Worth checking this paper out: Rethinking Easter Island’s ecological catastrophe (pdf – 2 column, sorry).

While the entire collapse discussion tends to occupy a dismally low intellectual plane, it’s useful to track some of the main points and samples just to keep up on the latest best understanding.

At some point I’ll post a review of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is frequently cited as a key work, but which I’m finding to be a somewhat depressing display of typically second, possibly third, rate pseudo-intellectualism. Oh, whoops, did I give away the core of the coming review? never mind, then.

Personally I found Jared Diamond’s book Collapse to be pretty decent, not perfect, but far better than Tainter’s tainted work. Some people seem to believe that making errors when you are basing your work off of best available information is somehow proof the work is bad, but that’s not the case, the work is bad when it starts with bad premises, bad logic, and bad methods, ala Tainter…

Sometimes a quotation is really all you need. This one is from the superintendent of police, in the tribal warfare area of central India.

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Gandhi, but with guns: Part One – Arundhati Roy

The problem, of course, is that multi-national raw material corporations want access to the minerals in the tribal jungles. You know, like the movie Avatar?

You can read part 2 here.

Google has a nice tool I just discovered, global population totals, the graphs run from 1960 to 2010, and you can select different countries, and compare them.

I was curious about just how much various countries had grown, now I know, and it’s quite intuitively designed and constructed as a tool.

For more precise information you can always use the CIA World Factbook site, which gives you easy access to CIA public information on each country listed. I always feel odd using this resource, the concept of ‘open’ and ‘CIA’ do not fit well together in my brain, but it’s still a very decently done resource.