In his newest book, the award-winning geographer and author Jared Diamond has taken a look at political crises and tried-and-tested ways to overcome them, as well as outlining the gravest current and future threats to world stability.
The book, titled “Upheaval: How Nations Cope With Crisis and Change,” sets out four issues of utmost danger to our planet, namely the threat of nuclear catastrophe, climate change, resource depletion and global inequality.
Diamond, 81, believes that the first of them is also the deadliest.
“There is potential right now for exterminating the human race involving the use of nuclear weapons,” the Diamond said in an interview with The Times of Israel.
“If nuclear weapons were just exchanged between, say, India and Pakistan, and they shot off their arsenals at each other, the result would not just be hundreds of millions of dead people in India and Pakistan,” says Diamond. “The exposure of those nuclear weapons would put dust up into the atmosphere and produce what’s called a nuclear winter.”
“It would first of all darken the atmosphere, we would then [witness] the world getting colder, followed by a drop in photosynthesis, the spread of disease, and the end result would be the risk of, at minimum [ending] first world civilisation, and at maximum, the end of the human race,” he theorised.
If this scenario were to be avoided, environmental issues could become a tangible menace, and Diamond believes that the future of humanity depends on whether climate change sceptic Donald Trump would stay in power.
“A great deal of this really depends on the issue of [US President] Donald Trump being elected in 2020,” says Diamond. “If he does get reelected, I would be pessimistic about the long-term future.”
Apart from pressing issues, his book focuses on how countries with diverse historical backgrounds and political landscapes – such as Finland, Chile, Japan, Indonesia, Germany and Australia – coped with defining national crises.
Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 magnum opus, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which tries to explain why the West began to dominate other civilisations.
