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By Islomaniac | July 25, 2007
Today I thought I would do a feature on one of my hero’s, Jared Diamond. Mr. Diamond is an evolutionary biologist, physiologist, biogeographer and nonfiction author who has probably done more to protect and preserve island ecology than any other scientist or activist. Click below to read more.
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Brief Biography
Diamond was born in Boston of in 1937. After attending The Roxbury Latin School, he earned a BA degree from Harvard in 1958 and his PhD in physiology and membrane biophysics from Cambridge University in 1961. During 1962-1966, he returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow. While in his twenties, he also developed a second, parallel, career in the ecology and evolution of New Guinea birds, and has since led numerous trips to explore New Guinea and nearby islands. Diamond has gradually developed a third career in environmental history, becoming a professor of geography and of environmental health sciences at UCLA.
Works
Diamond is the author of a number of popular science works that combine anthropology, biology, ecology, linguistics, genetics, and history. In his most recent work Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Diamond examines a range of past civilizations and societies, attempting to identify why they collapsed into ruins or survived only in a greatly reduced form.
Understanding Islands
Mr. Diamond is most famous for uncovering the reason for the collapse of society on Easter Island. Building on the work of other scientists Diamond discovered that the eradication of the people on Easter Island was a result of their over exploitation of the island. To read more about the fall of Easter Island click here: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/24/042.html.
People have been fascinated by Easter Island and its past, in a recent interview with American Scientist Mr. Diamond explained the fascination with Easter Island as…
“…the metaphor is just so obvious. Easter Island is the most isolated inhabitable scrap of land in the world. It’s an island in the Pacific about 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile and 1,300 miles from the nearest Polynesian island. So when Easter Island got in trouble, there was no place to which they could flee, and there was nobody to whom they could turn for help. People just see the metaphor: Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean is like planet Earth isolated in space. If we get in trouble, we’re not going to be able to run off to another planet, and there aren’t really any green extraterrestrials out there whom we can ask for help.”
Mr. Diamond is committed to preserving island ecology and currently sits on the board of directors of Seacology, which is the world’s premier nonprofit NGO with the sole and unique purpose of preserving the environments and cultures of islands throughout the globe.
One of my favorite quotes of his is “I wonder what they were thinking when they cut down the last tree on Easter Island.”
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