Collapse

Humans have a history of overreaching. In his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond offers up several examples.   As the Rapanui culture on Easter Island in the Pacific expanded its population, it exploited its critical resource base to the point of exhaustion.  Once forested, Easter Island was stripped of its trees by the people who lived there.  When they reached the point where they no longer had trees to make the canoes needed for sustenance fishing the ocean, the Rapanui civilization collapsed, and has never recovered.

The same ignominous fate brought down the Anasazi in the American Southwest and Viking settlements on Greenland. Too many people, too few resources.

The human population on earth has nearly tripled just in my lifetime. There are now more than seven billion of us, each needing food, water, and shelter, at a minimum.   Everywhere one turns, one can see serious resource overreach. Deforestation, water depletion, soil depletion,  exhaustion of commercial fisheries;  the biological fabric of our planet is unraveling, and we are totally responsible.

Jared Diamond's book is a very serious wake-up call.
 

Here is a link to a TED video with Jared Diamond talking about his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed...

http://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html