From: Phlip <phlip2005@...>
Date: 2009-04-23T08:10:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth

> ok, lets look at history. history is positively strewn with the
> shipwrecks of failed civilizations.

I'm getting in the habit of reading down to the first misappropriation of 
sophistry and replying...

For every civilization that failed, it grew at a sustainable rate until it 
created a positive population effluence. For example, in the Sacred Valley 
region of the Andes, you can count rows of stones - protypical terraces for 
farming - going all the way from some valley floors to the peaks of their 
mountains. At one time, those valleys were entirely farmed from bottom to 
top.

And every one of those failures happened because of a change in the climate. 
Rome collapsed not because of overpopulation or high taxes or Christianity 
or any historical revisionism like that; it collapsed because a volcano in 
the India Ocean created a series of long winters. The global agricultural 
bases collapsed.

Historically, civilizations did not collapse because they despoiled their 
environments. That's a relatively new phenomenon.

Oh, and the Inka civilization in the Andes collapsed from a smallpox 
plague...