Frontier

Tim Flannery from Australia wrote a book about the United Sates of America - "The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples" - One conclusion of that work is that the environment in North America is fragile. There is a blog in Blogger with this name, http://eternalfrontier.blogspot.com/.

It is not an accident that the peoples of America did not conquer Europe but the other way around, as one can read in Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", the reason is very likely the different geographies of the two regions. This part of the world where we live, North America, is more fragile than Euroasia.

The same is true for Australia. It is ironic that the two countries that will benefit more form the Kyoto Protocol, are among the four (Liechtenstein and Monaco are the other two) that refuse to ratify it. Maybe the fragility of these God forsaken lands makes us unsure of ourselves.