Week 12

Yu-Jen(Chris),Tsai

Diamond talks a lot about the factors that are causing the collapsing societies over the times; he also made several lists to clarify his point. In the online video, Jared brought up several examples that explains particularly on the five-point frame work he came up with, which can be related to many other ecocide elements and factors in the book Collapse. For example, the soil problem and the deforestation issues are part of the first list of the five; that is the human impact on the relied resources. During the lecture, Diamond discussed some of the problems Montana has gone through and need to be prepared to solve and face, which is also one of the main theme stated in the first part of his book. Firstly, the human impact on the environment of Montana State is mainly due to the toxins due to the mine waste, causing many severe damages on the land. Irreparable economic loss then emerged. Pollutions made Montana lost billions of dollars annually in that the condition of the land is so used up by the toxins and human wastes. Forest management then came up as another serious issue that needs immense improvement. Since the climate change phenomenon in our environment, one other list of the ecocide, depends generally on the plants that recycles the atmosphere and keeping the system running, the weather in Montana has changed from cold and humid to warm and dry, which bad news to the agricultural business in the particular areas like Montana. Despite this is an example happened back a few years ago, many other areas in the world are encountering the same harsh condition of either weather or the pollution in general. For instance, China need to figure out a way to manage the resource recycling since in the future, they will no doubt be one of the biggest countries that is responsible for massive use of environmental resource.