VARIOUS

I was lucky enough to eat at Susur last night for my cousin's birthday. The experience is as good as they say. I don't think I could summarize what was on the tasting menu, but among the words I heard were mullet (see below), bison, foie gras, tuna, asparagus, Dungeness crab tempura, raspberry sorbet, and creme brulee-stuffed strawberries. We drank this:




On quitting teaching.

Go work in China, immediately.

BOOKS
Sierra Club interview with Jared Diamond

His last book made him a literary superstar. Guns, Germs, and Steel has sold 1.5 million copies and even now - six years after its debut - continues to sell briskly. His current book, Collapse, rose to the number-two spot on the New York Times best-seller list. Yet geographer Jared Diamond's work is not the usual stuff of popular literature. The author himself described the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel as "a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years." It set out to explain why history unfolded differently on different continents - why, for example, Europeans enslaved Africans and not vice versa. The answers, he argued convincingly, are rooted not in racial differences, but largely in environmental ones.

In many ways, Collapse reads like a companion to Guns, but the seeds were planted earlier. In the prologue to his 1992 book, The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond wrote, "Our problems...have been growing for a long time with our growing power and numbers, and are now steeply accelerating. We can convince ourselves of the inevitable outcome of our current shortsighted practices just by examining the many past societies that destroyed themselves by destroying their own resource base, despite having less potent means of self-destruction than ours." That is the point of departure for Collapse: What lessons can we learn from failed civilizations?

In San Francisco just hours before he appeared onstage at a sold-out lecture hall, Diamond, a slight man in his late 60s, sat chomping a large apple as he politely fielded my questions. He would answer each question thoroughly, then take another bite. Chomp. Question, answer, chomp. Question, answer, chomp. By the end of the interview, as in his books, he had gotten down to the heart of the matter - the well-gnawed core.

Sierra: Your new book, Collapse, has a provocative subtitle: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Why would any society choose to fail?

Jared Diamond: No society literally chooses to fail, but societies make choices that may ultimately lead to success or failure. Take the Greenland Norse. Greenland is a very challenging environment, and yet we know the Norse could have succeeded because there were other people there - the Inuit - who did succeed. The Inuit made choices and the Norse made other choices, and those choices spelled the difference between survival and death.

Sierra: You say in your book that a society's core values often spell its ruin.

Diamond: Yes, the most difficult values to jettison are those that have helped you in the past. You're inclined to cling to them. The Greenland Norse had a problem maintaining their European dairying society, a week's ship journey from Europe. As European Christians, they also despised the Inuit as pagans. Now, they could have survived if they had worked out the same trading relations with the Inuit that the Danes did in the 1700s, but the Norse held values that would not allow them to deal with these pagans and certainly would not let them eat fish and hunt ringed seals the way these pagans did. So here is a case where the values that sustained them for 450 years ultimately killed them. The United States faces similar agonizing reappraisals today.

Sierra: Which values do Americans need to reexamine?

Diamond: I can think of two prime examples. One is the consumerist idea of infinite resources. The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.

The other value is isolationism. The United States used to be effectively isolated by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There was no country strong enough to be a threat to us, so George Washington's farewell address appropriately warned against "entangling alliances." But now, particularly after September 11, it's clear that isolationism no longer works. We can't wait until each of several dozen already fragile countries blows up and then intervene at the cost of billions per country.

Sierra: In looking at the possible collapse of modern society, you've faced a criticism so often leveled against environmentalists - that we're alarmists. How do you respond?

Diamond: Environmental problems, in particular, are difficult to predict. In some cases, they turn out to be worse than prophesied. Some turn out better. In the cases where they turned out better, it may be because the initial information or assumptions were wrong. But it is often the case that the initial information was correct, but that people took action.

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars. Does that mean that environmentalists were alarmist 25 years ago? No. It means that the country reacted appropriately to their alarms and made changes, with the result that air quality is now improved. But it's an important charge, based on something that I think is regularly misunderstood - namely, the role of false alarms.

Sierra: In the wake of the tsunami disaster, one of the big concerns with setting up warning systems is that false alarms could be damaging. To send everyone in a mad rush for the hills without reason would be a bad mistake.

Diamond: I read that a false alarm of a tsunami in Hawaii would cost about $68 million. So it's a complicated question: Given the damage that a tsunami would cause, but also given the damage of a false alarm, where do you set your level of warning? It is not the case that any false alarm at all would invalidate a tsunami warning system. You have to figure out where to set your level. And it's the same way with environmental issues. You don't want too many false alarms, but they do prove that the system is functioning. That's something that the Chicken Little critics just don't understand.

Sierra: Your book is an attempt to draw lessons from the mistakes of past civilizations. But most Americans feel that technology has changed the game, that it will save us from the vulnerabilities of the past. Do you share that optimism?

