Time & Perspective Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond’s move here is a bait-and-switch aimed at the comfortable reader. “Those islands” gestures toward the seemingly quaint case studies he’s famous for: isolated societies that rose, adapted, or collapsed in ways that feel safely anthropological, sealed off behind ocean and centuries. Then he snaps the distance shut. The phrase “Lest... still seem... too remote” anticipates the audience’s skepticism and gently scolds it; he’s preempting the modern reflex to treat history as a museum and island stories as entertainment.

The intent is pragmatic and slightly prosecutorial: stop reading collapse as a curiosity and start reading it as a rehearsal. “Just think about the risks” is an invitation that sounds mild but functions like a warning label. Diamond’s subtext is that isolation was never the point. The point is systems: feedback loops, resource limits, bad incentives, and the slow drift from manageable stress to cascading failure. By shifting to “increasing globalization” and “increasing worldwide economic interdependence,” he turns the island into a metaphor for Earth-as-island and supply chains as the new shorelines.

Context matters: Diamond writes in an era when globalization is sold as inevitability and insurance, a net that catches local shocks. He flips it: interdependence also means synchronized vulnerability. What looks like progress can become a transmission mechanism for crisis - financial contagion, fragile food systems, energy shocks, pandemics, climate-driven disruption. The line works because it recruits the reader’s modern self-image (cosmopolitan, connected) and then quietly suggests that connectivity is not just power; it’s exposure.