Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the consequences of prioritizing food production over managing population growth.
Jared Diamond's quote serves as a critical reflection on the choices societies make regarding resource management. By selecting to focus solely on increasing food production without addressing population limitations, we can inadvertently create dire consequences such as starvation, conflict over resources, and oppressive systems. It suggests that a balanced approach is necessary for sustainable development and societal harmony.
In practice
During a seminar on sustainability, one might reference this quote to discuss the need for balanced resource management.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.
Against my better judgment I feel certain that somewhere very near here—the first house down the road, maybe—there's a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody's having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.
The man who has perceived God looks upon all types of men as dream motion-picture images, made of the relativities of the light of Cosmic Consciousness and the shadows of delusion.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
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