Collapse, By Jared Diamond

In Larry Lankton’s text, “Beyond the Boundaries” we gradually enter an unknown world that is frightening yet filled with immense beauty for miles. Due to the copper mining industry, a gradual increase of working class men and their families start to migrate to the unknown world with unsteady emotion, yet hope for a prosperous new life. In “Beyond the Boundaries”, Lankton takes us on a journey on how the “world below” transformed the upper peninsula into a functional and accepted new part of the world.

“America’s ‘Oh Sh*t!’ Moment”, written by Niall Ferguson, a historian who teaches at Harvard University, in 2011, explores why civilizations collapse, and how America can avoid this. He does not focus only on America, but many civilizations in the past that have collapsed. Niall Ferguson is the author of Civilization: The West and The Rest. The article is creatively and cleverly written using the metaphor of modern technology to describe the way in which the societal collapse occurs. This shows that the article was written for adults who are highly educated and understand and relate to technology. The article discusses the possibilities of what complete collapse would look like in American society. I believe the author successfully

The nineteen-chapter, two part book starts off with a brief introduction. This introduction sets up the first part of the book, where the

Jared Diamond is a world renowned scientist, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and currently a geography professor at UCLA. Of his six books published, we will be looking at the last chapter of his fourth book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this book Diamond utilizes the comparative method to find resemblance in past societal collapses with our current society. In the chapter entitled, "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today," Diamond points out that there are indeed many parallels between past and present societies and that our modern day society is currently on a path of self destruction , through examples such as globalization and the interdependency of each country.

Forks Over Knives, directed and written by Lee Fulkerson, examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods. This film follows multiple doctors and their experimental process of attempting to understand the connection between the human diet and the many human ailments that occur in the world. Forks Over Knives creates a very persuasive case for eliminating meat and dairy from the dinner table.

In this essay I intend to explore the narrative conventions and values, which Oliver Smithfield presents in the short story Victim. The short story positions the reader to have negative and sympathetic opinion on the issues presented. Such as power, identity and bullying. For example Mickey the young boy is having issues facing his identity. It could be argued that finding your identity may have the individual stuck trying to fit in with upon two groups.

America’s answer for dealing with crime prevention is locking up adult offenders in correctional facilities with little rehabilitation for reentry into society. American response for crime prevention for juvenile’s offenders is the same strategy used against adult offenders taken juvenile offenders miles away from their environment and placed in adult like prisons.

Ancient Mesopotamia, sometimes referred to as the “Cradle of Civilization”, was located in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, bringing the Greek origin of its name, of “land between rivers”. There were two very different regions in ancient Mesopotamia:

All the light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, chronicles the lives and relationship between Marie and Werner, two children who grew up in France and Germany. The society around them forces discriminatory ideals that cloud their perception of the world, but they find its meaning through their own self-definition. In this, they are both guided by a single radio and the message and legacy that it contains. Throughout the book, the author isolated the two characters, but also created subtle connections between the two. The most important of which would be the radio. It created a bond between the two where they learned from each other’s experiences and struggles. All the Light We Cannot See recreates a new picture of the world by contrasting the two separate journeys taken by Marie- Laure LeBlanc and Werner Pfennig to gain that image, which is guided by the power of a radio and the message it contains, ultimately leading to the meeting of the two characters that officially forms an image of the world where one’s actions are valued more than one’s physical features.

In “The end s of the world as we know them” article Jared Diamond looks at the collapse of several historical societies and the factors that caused their collapse. The factors are:

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond gives you an in depth look at societies you may or may not be familiar with and shows you the secrets to their success or failure using his personal 5-point framework. I enjoyed this book and thought he made a lot of good points and had convincing evidence to back it up. While reading you could really tell he knew a lot about the areas he discussed because of the depth he went into with details and descriptions. One complaint I would have about the book is the length he went to in the detailed descriptions, at some points I felt he went too far and got a little wordy and with as much as he gave you are left with almost no questions or curiosity. There were a few terms he uses in the book like

The ancient lands of Mesopotamia are unknown territory for many people. It is one of the earliest civilizations in the world. The first great civilization, located between Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was developed in 3500 BC. Word “Mesopotamia” is derived from two Greek words meaning ‘land between two rivers’. The region is a vast, dry plain through which two great rivers flow. People of Mesopotamia were ‘Sumerians’. Tigris and Euphrates created fertile river basins for the region. World’s first cities grew up in Mesopotamia. The people of Mesopotamia were among the first to use the written words and a language of their own. Mesopotamia is known as the “cradle of civilization”. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers provided rich fruitful soil and

Easter Island was once a haven for its inhabitants. It provided them with all of their needs, food, shelter, tools, and even the ability to create great works of art. They abused this Eden, and turned it into a disaster, with almost no natural resources. This could very well happen to us, because our earth is the same Eden that Easter Island once was.

Rapa Nui was once a beautiful island filled with a civilization confident in their religious beliefs. Arriving on the island from Marquesas or Gambiers during the fifth century AD, the population increased to about 10,000 within five or six centuries. A social separation between the group divided the people into different clans where they then separated into different ranks. Here each clan began to worship and honor their gods by building enormous stone statues. Eventually; however, this gracious gesture turned into a competition where no one cared what was at risk. In the haste to beat one another, they had slowly began to kill the island. Trees were cut down in such a rapid pace that they didn’t have time to grow back. The Rapa Nui people had been their own

The small, isolated Rapa Nui Island—or, Easter Island—began its history of human-habitation with difficulty. Settlers were 3,000 kilometers away from other settlements, native plants and animals were limited, and its geographic location make the island subject to El Nino’s varying conditions (Hunt and Lipo 2007). Despite obstacles unique to Rapa Nui, as compared to its Polynesian neighbors, the people of Rapa Nui were successful before collapse, surviving as “one of the world’s most remote human outposts” (Hunt and Lipo 2012). The cause of collapse is, however (and, of course), a subject of debate over whether natural or anthropogenic factors led to the Rapa Nui’s downfall, and a lack of evidence has stopped anthropologists from reaching a more conclusive agreement. A union of the two overarching factors have been suggested, however combination of climatic and anthropogenic “causes have been merely hypothesized but not investigated” (Louwagie 290). Evidence is present and convincing on both sides, with layered explanations accounting for the rapid decline of a complex, highly functioning society. While researchers such as Jared Diamond and Donald Hughes seek to showcase Rapa Nui as a cautionary tale against the dangers of ecocide, and thus paralleling the modern world, there is an equal pushback to frame the Rapa Nui population as a capable, adaptive, and resilient people who were dealt a bad hand. This paper will explore the debate of Rapa Nui’s human-shortsightedness