I recently finished Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How societies choose to fail a succeed.

The book covers a numbers of examples of socieities that have collapsed, or have avoided collapse, because of environmental problems and overpopulation. In today’s globally interconnected world, those lessons could be valuable on a global scale. Diamond describes the world as being in an exponential horse race of uncertain outcome, between exponentially growing population and enviornmental impact on one hand, and increasing environmental concern and activism on the other hand.

In the cases where societies did choose to adapt and survive, the foresight and action of cultural elites was an essential factor, which typically required that the elites experience the effects of their actions directly rather than being insulated, and that they take a long term view.

Today’s announcement that Warren Buffet will donate $37 billion to the Gates foundation, and the announcement that Gates will be spending most of time on the foundation, are encouragings bets in this exponential horse race. Education and health will help improving living conditions, reduce overpopulation, and create sustainable food production.

Even if the Gates Foundation succeeds, we still face difficult choices. Diamond puts the argument starkly but convicingly. The world cannot sustain first world levels of consumption, for most of its population– or even for the first world plus China. This is not an abstract argument– China is clearly on a pace to hit those levels of consumption, and we are already feeling the pain in areas like high oil prices and pollution with global reach.

“There are many ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards… Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World lving standard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would double our human impact on the world.”

Can we make a soft transition to a more sustainable form of life, or will we have an unpleasant crash landing?

Because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.

For all of these reasons, I hope that the Gates Foundation and organizations like it can help to not only address the incredibly difficult problems of third world health, education, and living conditions, but also the even difficult issues of global sustainability.

Clearly, to have any hope of addressing these problems, the Gates Foundation must not only leverage their substaintial financial assets but also create a viral “platform” for attacking the problems. By “platform”, I mean platform in the software sense, allowing third parties to contribute in a way that adds value to the system. By “viral”, I mean that the message and incentive to participate in the program needs to be viral and fan out exponentially, in order to have hope of competing against the inevitably exponential growth of population and enviromental impact. (Windows, the Open Source movement, blogging, and Google are interesting points of comparison in the software world and some or all of these might even play a role in the solution.)

(While I’m on the topic; do check out gapminder.org for an essential set of visually illustrated global statistics.)

The Unofficial Google Weblog reports that Google is granting free advertising for nonprofits.

Nonprofits that are accepted into the Google Grants program are awarded an in-kind AdWords advertising campaign on Google.com for at least three months to increase traffic to their website, and raise awareness of their topic areas.

In order to be accepted for the program, organizations must have be based in the US, and have a 501(c)(3) status, assigned by the Internal Revenue Service.

USA Today reported on a a non-profit director that put up a website to attract donors to raise money to pay doctors to treat people in Africa and Asia. When he launched he was getting two visitors a day, and one donation per week. When he got accepted into Google Grants and received the free advertising, he started getting over 300 visitors per day, and 25 donations from all over the world. Donations were hitting around $5000-$8000 each from people that found the site on the Internet.

We all do what we can to help heal the wounds caused by Katrina, and the long-standing ills that made it so destructive.

Jason Goldberg, Jobster’s CEO, has announced several steps that we’ll be taking. First, “free usage”:http://jobster.blogs.com/blog_dot_jobster_dot_com/2005/09/free_use_of_job.html of the Jobster service by any nonprofit providing relief efforts and any company headquartered in Louisiana or Mississippi. Second, featured placement of relief jobs on our “job search site”:http://www.workzoo.com. Last but not least, we have a “relocation and an account management position”:http://jobster.blogs.com/blog_dot_jobster_dot_com/2005/09/fantastic_katri.html for a sourcing recruiter impacted by the hurricane. The idea is not only to help the recruiter but also the people in that recruiters network. If you know such a person, please help connect us with them.

Help Relocate a Recruiter Affected by Katrina

Inquire for Yourself or Tell a Friend

Click here to learn how

The indeed.com blog has links to
search for hurricane relief work. Great idea, I commend their creative thinking on how to get help to where it’s needed..

What can the tech world do to help with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath?

Josh Bancroft writes:

I just can’t believe that a major U.S. city is practically completely submerged under 20 feet of water. Millions are homeless, and will be for weeks, if not months. Basic service infrastructure is wiped out, as well as most communications. Can we do something with WiMAX here, to get VoIP and internet access to the area? Information about loved ones, evacuation routes, emergency services, etc. are in extremely high demand right now, and there’s no way for most people in the affected area to get any of it. The geeks of the world are trying to put their heads together to come up with ways to help.

Not that I have any specific ideas, but I’d love to see Intel come up with something to help, similar to what we did with 9/11. While the loss of life is nowhere near other disasters that have happened (9/11, the tsunami, etc.), the magnitude of this disaster is huge. Almost incomprehensible to me. Let’s put our heads together and come up with some ways that we can help where perhaps no one else can…

Josh also has links to citizen journalist coverage of Katrina.

My heart goes out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Watching the anguished face of one father whose wife was swept away when their house split in two, my mind instantly flashed back to Sri Lanka in December, where I’d seen the exact same expression in a victim of the tsunami.

We are all united in the transience of life and the preciousness of our families, and no degree of first world technology can entirely protect us from the risks of being torn apart from our loved ones without warning.

I’ve added relief for Hurricane Katrina victims to the list of recommended charities for Berry 411 and encourage everyone to do what they can.

My wife, Manjari Wijenaike, is mentioned in this Seattle PI story about emigres reaching out to help their homelands after the tsunami.

She will be speaking about her experience at a panel discussion at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The talk is January 20th at 7PM.

Room to Read is a charity that is working to rebuild the education infrastructure in Sri Lanka and other countries damaged by the tsunami. It’s just this sort of long term project that is often neglected after the initial short term aid comes to an end.

Room To Read is notable because it’s overhead is so low (less than 5%). They have built over 110 schools and 1500 libraries, affecting over half a million children in Asia. A pool of donors has agreed to match the first $100,000 donated to the tsunami relief efforts.

This charity was recommended to me by Jon Anderson, who knows the founder, John Wood. Jon is a partner at Ignition Partners, a member of the Jobster board, and a great human being.

Please join me in supporting Room to Read.

When a national tragedy occurs, a critical question is whether the long term effect on the national character is positive or negative, unifying or divisive.

Consider the United States and 9/11, for example. (Depending on your political leanings, the way you analyze the example will differ, but hopefully you get my point either way.)

At least in the case of Sri Lanka, I am hopeful that the unifying effect of responding to the Tsunami may persist to the benefit of all. NPR has an audio report on how the Tsunami Forces Sri Lanka Foes to Cooperate

Grassroots relief organizations are complementary to the efforts of big multinationals like the Red Cross and Unicef, donations to which I also encourage wholeheartedly. Local organizations have an existing network of volunteers in place, local knowledge, and a long term commitment. The challenge for foreigners wishing to help is finding one that they can trust, and will accept online donations.

If anyone is interested in donating to a reputable grassroots charitable organization in Sri Lanka that allows online donations, I have identified one. My wife is Sri Lankan, and her cousin, Erangit Wijenaike, is involved with the Colombo Chamber of Commerce, a long established organization with an excellent record of service.

They have created a web site at: http://www.sossrilanka.org.

A key problem is simply understanding what the needs are and how to efficiently meet those needs based on the resources available. A long term perspective and commitment is important. Organizations like the Colombo Chamber of Commerce are thinking about the longer terms issues of housing and improved warning systems, as well as immediate aid and comfort.

If anyone has further questions, please contact me directly.