Boring and Wrong on Many Points
Reviewer lorenz kraus
January 21, 2007
This could have been a very interesting topic. But from the beginning to the end, it is ceaselessly boring. There's not a new thing I've learned, just a rehash of environmentalism.
Since this is all about the collapse of society from a lack of resources, the fact is, our access to resources has increased by magnitudes since the caveman and the human population is able to thrive in this new environment. In the Ultimate Resource, the economist Julian Simon showed how human creativity is the key to creating new resources, and that since human creativity is unlimited, our access to resources is ultimately unlimited.
Thus, our need to be fixated on the boogie man of global warming, global cooling, and other manufactured threats just won't pan out. To be so undermines our efforts to live and enjoy life.
Diamond doesn't come out against socialism and big government and that is why our elites are so "insulated" from the world.
Unlike the Easter Islanders and others, we are not isolationists. We trade with the whole world and our resources come from the whole world. Diamond's ideas, and Al Gore's for that matter, make for a B horror movie, but we all know Jason and Freddie Krueger don't exist.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TINTRO.txt