The World As Polder: What Does It Mean To Us Today, By Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the director of 2 environmental organizations: the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International. Diamond is also the author 6 books, including “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail” from which the chapter “The World as Polder: What Does It Mean to Us Today” is taken. In this chapter, Diamond shows us that we have a lot to learn from the ancient civilizations that failed before us. He explains how globalization has increased the risk of national breakdown, how the polder concept can help us minimize the clashing of differing interests and live together as one community, and how he practices cautious optimism when he views the now bleak future.

Then he gets into his first major point: globalization. He opens his argument that globalization is one major difference between the modern world and ancient civilizations by posing 2 questions to 2 people, and receiving the same answer. He says to “ask some ivory-towery academic ecologist…to name the overseas countries facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation, or both.”(17) Then he says to “ask a First World politician…to name the worlds troubles spots” (17), which means areas that have severe governmental issues. Both the ecologist and the

He tells the story of how his Dutch friend explained the importance of polders to the success of the Netherlands. A polder is an area of land below sea level that has been reclaimed. These polders have to constantly be watched and worked on so the sea does not take them back. Everyone lives in the polders, so everyone is in it together. There is no separation of wealth or class, everyone is united under the idea that if they all go, they all go together. Diamond contrasts this with the separation of classes that is currently taking place in the United States. He says that “wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, [and] aspire to create their own separate virtual polders”. He says that by secluding themselves from society, they successfully managed to make sure they are the last ones that die, comparing them to the Greenland Norse chiefs who did the same. He ties this in with globalization and explains that the “whole world has become one polder, such that events anywhere affect Americans.”