A Tale of Two Farms

Diamond opens this reading in an extremely unique way that I found very interesting. He began by comparing the similarities of both farms as if they were both fully operational farms which made it easy to compare them. He then goes on to to tell us that Gardar farm was abandoned over 500 years ago. Had he have opened up by telling us this it would have been harder to compare the two and made this reading much more difficult.

                                                           (https://www.google.com/search?q=gardar+farm&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=589&source)

“…even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated."

                                                  (https://www.google.com/search?q=success+to+failure&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=633&source)

This is the moral of the story! Nothing is ever unstoppable and Diamond uses some great examples to drive this home. He shows us a modern business that is on top and shows no sign of slowing down and compares it to one that was in the exact same place and went on to fail. Having a failed business to compare it to made it much much easier to understand how serious this really is. 

"...many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended."

Sound familiar? They say we learn history because it repeats itself and this is a prime example. Many times we humans have taken advantage of our environment and the results have almost always been catastrophic. A great example would be after the civil war when American settlers began killing Buffalo in the thousands and almost forcing them to go extinct. As we've discussed many times we cannot live without our environment so this is another important lesson to take care of what we are given. Had the environment been preserved and properly taken care of it is highly probable that Gardar farm would have thrived for years to come. With how people are taking advantage of the environment today (car pollution, massive expansion, growing population, etc...) it would not be a surprise to me if Huls farm went down the same path that Gardar farm did.  

                                       (https://www.google.com/search?q=buffalo+going+extinct+wild+west&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=633&source)

"Those past collapses tended to follow somewhat similar courses constituting variations on a theme. Population growth forced people to adopt intensified means of agricultural production..."

Similar to the video we viewed in class we see a pattern where a growing population has forced farmers to abandon the "old fashioned way" of farming and switch to unconventional mass production forms of farming which are not only not as nutritious but usually take more from the environment. The biggest lesson from this reading is to use Gardar farm as an example. Do not take advantage of your environment because the environment always wins!