"Jared Diamond: The New King of All Media"

"Jared Diamond: The New King of All Media" is my new VDARE.com column. I think it's the fairest assessment of the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel yet. Here's an excerpt:

Still, his 2005 environmentalist bestseller Collapse can be valuable, especially if you look for the parts where Diamond shows more courage than is normal for him these days.

A close reading demonstrates that Diamond is quite unenthusiastic about mass immigration. For instance, in his chapter about the ecological fragility of Australia, he relays this optimistic hope for better policy in the future:

"Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70 percent of Australians say they want less rather than more immigration."

Diamond also points out that the quality of immigrants matters. In an interesting chapter comparing the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola, the mediocre but livable Dominican Republic and dreadful Haiti, he notes that one reason the Dominican Republic is now both more prosperous and less deforested and eroded than tragic Haiti is the difference in their people:

"… the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves."

Ironically, when I left the "Collapse" exhibit, with its generic warnings about overpopulation, at Los Angeles's Natural History museum, I turned out of the parking lot onto Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the billboards were in Spanish. In LA, the African Americans have been pushed off even MLK Blvd. by Latin American immigrants.

Diamond writes:

"I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing… The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those directly related to our growing and already high population… While there are optimists who explain in the abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can accommodate it, I have never met an Angeleno … who personally expressed a desire for increased population in the area where he or she personally lived... California's population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes of the immigrants after their arrival."

Unfortunately, Diamond's bravery then breaks down again. Rather than call for doing something about immigration, such as enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, he merely laments, "The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively …"

No, it's not. Israel, with two percent of America's population, is successfully fencing off its West Bank border, which is ten percent as long.

In another important section, Diamond illustrates how ethnic diversity makes environmental cooperation more difficult. He praises the Dutch as the most cooperative nation on earth and attributes their awareness of and willingness to tackle problems to their shared memory of the 1953 flood that drowned 2,000 Netherlanders living below sea level. (Unfortunately, he doesn't mention whether Holland's rapidly growing immigrant Muslim population remembers when the dikes failed 52 years ago.)

Diamond notes that there are three possible solutions to what Garrett Hardin called "the tragedy of the commons," or the tendency for individuals to over-consume resources and under-invest in responsibilities held in common, leading to ecological collapse.

• Government diktat.

• Privatization and property rights -- but that's impractical with some resources, such as fish.

• "The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogenous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined." (My emphasis)

Wow! [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer