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to see their response as an example of what he calls “constructive paranoia” – a sense of danger that comes with living in environments that are chronically unsafe for humans. |
Rightly, Diamond thinks that we may have something to learn from this attitude; but he underscores clearly how it is a response to living in a world that, in some |
important respects, is more insecure than the one that has been built in modern times. Without modern medicine, accidents are more easily fatal or permanently disabling – and there is |
no place in traditional cultures for the severely impaired. As Diamond notes: “Some traditional societies, especially nomadic ones or those in harsh environments, are forced to neglect, abandon or kill |
their elderly.” The paranoia he describes has another source in how, in traditional communities, encounters with strangers are infused with peril. When New Guinean Highlanders had their first sight of |
a European in 1933, they wept in terror. Reflecting this horror of outsiders, their relations with other tribal groups were governed by more or less continuous warfare. These are not |
the innocent primitives of Rousseauesque mythology but nor are they the bloodthirsty savages of Victorian imperialist folklore. Living as everyone lived until around 11,000 years ago, they are human beings |
in many ways like ourselves. When a 50-year-old Yahi Indian from Northern California gave up his huntergatherer life to live in San Francisco, Diamond tells us, he was deeply impressed |
by matches and glue, thinking them the most admirable modern inventions (later he became attached to running water, flushing lavatories and railway trains, among other amenities). The Yahi admired these |
modern inventions for the same reason Europeans invented them: they add to the ease and enjoyment of life. For Diamond, the modern world is a patchwork of such inventions but |
their overall impact on human well-being has been complex and mixed. The domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of large human settlements along with formal systems of justice, the |
expansion of states, the spread of literacy, cumulative innovation in science and technology – these are some of the developments that together produced the way we live today. Along with |
their undoubted benefits, modern societies have their distinctive disorders, including the epidemic spread of diseases such as diabetes and hypertension that are unknown in traditional societies, unremitting time-scarcity and the |
cultural and cognitive losses that go with vanishing languages (one of the remaining 7,000 languages that are still extant disappears every nine days, Diamond tells us). As he sees it, |
modernity is not a unique transition that some societies have experienced at various times during the past few centuries; it is an ongoing process whose upshot is uncertain and insecure. |
The fragility of civilisation is a theme that runs through much of Diamond’s work. His bestselling books Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or |
Succeed (2005) have given him the reputation of being something of a doommonger. This is only to be expected, since Diamond points to an undeniable but unwelcome truth. Modern societies |
are no more immune from environmental collapse than the many that have disappeared in the past – having become so closely interconnected, they are in some ways more at risk. |
Yet Diamond’s work is about much more than the vulnerabilities of advanced societies and it would be more accurate to describe him as inquiring into the environmental conditions that shape |
human communities. One way or another, most theories of human development privilege the kind of society in which the theorist lives. Where 19th-century racial theories posited the biological superiority of |
Europeans, the triumphal celebrations of unending economic advance that filled the airport bookstalls in the 1990s invoked the cultural superiority of American individualism – something of which we hear rather |
less now that the financial crisis has shown reckless debt rather than bourgeois virtue to be the chief source of America’s apparent economic outperformance in recent times. Diamond’s divergence from |
such ways of thinking is bracing and deeply instructive. Arguing that, “The explanation for the differences in types of societies existing in the modern world depends on environmental differences,” he |
suggests that human groups in the relatively few regions of the world with plants and animals suitable for domestication had a major advantage over others. Food surpluses led to population |
growth, which in turn led to political centralisation and social stratification, the growth of cities and the rise of industrial production. Rather than any built-in biological or cultural advantage, it |
was this environmental head start that eventually produced the modern societies we know today. Diamond is one of our most consistently illuminating thinkers and The World Until Yesterday is a |
compelling account of the gains and losses that go with modern living. But if Diamond is impressive in deconstructing simple-minded ideas about what it means to be modern, he does |
not explain why modernisation has become such a powerful myth. Recent history is littered with vast political experiments aiming to impose models of modernisation on refractory societies, often incurring huge |
human costs. Not only in Russia and China in the communist era but also in many emerging countries, millions of lives have been lost or ruined by the imposition of |
crudely schematic plans of development. If Nazism is included as a modernist ideology aiming to remake the world on a hideous new model, probably more human beings were killed in |
the 20th century for the sake of a vision of the future than for any other single reason. At this point, the scales tilt against modern societies. Traditional cultures may |
live in a state of continuous warfare with each other, while genocide is not unknown. No traditional people has attacked and murdered its own members on anything like the scale |
perpetrated by some modern states. No doubt one reason for this is that traditional societies lack a state apparatus, one of the preconditions of industrial-style killing. Yet there may be |
a more fundamental reason why traditional peoples do not engage in large-scale slaughter of their own members. Partly because of their non-linear, cyclical understanding of time, traditional cultures lack the |
idea that a new world can be brought into being by human action. To sacrifice the present generation of human beings for a hypothetical future would be literally inconceivable to |
them. Traditional cultures have many disadvantages but it is silly to think of them as being simply backward when the belief that we are forever on the brink of a |
new world has led to so many disasters. Think of the experiment in financial deregulation that resulted, only a few years later, in an unprecedented bust in the global banking |
system. Undoubtedly, part of the pressure for deregulation came from selfinterest – if anyone has benefited, it is surely bankers and those with substantial financial assets. Yet the experiment could |
not have been attempted if an ideology that envisioned the future in terms of a self-regulating global market had not been widely promoted and accepted by mainstream politicians. We had |
entered a “great moderation”, we were assured, in which the buffering institutions of earlier times – a welfare state, full employment policies –were obsolete. The results of chasing this fantasy |
can be seen all around us. As much as the inventions that Diamond describes, it is myths of the future that have come to drive modern life. The self-regulating market |
was only the latest version of a dream in which the cycles of history have been left behind. If we’d retained some of the constructive paranoia of traditional cultures, we |
might still not have been able to prevent the neoliberal experiment; but we would have been better prepared for the fiasco that has ensued. John Gray is the New Statesman’s |
lead book reviewer. His next book, “The Silence of Animals: on Progress and Other Modern Myths”, will be published by Allen Lane in February More from New Statesman - Online |
writers: - Steven Baxter - Rowenna Davis - David Allen Green - Mehdi Hasan - Nelson Jones - Gavin Kelly - Helen Lewis - Laurie Penny - The V Spot |
- Alex Hern - Martha Gill - Alan White - Samira Shackle - Alex Andreou - Nicky Woolf in America - Bim Adewunmi - Kate Mossman on pop - Ryan |
Geneva Conventions (1949) The Geneva Conventions consist of four treaties formulated in Geneva, Switzerland, that set the standards for international law for humanitarian concerns. They chiefly concern the treatment of non-combatants and prisoners of war. They do not affect the use of weapons in war, which are covered ... |
gas and biological weapons of 1925. They were founded by two young men—Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross movement and Gustave Moynier, a co-founder—who cordially loathed each other. The role of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, a voluntary humanitarian organization as a non-state actor in monitoring the treatment of... |
an example of how civil society, because it is sometimes more neutral than states, can play a pivotal part in helping to create a better, more humane world. The Conventions were the results of efforts by Henry Dunant, who was motivated by the horrors of war he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. The adoption ... |
of the International Committee of the Red Cross whose founder, Henry Dunant, initiated international negotiations that produced the Convention for the Amelioration of the Wounded in Time of War in 1864. Because some belligerents in World War II had abused the principles contained in earlier conventions, an Internationa... |
four conventions, which were approved in Geneva on August 12, 1949. In the decades following World War II, the large number of anticolonial and insurrectionary wars threatened to render the Geneva Conventions obsolete. After four years of Red Cross-sponsored negotiations, two additional protocols to the 1949 convention... |
of the Geneva Conventions I, II, III and IV, respectively, all signatory states are required to enact sufficient national laws that make grave violations of the Geneva Conventions a punishable criminal offense, this is what created the international criminal court. More than 180 states have become parties to the 1949 c... |
party to Protocol II, though the United States is not. In addition, more than 50 states have made declarations accepting the competence of international fact-finding commissions to investigate allegations of grave breaches or other serious violations of the conventions or of Protocol I. The conventions and their agreem... |
Armed Forces in the Field" (first adopted in 1864, last revision in 1949) - Second Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea" (first adopted in 1949, successor of the 1907 Hague Convention X) - Third Geneva Convention "relative to the Treatm... |
1949) - Fourth Geneva Convention "relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War" (first adopted in 1949, based on parts of the 1907 Hague Convention IV) In addition, there are three additional amendment protocols to the Geneva Convention: - Protocol I (1977): Protocol Additional to the Geneva Convention... |
Armed Conflicts. As of January 12, 2007, it had been ratified by 167 countries. - Protocol II (1977): Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts. As of January 12, 2007, it had been ratified by 163 countries. - Protoco... |
1949, and relating to the Adoption of an Additional Distinctive Emblem. As of June 2007 it had been ratified by 17 countries and signed but not yet ratified by an additional 68 countries. All four conventions were last revised and ratified in 1949, based on previous revisions and partly on some of the 1907 Hague Conven... |
"Geneva Conventions of 1949" or simply the "Geneva Conventions." Later conferences have added provisions prohibiting certain methods of warfare and addressing issues of civil wars. Nearly all 200 countries of the world are "signatory" nations, in that they have ratified these conventions. Clara Barton was instrumental ... |
1882. By the Fourth Geneva Convention some 47 nations had ratified the agreements. Other Geneva Conventions Other conventions of the United Nations taking place in Geneva and agreements signed there have become part of international and national laws, but are not to be confused with the above-mentioned treaties though ... |
Sea and the Contiguous Zone, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (1967), and others. Extent of Provisions War on Terror The war against terror following the attack on the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, has raised i... |
many detainees in its facility at Guantanamo Bay as "illegal combatants" and argued that the terms of the Geneva Convention apply only to those individuals who abide by the rules of law. The ICRC, which has visited the camp and also Amnesty International, have argued that the detainees deserve the full protection of th... |
some of the provisions of the Convention apply. Following a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in June 2006 rejecting the use of "special tribunals" to try detainees, and called for the application of the rule of law and conformity with the Geneva Conventions. Subsequently, the U.S. government announced t... |
according to the Geneva Conventions. On the one hand, some argue that the war on terror requires a revision of international humanitarian law to deal with changed circumstances, in which non-state actors do not follow the rules of war. On the other hand, the Supreme Court's ruling has been hailed as a vindication of th... |
the most debated issues surrounds the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the West bank and Gaza strip following the Israeli occupation. Article two states that "The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party, even if the said occupation m... |
the Geneva Conventions do apply but this has been rejected by Israel, which hold that "the Fourth Geneva Convention is not applicable to the occupied territories." The International Court of Justice has ruled that the Convention does apply, which again can be interpreted as a vindication of the extent of the provisions... |
war - War crime - ↑ The text is given at the ICRC website, Resolutions of the Geneva International Conference Retrieved February 7, 2008. - ↑ Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, State Parties, Signatories Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, Parties / Signatories Retrieved February 7, 2008. - ↑ Texts of all relate... |
Retrieved February 7, 2008. - ↑ Charles Lane, "High Court Rejects Detainee Tribunals." Washington Post, June 30, 2006, High Court Rejects Detainee Tribunals Retrieved February 7, 2008. - ↑ "The Question of the Observance of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 in Gaza and the West Bank," United Nations, January 1, 1979... |
the West Bank Retrieved February 7, 2008. - ↑ "Consider Geneva pact, Israel told," BBC News, August 24, 2004, Consider Geneva pact, Israel told Retrieved February 7, 2008. - Bennett, Angela. 2005. The Geneva Convention the hidden origins of the Red Cross. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton. ISBN 9780750941471 - Diplomatic... |
Howard S. Levie. Protection of War Victims Protocol 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1979. ISBN 9780379007862 - Jinks, Derek. 2005. The rules of war: the Geneva Conventions in the age of terror. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195183627 - Levie, Howard S. The Law of No... |
of the Henry Dunant Institute. Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1987. ISBN 9789024734917 - Roth, Kenneth, Minky Worden, and Amy D. Bernstein. 2005. Torture - does it make us safer? is it ever OK?: a human rights perspective. New York: New Press. ISBN 9781595580573 All Links Retrieved February 7, 2008. - Texts and commentaries of... |
terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here: Note: ... |
About this product: This graphic shows an approximate representation of coastal areas under a hurricane warning (red), hurricane watch (pink), tropical storm warning (blue) and tropical storm watch (yellow). The orange circle indicates the current position of the center of the tropical cyclone. The black line and dots ... |
National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast track of the center at the times indicated. The dot indicating the forecast center location will be black if the cyclone is forecast to be tropical and will be white with a black outline if the cyclone is forecast to be extratropical. If only an |
L is displayed, then the system is forecast to be a remnant low. The letter inside the dot indicates the NHC's forecast intensity for that time: D: Tropical Depression – wind speed less than 39 MPH S: Tropical Storm – wind speed between 39 MPH and 73 MPH H: Hurricane |
– wind speed between 74 MPH and 110 MPH M: Major Hurricane – wind speed greater than 110 MPH NHC tropical cyclone forecast tracks can be in error. This forecast uncertainty is conveyed by the track forecast "cone", the solid white and stippled white areas in the graphic. The solid |
