In 1999, The Library Foundation of Los Angeles produced the Big Questions Series, which invited visionary guests to address some of the great questions of our time. Participants ranged from United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, performance artist Laurie Anderson, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., poet and author bell hooks, and Pacifica Radio’s resident physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku.
One of the most illuminating presentations of the series was presented by author and Professor of Geography and Physiology at the University of California Los Angeles, Jared Diamond, who tackled the question “What do the Collapse of Past Societies Teach Us About Our Own Future?†Diamond has been awarded the National Medal of Science for his work and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society won the Pulitzer Prize.
This lecture was originally broadcast in the Pacifica Radio Archive series Voices of Pacifica and is now rebroadcast for the first time on this week’s episode of From the Vault….
From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.
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