For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism, ' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

Jared Diamond
About This Quote

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. The contrasting histories of these two countries can teach us all a great deal about how environment shapes people's lives and vice versa.

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Choose your love. Love your choice. - Thomas S. Monson
  2. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure:... - Lauren Oliver
  3. Everyone has choices to make no one has the right to take those choices away from us. Not even out of love.. - Cassandra Clare
  4. Dante laughed. "No cold soup, no goat cheese. I'll make a mental note. And no Gottfried Curse.""And for you it's no food at all. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>No sleep. And no tunnels."" I'm low maintenance."" Is that what you are? Because I've been trying to figure... - Yvonne Woon
  5. You cannot control the behavior of others, but you can always choose how you respond to it. - Roy T. Bennett
More Quotes By Jared Diamond
  1. [W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
  2. Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
  3. Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two...
  4. Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database...
  5. The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
Related Topics