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| Photo of Easter Island: Art Wolfe/Getty Images |
The west's dwindling connection with the natural world puts it in increasing peril, says a distinguished anthropologist (Jared Diamond) in his new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Many of the practices of tribal cultures can help us to rediscover our way. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/06/jared-diamond-tribal-life-anthropology
"Why did the Vikings perish in 16th-century Greenland while the Inuit flourished? Why did the ancient Mayans wreck their own ecology by stripping their lands of forests, thus triggering the soil erosion and starvation that caused the collapse of their civilisation? And, most poignantly of all, why did the people of Easter Island chop down every tree on their remote island and so maroon themselves in the middle of the Pacific, where they eventually descended into civil war and cannibalism?"
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