Veio-me parar às mãos um livro sobre a auto-destruição das sociedades. Quem me lê sabe que sou um leitor atento da Queda do Império Romano, do percurso dessa queda. Também, há dias, falei aqui de dois filmes que focam o actual declínio da sociedade ocidental. Há mais livros e filmes que contribuem para a percepção dos declínios. A Fénix é outro capítulo de outras percepções. Mas tudo isto tem a ver com o livro que me veio parar às mãos, “ COLLAPSE – How societies choose to fail or survive” de Jared Diamond. Aqui deixo um trecho, mas recomendando a sua leitura. É um livro que, não trazendo novidades, suscita-nos muitas análises sobre situações que, não sendo desconhecidas, são muitas vezes observadas com demasiada ligeireza. Eis o trecho extraído já da parte final do livro:
«Why should levels of these poisonous chemicals from remote industrial nations of the Americas and Europe be higher in the lnuit than even in urban Americans and Europeans? It's because staples of the lnuit diet are whales, seals, and seabirds that eat fish, molIuscs, and shrimp, and the chemicals beco me concentrated at each step as they pass up this food chain. AlI of us in theFirst World who occasionally consume seafood are also ingesting these chemicals, but in smalIer amounts. (However, that doesn't mean that you will be safe if you stop eating seafood, because you now can't àvoid ingesting such chemicals no matter what you eat.)
Still other bad impacts of the First World on the Third World include deforestation, Japan's imports of wood products currently being a leading cause of deforestation in the tropical Third World; and overfishing, due to fishing fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the heavily subsidized fleets of the European Union scouring the world's oceans. Conversely, people in the Third World can now, intentionalIy or unintentionalIy, send us their own bad things: their diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever, carried inadvertently by passengers on transcontinental airplanes; unstoppable numbers of legal and illegal immigrants arriving by boat, truck, train, plane, and on foot; terrorists; and other consequences of their Third World problems. We in the US. are no longe r the isolated Fortress America to which some of us aspired in the 1930s; instead, we are tightly and irreversibly connected to overseascountries. The US. is the world's leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil and some rare metaIs) and many consumer products (cars and consumer electronics), as welI as being the world's leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world's leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world.
That's why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, Our trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to name the countries most geopoliticalIy irrelevant to our interests because of their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as important enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops. Today the world no longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter lsland society or Maya homeland colIapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. lnstead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline. That conclusion is familiar to any investor in stock markets: instability of the U.S. stock market, or the post-9/11 economic downturn in the U.S., affects overs as stock markets and eco no mies as welI, and vice versa. We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no longer get away with advancing our own self- interests, at the expense of the interests of others.»
Still other bad impacts of the First World on the Third World include deforestation, Japan's imports of wood products currently being a leading cause of deforestation in the tropical Third World; and overfishing, due to fishing fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the heavily subsidized fleets of the European Union scouring the world's oceans. Conversely, people in the Third World can now, intentionalIy or unintentionalIy, send us their own bad things: their diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever, carried inadvertently by passengers on transcontinental airplanes; unstoppable numbers of legal and illegal immigrants arriving by boat, truck, train, plane, and on foot; terrorists; and other consequences of their Third World problems. We in the US. are no longe r the isolated Fortress America to which some of us aspired in the 1930s; instead, we are tightly and irreversibly connected to overseascountries. The US. is the world's leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil and some rare metaIs) and many consumer products (cars and consumer electronics), as welI as being the world's leading importer of investment capital. We are also the world's leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked with the rest of the world.
That's why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, Our trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to name the countries most geopoliticalIy irrelevant to our interests because of their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as important enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops. Today the world no longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter lsland society or Maya homeland colIapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. lnstead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a worldwide decline. That conclusion is familiar to any investor in stock markets: instability of the U.S. stock market, or the post-9/11 economic downturn in the U.S., affects overs as stock markets and eco no mies as welI, and vice versa. We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no longer get away with advancing our own self- interests, at the expense of the interests of others.»
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