Diamond: Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today: because there are more people with greater per capita impact.

Sierra: In Collapse, you write that the world now finds itself in an "exponentially accelerating horse race" between environmental damage and environmental countermeasures. What gives you hope that the race may turn out well?

Diamond: Well, the main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan. Also, we've got archaeologists. The Maya didn't have archaeologists. We have at least the potential to learn from past societies. No other society in the world's history has had that opportunity.



THE WORLD
Let's talk about climate change: To address climate change and the political challenges it raises, we must harness imagination to understanding, good science to enlightened globalisation.

by Ian McEwan

The commonplace view of the earth from an airplane at 35,000 feet - a vista that would have astounded Dickens or Darwin - can be instructive when we contemplate the fate of our earth. We see faintly, or imagine we can, the spherical curve of the horizon and, by extrapolation, sense how far we would have to travel to circumnavigate, and how tiny we are in relation to this home suspended in sterile space. When we cross the Canadian northern territories en route to the American west coast, or the Norwegian littoral, or the interior of Brazil, we are heartened to see that such vast empty spaces still exist - two hours might pass, and not a single road or track in view.

But also large and growing larger is the great rim of grime - as though detached from an unwashed bathtub - that hangs in the air as we head across the Alps into northern Italy, or the Thames basin, or Mexico City, Los Angeles, Beijing - the list is long and growing. These giant concrete stains laced with steel, those catheters of ceaseless traffic filing towards the horizon - the natural world can only shrink before them.

The sheer pressure of our numbers, the abundance of our inventions, the blind forces of our desires and needs, appear unstoppable and are generating a heat - the hot breath of our civilisation - whose effects we comprehend only hazily. The misanthropic traveller, gazing down from his wondrous, and wondrously dirty machine, is bound to ask whether the earth might not be better off without us.

How can we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appear, at this distance, like a successful lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a fruit. Can we agree among ourselves? We are a clever but quarrelsome species - in our public discourses we can sound like a rookery in full throat. In our cleverness we are just beginning to understand that the earth - considered as a total system of organisms, environments, climates and solar radiation, each reciprocally shaping the other through hundreds of millions of years - is perhaps as complex as the human brain; as yet we understand only a little of that brain, or of the home in which it evolved.

Despite that near ignorance, or perhaps because of it, reports from a range of scientific disciplines are telling us with certainty that we are making a mess of the earth, we are fouling our nest and we have to act decisively and against our immediate inclinations. For we tend to be superstitious, hierarchical and self-interested, just when the moment requires us to be rational, even-handed and altruistic. We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime; and in democracies, governments and electorates collude in an even tighter cycle of promise and gratification. Now we are asked to address the wellbeing of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour.

To concentrate our minds, we have historical examples of civilisations that have collapsed through environmental degradation - the Sumerian, the Indus Valley, Easter Island. They extravagantly feasted on vital natural resources and died. Those were test-tube cases, locally confined; now, increasingly, we are one, and we are informed - reliably or not - that it is the whole laboratory, the whole glorious human experiment, that is at risk.

And what do we have on our side to avert that risk? Against all our deficits, certainly a talent for co-operation; we can take comfort from the memory of the Partial Test-Ban Treaty (1963), made at a time of hostility and mutual suspicion between the cold war superpowers. More recently, the discovery of ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere and worldwide agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) production should also give us heart. Secondly, globalisation has not only unified economies, it has focussed global opinion to put pressure on governments to take action.

But above all, we have our rationality, which finds it highest expression and formalisation in good science. The adjective is important. We need accurate representations of the state of the earth. The environmental movement has been let down by dire predictions, “scientifically” based, which over the past two or three decades have proved spectacularly wrong. Of itself, this does not invalidate dire scientific predictions now, but it makes the case for scepticism - one of the engines of good science. We need not only reliable data, but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics.

Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient data or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment - and there are quite a few - simply because they do not make the advocate’s case. It is tempting to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits our mood. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating, if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue). It was good science, not good intentions, that identified the ozone problem, and it led, fairly promptly, to good policy.

The wide view from the airplane suggests that whatever our environmental problems are, they will have to be dealt with by international laws. No single nation is going to restrain its industries while its neighbours’ are unfettered. Here too, an enlightened globalisation might be of use. And good international law might need to use not our virtues, but our weaknesses (greed, self-interest) to lever a cleaner environment; in this respect, the newly devised market in carbon trading was a crafty first move.

The climate change debate is hedged by uncertainties. Can we avoid what is coming at us, or is there nothing much coming at all? Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented era of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian summer of reckless denial? Is this the beginning, or the end? We need to talk.