This morning 11 CWA sophomores were among 2,400 Western Washington high school students to attend a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall.  Diamond discussed the themes of his best-selling books Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005), as well as his current investigation of different cultures’ approaches to parenting.

Diamond is in town to give two sold-out lectures to the general public this week and National Geographic Live offered local schools the chance to send students and teachers to this special morning event for free.  History teacher Nick Coddington’s World Civilizations class took them up on the offer.  In class, they are examining the roots of European hegemony and Diamond’s interdisciplinary work directly examines how and why some civilizations achieve such dominance.

A MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee, Jared Diamond is professor of geography and environmental health studies at UCLA.  In Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond aimed to uncover the root causes of Eurasian dominance of the modern world, arguing that this dominance was the result of geographic variables rather than cultural superiority. In his most recent book and upcoming National Geographic Channel film, Collapse, he addresses exactly the opposite question: What causes great societies to fail? Collapse contrasts past and present to help modern society identify what is sustainable—in essence, what can we do differently to avoid becoming the next failed society?

The lecture was a unique opportunity for CWA students to discover why this renowned thinker and field scientist believes that the big problems the world faces in the coming decades can be solved by their generation.  Diamond encouraged the students to consider that when and where a person is born largely determines the course of their life and that the study of geography, often a neglected discipline, can answer some of the most interesting questions about humanity.