Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and Dwarfcharacterizes two basic and conflicting tendencies in the way people see human prospectsin the world: he calls the first one “the Myth of Apocalypse” and the other one “the Myth ofEternal Progress”. The biblical myth of apocalypse has accompanied humans for at least thelast few millennia, while the myth of eternal progress started to dominate western societiesonly relatively recently. Regardless of their age, both myths are dangerous for recent humankind:the first myth suggests people do not need to do anything about the global challengesof today, because whatever we do, it will anyhow end up in an apocalypse. The other mythleads to the same conclusion but by a different means: people do not need to do anything,because technological progress and free market will solve our problems for us. Did we endup in a mental trap, sentenced to wait while the wind buffets our fragile barge?Let us jump, for a short while, from Africa many thousand miles North West, to thenorthern Pacific. Back in 1944 the U.S. Coast Guard landed 29 reindeer on the small islandof St. Matthew in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. The reindeer were supposedto serve as an emergency source of food for military sailors or airmen in case of shipwreckduring the military operations against Japan. The war ended, and a few years later, theCoast Guard left the island, leaving the reindeer to their fate. On the island, free of naturalpredators, the reindeer flourished and in 1963 their numbers reached 6,000. A yearlater, however, researchers found the island dotted with white reindeer skeletons and 43emaciated reindeer, mostly females, remained grazing on poor pastures. By 1980 no livingreindeer were left on the island. Scientists later explained that the collapse of the reindeerpopulation was due to a limited supply of food in conjunction with an extremely harshwinter in 1963–1964. The extreme cold increased the energy consumption of the reindeersand at the same time reduced the availability of food. In places where reindeer populationswere kept at bay by predators, reindeers were lost, but the overall population survived—buton St. Mathew Island they became extinct. A shortage of food resulted in 6,000 malnourishedreindeer which eventually died. Had there been a population of 500 or maybe a 1,000reindeer on the island during the harsh winter of 1963–64, it is more than likely manywould have survived and their species would continue to live on the island today.Can something similar happen to people?Jared Diamond, a scientist and author mentioned in the previous chapter, describes inanother of his books, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” 15 several cases oftotal human extinction on several islands due to the exhaustion of their natural resourcesor changing climatic conditions. A classic example is the collapse of Rapa Nui, a society thatsucceeded in building the huge stone moai statues on Easter Island in the remote Pacific.When the Rapa Nui people reached Easter Island sailing on their boats from Polynesia, theylanded on an island covered by the largest palm trees in the world and surrounded by deepwaters full of fish and dolphins. Pollen grain analysis shows that by around 1650 all the trees15 Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group, USA, 200526