Jared Diamond,
Posted on 03/29/2005 2:57:47 PM PST by swilhelm73
Our friends at Powerlineblog.com wrote several weeks back about how the unctuous Bill Moyers had slandered Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt by recycling the canard that "Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’"
Watt never said any such thing, and though this urban legend has been knocked down for more than 20 years, as the Moyers article shows it lives on. Moyers had to issue a public apology to Watt, as did the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where Moyers article appeared. (He also made the same charge in a speech at Harvard.) So, too, the environmental website Grist.org issued an apology and retraction (it had been Moyers’ source for the quote): "Grist has been unable to substantiate that Watt made this statement. We would like to extend our sincere apologies to Watt and to our readers for this error."
All of this is prologue for considering what is likely an equally spurious quotation, if not in fact a fabrication, that appears in the pages of Jared Diamond’s new best-seller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a particularly frothy passage on page 462 attacking mining companies, Diamond writes: “Civilization as we know it would be impossible without oil, farm food, wood, or books, but oil executives, farmers, loggers, and book publishers nevertheless don’t cling to that quasi-religious fundamentalism of mine executives: ‘God put those metals there for the benefit of mankind, to be mined.’”
The “mine executive” who supposedly said this is not identified, nor the name of her company. (There are no footnotes or source notes for this quote, or any other in the book.) It is not clear from Diamond’s prose whether this is meant to be a verbatim quotation, or a stylized characterization, The doubt about the authenticity of this quote is deepened by the immediate sequel: "
The CEO and most officers of one of the major American mining companies are members of a church that teaches that God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway."
Again, Diamond identifies neither the mining company nor the denomination in question here. These things matter. Precisely because Diamond is a bestselling author of considerable reputation, his distortion or invention of ridiculous quotations threatens to inject them into wider circulation. In fact, it has already started.
Reviewing Collapse in Science magazine, Tim Flannery writes of “the CEO of an American mining company who believes that ‘God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway.’” Suddenly we’ve gone from executives who attend an unidentified congregation that believes this to an unnamed CEO who “believes” this. The next short step will be directly attributing this non-quotation to the unnamed CEO.
It is beyond doubtful that any denomination believes as a matter of doctrine the ridiculous views Diamond describes. To paraphrase Orwell, only a university professor could believe such nonsense. Diamond owes it to his readers, and the mining company executives in question, to come clean with specifics about who supposedly said this and what denomination holds these views, so other journalists can verify the story. Either Diamond was had by some woolly faculty room chatter, or he fabricated another shameful slander reminiscent of the Watt remark.
I thought the book was fairly balanced although it failed to address common political failure modes.
Our friends at Powerlineblog.com wrote several weeks back about how the unctuous Bill Moyers had slandered Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt by recycling the canard that "Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.’"
Watt never said any such thing, and though this urban legend has been knocked down for more than 20 years
This is all in error. The supposed “urban legend” never existed.
As Byron York pointed out in the WSJ:
“A search of the Nexis database finds that the first-ever reference to Watt’s “quote” came in that Dec. 11 Miami Herald excerpt of Moyers’s speech. Watt left office in 1983, meaning that the “famous” quote somehow escaped attention for 21 years.”
The idea that it was ever an urban legend was invented after Moyers was caught using a quote from a leftist wingnut blog, without making any attempt whatsoever to verify it.
Not only did Watt never say it, but NOBODY in any publication claimed Watt said it before Moyers’ did.
Moyers is a POS
That's like saying, "I read a book on cardiology but it failed to address the treatment of heart attacks."
Diamond can't address politics, because like most post-moderns, he has no idea what it is in reality.
I have known a good number of "mine executives", any of whom might have said the above but none of whom were particularly religious, particulartly not fundamentalist by any strech of the term. I have seen the development of the "Carlin trend" and have known many of the Arizona "Copper Barons" of the mid and late 20th Century. With some exceptions, they were honorable men -- most were engineers and had the mentality of engineers. I am too young to have known the Thompsons, Douglases, Jacklins, etc., but I have known people who did know them. They saw their work as building and benefiting society and not as "raping the earth."
Or..maybe they think tungsten is a vegetable.
I supposed the most notable holder of this position was Rockefeller. It served him well regardless of its veracity. .
Yeah, somewhat. I have a fairly low tolerance for lefty drivel and found the book enjoyable.
Have you read the book?
How would you explain say, the failure of Greenland Norse civilization while the Innuit survived under the same conditions?
Not very surprising.
I find it extremely surprising that people would die rather than follow the example of the locals.
PING
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