Lessons from Lost Worlds

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The other reason for my optimism is the big advantage we enjoy over the Anasazi and other past societies: the power of the media. When the Anasazi were collapsing in the U.S. Southwest, they had no idea that Easter Island was also on a downward spiral thousands of miles away, or that Mycenaean Greece had collapsed 2,400 years earlier. But we know from the media what is happening all around the world, and we know from archaeologists what happened in the past. We can learn from that understanding of remote places and times; the Anasazi didn't have that option. Knowing history, we are not doomed to repeat it.

Jared Diamond is a UCLA professor of geography and public health, a director of the World Wildlife Fund and author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies