Author: Jared Diamond
Translator: Ju-heon Kang
Publisher: Gimmyoungsa
Hardcover | 788 pages | 223*152mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer
Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in
flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in
this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally,
undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples
of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter
Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores
patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often
abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably
to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the
disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to
contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he
finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from
solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote
past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating
the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he
holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old
but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of
forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism
initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to
zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a
stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls.
Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the
indissoluble links that bind humans to nature. Photos.
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