Chp. 17 thoughts

In this chapter, we get a crash course in the theory of uniformitarianism (try saying that five times fast), the idea that, if we want to understand the present condition of something, we should look to its past. The main thrust is that we can learn from the past to understand and evaluate the present, and even perhaps project into the future.

This makes a lot more sense than the idea of singularity in the previous chapter. Archeologists can dig up an ancient city and predict how it came to die out, giving us some clues about how vulnerable we are to extinction. But an easier way to go about this is to look at catastrophes that wipe out civilizations and try to learn from them. But does every society end in a blaze of cataclysmic glory?

This essay seems to say that isn't always the case. For every Atlantis that may have been functioning just fine until one day when it suddenly wasn't there, there are societies that gradually become extinct. Catastrophes can't account for the Mayan people, who seemed to just die off and fall from power over centuries. It's more dramatic when a massive earthquake or other natural disaster takes out an entire society and forces a reorganization of people in order to survive in the new enviroment. But it's not always the case.

If you believe that catastrophes always cause the birth of new societies in the place of old ones, you need to only look at more recent times to see that this isn't always the case. The tsunami of 2004 destroyed much of the Asian countries that it affected, yet there was no collapse of these countries into anarchic chaos. Efforts to rebuild Asia (and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) showed the better angels of human nature, as charities raced to help those affected and the world united (if only briefly) to help. The terrorists of 9/11 wanted their attacks to be harbingers of the United States' collapse, yet we're still around. Catastrophes can band peoples together just as much as they can tear them asunder.

The interesting point that this essay makes is that the way to extinction is not always so dramatic. It can be a simple issue of running out of resources. Easter Island is the most obvious example, but the Ocracoke situation was a surprising one to read about. Thanks to the strain of tourism, it's entirely possible that the native population of an island in the 21st century, in the richest nation on the planet, could become reduced or even extinct. Such a strain on natural resources on a minor scale is a warning to us all.