I am not a doomsayer. I have a lot of faith in humanity, but I also find myself often shaking my head We have come up with wonderful inventions, in life saving treatments, in technologies that improve the quality of life. We also like to tamper with "mother nature" and impact her sweet balance. We are often reactive, trying to fix a crisis rather than trying to prevent it in the first place. We are also greedy, too greedy. Our wants have turned to needs and we start to loose track of what is truly important in life.
Today there was an
article in the Journal about an author named Jared Diamond who will be speaking at the University. Some of his observations really resonated with me.
The lesson -- that new technology creates its own unintended consequences -- has been missed by societies over thousands of years, says Diamond, the internationally acclaimed author of the 2005 book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
He has spent years studying why societies fall apart or succeed -- and why they often always miss the signs of their imminent demise.
Societies don't tackle their coming problems if the wealthy, ruling elite can protect itself from the worst impacts of those problems. This problem is "acute" in the U.S. these days where the gap between rich and poor is much wider than in Canada, he says.
"It's not just the fact that the elites have all the wealth in a society, but that they are disconnected from the problems. If the rich and powerful still live the good life as society is spinning downhill, they are not motivated to solve the problems."
In the U. S, where the rich live in gated communities with private health care and private schools, the elites are not engaged with the range of social and economic problems, he says.
The US economic crisis is just one example used by this author, but it is a key and current example of how we plow straight into trouble because we follow the lead of those that have nothing to loose and everything to gain. I sometimes feel this way about living in Alberta and our dependence on oil and gas. We seem hell bent to pay any price for the money it brings.
Anyway, I think I will pick up this book, sounds interesting.
Our priority are all screwed up. Just look at the issue with the ducks landing in the tailings pond. Somehow the problem was that the noisemakers weren't working...NOT that there are giant lakes of toxic waste in the first place.
ReplyDeleteWe can blame those with the power, but we keep electing them into power.
Jared Diamond previously wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, which is a fascinating read on why certain societies prospered and others fell. Still haven't read Collapse yet. :)
ReplyDeleteThe problem that we have in Alberta is that we constantly panic and listen to these oil company executives without giving their claims a second rational thought. Example : How many times do they threaten to up and leave the oilsands if royalties aren't dropped or are raised? So they'll walk away from hundreds of billions in development and go...where exactly? It's BS, but we're too stupid to think about it before panicking.