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Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, lectures at 7 pm this Thursday evening, March 2, 2006 at USF (tonight).

For reference, Jared Diamond, geographer and author of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize wining general nonfiction book Guns, Germs, and Steel, lectures at 7 pm on Thursday evening, March 2, 2006 at the USF Special Events Center:

    Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

    http://usfnews.usf.edu/page.cfm?link=article&aid=1187
    http://usfweb2.usf.edu/50/Events/
    http://www.ctr.usf.edu/uls/
    http://www.research.usf.edu/rr/calendar/
    http://www.usfcollab.usf.edu/eventdetail.cfm?eventID=99

Prof. Jared Diamond’s most recent book is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, which topic is the subject of this Thursday evening’s lecture at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Read an online excerpt from Collapse on the publisher’s website here:

“It has long been suspected that many of those mysterious abandonments were at least partly triggered by ecological problems: people inadvertently destroying the environmental resources on which their societies depended. This suspicion of unintended ecological suicide—ecocide—has been confirmed by discoveries made in recent decades by archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists, and palynologists (pollen scientists). The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.”

I’ve not previously heard Jared Diamond speak so I cannot attest in advance to his personal charisma as a public speaker. Yet other invited speakers in the USF Lecture series whom I have heard within the recent past have all been uniformly excellent (namely, Cornel West, John Zerzan, and Mira Nair).

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