Thoughts on Jared Diamond's 'A Tale of Two Farms'

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"Instead, my trips to Huls and Gardar Farms, thousands of miles apart but visited during the same summer, vividly brought home to me the conclusion that even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated. (Diamond 17) I found this point to be quite interesting. Diamond previously wrote that even though Huls Farm is technologically advanced, it will 'collapse' in the future. In our generation or at least in America, we seem to think that we can fix everything with technology; but technology is not the answer to every problem. While it has helped America become advanced in many ways, we are still facing a lot of problems. There are a lot of farms having problems today because of technology. People do not want to do things the natural way anymore and are looking for all types of ways to do things faster or create new things with technology.

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"By collapse, I mean a drastic decrease in human population size and/ or political/ economic/ social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time." (Diamond 17) To me, Diamond seems to be saying that we are all connected and that the fall of one business can cause the fall of other businesses. I agree to this because many companies are connected or because you have one company, you have other companies. So, if one company falls, then a lot of others fall as well and that can also mean the fall of a society. We need a lot of companies to stay open for the community to survive and if they were to close, we would all generally be screwed. Some of the companies I am referring to are food companies and banks etc. If consumers do not like a certain company, then the company dies. If a show does not get enough viewers, then the show dies. We are all connected in every way.  

"It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by the ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended." (Diamond 20) I totally agree with this statement because we are all destroying our planet, but a lot of us are not aware that we are doing. A lot of us probably think that one person could not possibly destroy the planet by our actions; but if all of us are that one person then we are definitely destroying the planet. This ties back to the many other excerpts from the book that state that we as a community need to become more educated on the environment. If we do not know what we are doing, then how can we fix the mess we have created. A lot of us do not even know that the world is a mess or that there is a lot that needs to be fixed.