RJ Stangherlin

Keystone Technology Integrator and STAR Discovery Educator

This site is for Mrs. Stangherlin's classes at Salisbury High School.

GGS: The Fates of Human Societies--Some Helpful Sites

GGS Background: In prehistory, the acquisition of guns, germs, and steel affected the successful fates of human societies.  GGS Prompt: If you were retitling Diamond’s book to reflect what you need in today’s society to be a successful world power, your title would read: _____, _____, and _____: The Fates of Postmodern Societies.  Honors English 11 Task:  Fill in the blanks; what would it take today to be a successful world power?  You will need to write a five-paragraph essay, no notes, no book/text, no online research, unless work is cited either using an online citation maker or URL.

Then, there’s Collapse, Jared Diamond’s sequel to GGS.  According to Michael Kavanagh, “Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society’s response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society’s demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society’s response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can choose to fail.”

For your essay and/or 5th paragraph, here are some sites to consider for taking the 5th paragraph into the future.

1.  Wonderful, concise video that helps raise awareness of the issues of globalization in our newly connected world first raised in Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. Karl Fisch remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others, added some music, and came up with the following presentation [the remixing is actually a mashup].

2.  Slightly different version of Did You Know.

3.  Thomas Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map: A Blueprint for Action” article in Esquire about his book.  This article suggests that wars will continue until we bring gap countries into the core.  Pay special attention to the maps.

4.  Karl Fisch’s What If?

5.  Fisch’s 2020 Vision.  Definitely worth watching.

6.  Joe Brennan’s [he’s doing the December Discovery webinar on Making Movies] Shift Happens.

7.  For those of you who are considering education as a building block to a successful world power, consider this image: