Politics & Power Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond’s line carries the cool fatalism of a systems thinker: governments are temporary, but incentives are perennial. The first sentence is a destabilizer. It reminds you that the institutions we treat as solid are, historically speaking, seasonal. Policy wins can vanish with an election, a coup, an austerity cycle. Environmental protection, in that framing, can’t rely on state benevolence alone because the state itself is a variable.

Then comes the provocation: “the most potent force… big business - doing good for the environment.” Diamond isn’t offering a tech-bro pep talk about capitalism saving the whales. He’s sketching an uncomfortable coalition logic. If you want durability, you recruit the actors with continuity, capital, and supply chains that outlast administrations. Companies don’t have to become saints; they just have to find that waste reduction, energy efficiency, risk management, and brand insulation align with survival. In a world where climate damage is a material threat to assets and logistics, “doing good” can be indistinguishable from protecting margins.

The subtext is also a warning to environmentalists: purity politics won’t scale. Moral arguments are powerful for mobilization, but the machine that moves land use, extraction, shipping, and food systems is corporate. The line is likely rooted in Diamond’s broader interest in societal collapse and resilience: societies endure when feedback loops reward sustainable behavior. If government is a flickering signal, business can be the steady current - for better or worse.