Published May 23, 2008
by dbazely
It's amazing what great stuff is available online. Andrew Tanentzap, a former York U Biology student, now at Cambridge University, sent me the link to a great lecture by Jared Diamond at Columbia's Earth Institute. In case you didn't know, Jared Diamond is the originator of the list of major causes of the current biodiversity crisis - also known as the only human-caused mass extinction. In a 1989 article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Diamond and his colleagues, listed the human causes of today's species extinctions: overhunting, habitat loss, introduced species and ripple effects or "chains of extinction". Jared Diamond is also the author of the Pullitzer-prize winning, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and the more recent, Collapse (2005).
Dawn Bazely
Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog
Collapse is pretty good. I read it on my flight to India last fall. Diamond was also a keynote speaker at the AAG last year. The Easter Island section harkens back however to an older environmental history text, namely, Clive Ponting’s “A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations.” In fact, a lot of Diamond’s points echo those of Ponting who was writing in 1993. Just another example of interesting ideas coming back into vogue along with the requisite critiques, especially with the controversy that surrounds anything smacking of environmental determinism.