Jared Diamond
Geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles; author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005) and Upheaval (2019).
Cited by Davis KedroskySee it on the map
Jared Diamond did not write this page.
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Their wordsFor example, all of us know in a personal crisis—breakup of a marriage, death of a loved one, financial setback, health setback, and all these personal crises—getting through it requires, first of all, acknowledging that you are in a crisis.
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Their wordsBut the world has not had a world identity. We citizens of the world are not united by a common enemy.
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Their wordsit's clear that all countries have got to deal with this problem, because if 215 countries get rid of COVID and the 216th country still has it, it will infect the rest of the world. This is a world problem that requires a world solution.
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Their wordsInstead, I see it as a sound, public health policy to close borders, which sometimes coincides with state borders, sometimes with national borders.
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Their wordsWhen one has a visible common enemy that kills quickly and it's clear that it's the enemy of everybody, that's something that brings people together and encourages people to cooperate.
- 12 years earlier
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Their wordsSeveral decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.
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Their wordsWhat really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.
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Our reading
Promising developing countries a first-world lifestyle is an impossible promise, a cruel hoax.
Their wordsThis promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.
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Our reading
Rich countries will soon consume less, willingly or not, because present rates are unsustainable.
Their wordsNevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.
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Their wordsReal sacrifice wouldn't be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates.
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Their wordsMuch American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life.
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Our reading
Run sustainably, the world's fisheries could yield at maximum historical rates indefinitely.
Their wordsIf we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.
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Their wordsIn fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.
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Their wordsThe world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.