced auditors…” (page 474). He goes on to state that FSC can help prevent this future “collapse” of civilization that he conceptualizes because “the FSC initially served mainly to recognize companies with environmentally sound practices, and is now increasingly serving to change the practices of other companies that were initially less sound environmentally” (page 478).
In addition to being an author, Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. His awards include the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (known informally as the “genius grant”).