Good suggestion. The library also has Catton's overshoot book available which I've definately got to read. Jato, we may have flat-footed incompetent politicians, but at least we have a fine baseball team! Ninth inning rally: Padres 3, Atlanta 2. First place National League West.dmtu wrote:I'm working on Collapse right now. Another excellent Diamond book is Guns Germs and Steel, maybe it's available while you wait.
Starving people would have poured into Gardar [the largest farm], and the outnumbered chiefs and church officials could no longer prevent them from slaughtering the last cattle and sheep. Gardar's supplies, which might have sufficed to keep Gardar's own inhabitants alive if all their neighbors could have been kept out, would have been used up in the last winter when everyone tried to climb into the overcrowded lifeboat, eating the dogs and newborn lifestock and the cows' hoofs as they had at the end of the Western settlement.
I picture the scene at Gardar as like that in my home city of Los Angeles in 1992 at the time of the so-called Rodney King riots, when the acquittal of policement on trial for brutally beating a poor person provoked thousands of outraged people from poor neighborhoods to spread out to loot businesses and rich neighborhoods. The greatly outnumbered police could do nothing more than put up pieces of yellow plastic warning tape across roads entering rich neighborhoods, in a futile gesture aimed at keeping the looters out. We are increasingly seeing a similar phenomenon on a global scale today, as illegal immigrants from poor countries pour into the overcrowded lifeboats represented by rich countries, and as our border controls prove no more able to stop that influx than were Gardar's chiefs and Los Angeles's yellow tape. That parallel gives us another reason not to dismiss the fate of the Greenland Norse as just a problem of a small peripheral society in a fragile environment, irrelevant to our own larger society. Eastern Settlement was also larger than Western Settlement, but the outcome was the same; it merely took longer.
I suspect as times get tougher, people will be more willing to use deadly force. Whether it will work is another story.
Revi wrote:This was a great book, but shouldn't be used as a prediction of our collapse. It talks about small, islolated societies that collapsed suddenly. Ours may go the route of the Roman Empire. Rome went from a huge city to a small town, but it took 400 years. Things will slowly fall apart.
julianj wrote:I have just finished the book.
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