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Quote by Adam Frank

“The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists. There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse. Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves. The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland. In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the”

Quote by Adam Frank

Book:Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth
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Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth

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Adam Frank
Adam Frank

Adam Frank is an American writer born on August 1, 1962. His works span across various fields including science, philosophy, and cosmology, known for his unique perspective and in-depth analysis. more

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“Wikipedia: Tragedy of the commons In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.”

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“Page 143: There is no use either in cherishing illusions as to the practical consequences of a system in which political power and control of economic production and distribution are irrevocably delegated to, or conferred upon, the same persons. In so far s the state absorbs and distributes a larger and larger portion of the public wealth, the leaders of the ruling class come to possess greater and greater facilities for influencing and commanding their subordinates, and more and more easily evade control by anybody.”

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