[Texgreen] Interesting interview with Jared Diamond

[Roger Baker]

Transcript of interview on Marketplace, NPR:

KAI RYSSDAL: There's a technical term for what we're doing as we eat,
shop, drive and go about our daily lives. The word is "overshoot" --
when a population uses up resources faster than they can be replaced.

Today, we're consuming about 30 percent more trees, fish and fossil
fuels than the planet can regenerate. We can run a deficit like this
for a little while, but there are limits to how big a hole we can dig
before it gets too deep to get out of.

To help understand those limits we spoke with Jared Diamond. He's a
professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
You might know him better though his books -- Collapse, among others.
When we talked, I asked him whether we've overshot our resources  
already:

Jared Diamond: Of course we are in overshoot and everybody knows that
we are in overshoot -- and we are overshooting the things that people
talk most about. First thing we're running out of is oil, and
everybody knows it. Second thing we're running out of is water.
Something like 70 percent of the fresh water in the world is already
utilized. Topsoil -- we're exploiting it and it's running off into the
ocean. We've already exhausted something like maybe half of the
topsoil that was originally in the Great Plains. And then fish and
forests...

RYSSDAL: Is the rate of use increasing? Are things getting worse more
quickly than they did 20 years ago?

Diamond: Yes, things are getting worse more quickly, for obvious
reasons -- namely, the human population is increasing, and worse yet,
average consumption rates are increasing. That's to say, out of the
world's six-and-a-half-billion people, the majority are in the
so-called Third World, but they are working hard to catch up.

RYSSDAL: The same way that I would imagine there's no one thing you
can point to where you'd say that's the tipping point of decline, is
there one thing that can be done to reverse that decline?

Diamond: Yes, and that is to stop looking for the one thing that we
could do to reverse the decline. The reason is that there are about a
dozen major problems and we got to solve them all. If we solve 11 of
those problems, but we don't solve the water problem, we're finished.
Or if we solve 11 of those problems but we don't solve the problem of
topsoil and agriculture, we're finished. So we've got to solve all 12
problems and not look for that one problem that's most important.

RYSSDAL: It seems to me what we're missing is the "or else" part of
this discussion... There's a whole list of things we have to fix --
what happens if we don't?

Diamond: History is full of the "or elses." For example, the most
advanced Native American society of the New World, the Maya, had
astronomy and astronomical observatories and writing and books. They
chopped down their trees, they ran into water problems, and the big
Maya cities that American tourists go to visit today, they go abandoned.

RYSSDAL: Are we seeing those crashes anywhere today?

Diamond: Absolutely. The African country of Rwanda, the most densely
population country in Africa, began to get deforested, massive
problems of soil erosion, too many people and not enough food... And
in 1994 Rwandans transiently quote "solved" -- if I can put it in
quotes -- their population problems in the most awful way imaginable.
Namely, six million Rwandans killed one million Rwandans in brutal
ways, and drove another two million into exile. That's an example of a
country that did not master its environmental problems.

RYSSDAL: How much time to we have left?

Diamond: If we carried on as we are now, then I would expect that we
will not have a First World lifestyle anywhere sometime between 30 and
50 years from now.

RYSSDAL: Concentrates the mind...

Diamond: Yes it does. To know that you could get shot tomorrow does
grab your attention.

RYSSDAL: Jared Diamond teaches geology at UCLA and is the author of
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.