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Thursday, March 02, 2006
Jared Diamond Lecture
Tonight was the big Jared Diamond lecture on the USF campus. I attended with a group of fellow anthropologists and was pleased with both the lecture and the turnout. A couple hundred people listened intensely as Diamond provided insight into the research and writing of Collapse and how history’s lessons are relevant today. His overarching message, or at least what I took from the talk, was that we do have quite a bit to learn from the past and that we as a human species are united through our impacts on the natural environment. Diamond mentioned how the message of Collapse is sometimes interpreted as pessimistic and suicide-inducing but he dispelled that myth by providing general guidelines for the future. The audience questions were impressive and a few even challenged his central theses quite eloquently, although I still tend to agree with him more than I disagree. If anything, his talk tonight gave me even more motivation to save the world one pit at a time.
Posted by Will at March 2, 2006 09:33 PM in Graduate School