A Tale of Two Farms --- Jared Diamond

Stability is probably one of the most important aspects to a successful society. If a society was not stable and instead out of sync with one another it would be complete chaos. This in turn would cause some sort of collapse. In Jared Diamond’s excerpt “A Tale of Two Farms” he describes that a society’s collapse can be linked to its people’s unintentional ecological suicide which has been changed into one word Ecocide. When Diamond refers to a society’s collapse he is referring to “a drastic decrease in human population size and / or political / economic / social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.” Ecocide is then broken up into eight smaller categories: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems, water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people. By reading just this part of the excerpt it seems as though it can relate to Jane Goodall’s excerpt “Healing Earth’s Scars: It’s Never Too Late” which was about restoring land that was once destroyed by human use. We build a population up to the point where it is just way too much for a specific area to handle and then we move on to a new area forgetting about the land we were previously inhabiting. This goes along with Diamond’s excerpt when he wrote about the builders abandoning the structures they created. When humans migrate to areas where humans have never been before and they begin to change the environment around them and then the entire ecosystem they are in begins to form a chain reaction slowly allowing the society in the future to either become successful or failure.