The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

Sustainable: A society that balances the environment, other life forms, and human interactions over an indefinite time period.
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. - Jared Diamond
Read Jared Diamond's classical article from 1987: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.

Nigerian farmers. Photo: Mike Blyth
Related reading:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making the Garden — Christopher Alexander

Image
By Christopher Alexander . Original text at First Things . Rose trellis of Generalife. It has taken me almost fifty years to understand fully that there is a necessary connection between God and architecture, and that this connection is, in part, empirically verifiable. Further, I have come to the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of the physical world for sacredness—provides a powerful and surprising path towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as a necessary part of the reality of the universe. If we approach certain empirical questions about architecture in a proper manner, we will come to see God. It comes from realizing that the task of making and remaking the Earth—that which we sometimes call architecture—is at the core of any commonsense understanding of the divine. Only in the last twenty years has my understanding of this connection taken a definite form, and it continues to develop every day....
Les mer...

Tear Down the Corviale! New Urbanism Comes to Rome

Image
From the PLANETIZEN May 24, 2010 Nikos Salingaros presents the case for demolishing a modernist eyesore in Rome and replacing it with a high-density, mixed-use New Urbanist neighborhood. The Corviale building outside Rome is a social housing block that exemplifies the established Corbusian tradition of treating human beings as battery chickens. It was built during 1972-1982 as a single one-kilometer-long building. It is now estimated to house 6,000 people. Apologists who are nostalgic of Soviet-era social experiments continue to defend its paradigmatic modernist design on the grounds that every resident is EQUALLY oppressed in this inhuman environment, an ideal consistent with totalitarian notions of social equality. Apartments in the Corviale Building. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user  Matteo Dudek) I am involved in an architectural revolution that is occurring today in Italy, and which may hopefully spread to the rest of Europe and the World . We are proposing tearing...
Les mer...

Raymond Ibrahim om Vesten og islam, katolsk fornyelse i Frankrike & kampen for skjønnheten

Image
Stupetårnet i Engelandsvika må nok sies å være det flotteste bygget i Gjøvik i dette årtusenet. Diving tower from Lake Mjøsa by the town of Gjøvik in early June. Stock-bilde | Adobe Stock Nok en god samtale med Raymond Ibrahim, som er svært nyttig å ta med seg for vår tur til Frankrike, i kjølvannet av de islamske jihad-opptøyene i Paris nå i juni 2025. Denne fotballklubben er eid og sponset av Qatar, slik at i lys av hva Raymond forteller om jihad, er det klart det at Qatar bedriver jihad i Europas hovedstad. Målet er naturligvis at vår hovedstad skal erobres, i likhet med Konstantinopel, og at Notre Dame skal bli en moske, i likhet med Hagia Sofia. Islamic Appropriation at Mount Sinai: Egypt’s Assault on the World’s Oldest Continuously Functioning Christian Monastery Allikevel, som Raymond poengterer, må vi skille mellom muslimer og islam, da mange muslimer er flotte folk, på tross av denne politiske ideologien de har underkastet seg, da islam betyr underkastelse. Raymonds perspektiv...
Les mer...