I’ve been reading Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’ recently, which I’m finding very thought-provoking. Just out of curiosity, I looked him up on TED today to see if he’d ever done a presentation, and he has. This is a good summary of the book if you’ve got twenty minutes to spare.
“The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. Since we made the problems, we can also solve them. It is entirely within our power to solve our problems.”
The Earthbound Report 