white area depicts the track forecast uncertainty for days 1-3 of the forecast, while the stippled area depicts the uncertainty on days 4-5. Historical data indicate that the entire 5-day path of the center of the tropical cyclone will remain within the cone about 60-70% of the time. To form |
the cone, a set of imaginary circles are placed along the forecast track at the 12, 24, 36, 48, 72, 96, and 120 h positions, where the size of each circle is set so that it encloses 67% of the previous five years official forecast errors. The cone is then |
formed by smoothly connecting the area swept out by the set of circles. There is also uncertainty in the NHC intensity forecasts. The Maximum 1-minute Wind Speed Probability Table provides intensity forecast and uncertainty information. It is also important to realize that a tropical cyclone is not a point. Their |
effects can span many hundreds of miles from the center. The area experiencing hurricane force (one-minute average wind speeds of at least 74 mph) and tropical storm force (one-minute average wind speeds of 39-73 mph) winds can extend well beyond the white areas shown enclosing the most likely track area |
of the center. The distribution of hurricane and tropical storm force winds in this tropical cyclone can be seen in the Wind History graphic linked above. Considering the combined forecast uncertainties in track, intensity, and size, the chances that any particular location will experience winds of 34 kt (tropical stor... |
force), 50 kt, or 64 kt (hurricane force) from this tropical cyclone are presented in tabular form for selected locations and forecast positions. This information is also presented in graphical form for the 34 kt, 50 kt, and 64 kt thresholds. Note: A detailed definition of the NHC track forecast |
These are additional global health resources, and inclusion of the resources on this page does not imply endorsement by the NHLBI. See also Partners in Global Health. The Observatory of |
Innovative Practices for Complex Chronic Disease Management responds to the need to harness the power of information and communication technologies to support a global network of managers, researchers, health professionals, |
patients and caregivers interested in transforming the management of complex chronic diseases, thus facilitating continuous improvement of quality in health care, worldwide. C3 Collaborating for Health C3 brings together policy-makers, |
businesses, government, teachers, health experts, young professionals, academics and others to design ways to make it easier to be healthy, and to put these ideas into action. C3 seeks to |
promote 3 behaviour changes: stopping smoking, eating a better diet (including avoiding the harmful use of alcohol) and increasing physical activity. NCD Action Network NCD Action and the Young Professionals |
Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN) address local and global non-communicable disease needs by building networks, campaigns, and projects that are both grassroots and globally focused. Members are students and experts in |
their fields – including public health professionals, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, nutritionists, communicators, architects, and anyone else who is committed to addressing NCDs. Members are encouraged to share their ideas, |
passions, and expertise, and in doing so, help them turn their creative passion into real-world projects that have measurable impact on the local and global burden of NCDs. 3FOUR50.com is |
an awareness-raising and action-based online social network aimed at preventing chronic diseases. The name represents the Oxford Health Alliance's key message: three risk factors, tobacco use, poor diet, and lack |
of physical activity, contribute to four chronic diseases: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, lung disease, and some cancers — which, in turn, contribute to more than 50 percent of deaths |
in the world. However, by addressing the risk factors, many of these deaths could be prevented. Community Interventions for Health (CIH) Oxford Health Alliance's CIH initiative acts upon the urgent |
need to design, implement, and assess cost-effective, comprehensive interventions for three risk factors for chronic diseases (poor diet, tobacco use, lack of physical activity), adaptable to different cultures and communities. |
The research is unique in its scale and scope — the interventions will be tracked across multiple countries and multiple settings: schools, health-care centers, work places, and local communities. Global |
Development Network (GDN) The GDN is an international organization that works with developing country researchers and policy research institutes to support the generation and sharing of world-class, policy-relevant research on |
development. Institute of Medicine, Preventing the Global Epidemic of Cardiovascular Disease: Meeting the Challenges in Developing Countries The Institute of Medicine is convening an ad hoc committee to study the |
evolving global epidemic of cardiovascular disease and will offer conclusions and recommendations pertinent to its control and to a range of public and private sector entities involved with global health |
and development. ProCor is a global network promoting cardiovascular health in developing countries and other low-resource settings. ProCor is a program of the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, a tax-exempt, nonprofit |
organization, based in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA. - 2008-2013 Action plan for the global strategy for the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. World Health Organization, Geneva, 2008. (PDF)* - Disease |
control priorities in developing countries, second edition. Jamison DT, Breman JG, Measham AR, et al, eds. Oxford University Press and the World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2006. - Preventing chronic diseases: |
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