Why Poor Places Are More Diverse
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Thanks to The Kwongan Foundation at the University of Western Australia for supporting this video: http://www.plants.uwa.edu.au/alumni/kwongan MinuteEarth is now on Patreon! Please support us at: http://www.patreon.com/minuteearth And subscribe! - http://www.youtube.com/user/minuteearth?sub_confirmation=1 ________________________ Created by Henry Reich Production and Writing Team: Alex Reich, Peter Reich, Emily Elert, Ever Salazar, Kate Yoshida, and Henry Reich Music by Nathaniel Schroeder: http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder ________________________ Free iTunes podcasts of MinuteEarth! - https://goo.gl/sfwS6n Facebook - http://facebook.com/minuteearth Twitter - http://twitter.com/MinuteEarth MinuteEarth provides an energetic and entertaining view of trends in earth's environment -- in just a few minutes! ________________________ References Borer, ET et al. 2014. Herbivores and nutrients control grassland plant diversity via light limitation. Nature 508, 517–520 Fearon, J. 2003. Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country. Journal of Economic Growth 8: 195–222. doi:10.1023/A:1024419522867. Guyana Fourth National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Guyana Environmental Protection Agency 2010, 83 pages Iyigun, M.F. and A.L. Owen. 1998. Risk, entrepreneurship, and human-capital accumulation, American Economic Review, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings 88 (2), 454-457. Lambers, H (ed). 2014. Plant Life on the Sandplains in Southwest Australia, a Global Biodiversity Hotspot - Kwongan Matters. Publisher: University of Western Australia Publishing, Crawley. ISBN: 978-1-74258-564-2 Maffi L. 2005. Linguistic, cultural and biological diversity. Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 34: 599-617 Nettle, D. 1998. Explaining global patterns of language diversity. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 17(4):354--74. New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora. 2002., CD Preston, DA Pearman, TD Dines (editors), Oxford University Press. 910 pages Sutherland, W. J. 2003. Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species. Nature, 423:276--279. S. Wennekers, A. van Stel, M. Carree, and R. Thurik, 2010. The Relationship between Entrepreneurship and Economic Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship 6: 167-237. Yamada G. 1996. Urban Informal Employment and Self-Employment in Developing Countries: Theory and Evidence. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURAL CHANGE. 44: 289-314. IMAGE CREDITS: Kwongan - Kwongan Foundation http://www.plants.uwa.edu.au/alumni/kwongan Rainforest - Bishnu Sarangi (Public Domain) http://pixabay.com/es/selva-parque-nacional-mollem-384944/ Meadows - Wikimedia user Nikater (Public Domain) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blumenwiese_bei_Obermaiselstein05.jpg Forest - Hansueli Krapf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Swiss_National_Park_131.JPG Wetland - Wikimedia user Martinsnm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laguna01.jpg Indian Market - Courtesy Shutterstock Chinatown Bangkok - Yoav David http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinatown_Bangkok.jpg Language and Poverty map data: http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=WDI&f=Indicator_Code%3ANY.GNP.PCAP.CD http://asjp.clld.org/

As an ecology major: maybe don’t try comparing human society to ecology. Ecology is a really fucked up system if you really think about it with organisms constantly trying to eat or starve each other and dying as horribly and with as much suffering as they lived. Is that what we want in our society of intelligent, logical creatures? Plenty of other animals gave figured this out and formed cooperative social groups where individuals do things with the explicit intent to benefit the collective, why can’t humans?

Consult Maslow’s Pyramid. If you can’t afford to feed yourself or your family, don’t have stable housing, clean water, or social mobility, chances are “but you’re so diverse!” isn’t a consolation in your eyes.

Finally, the issue with rich (human) places being less diverse is entirely the fault of capitalism favouring the richest, and colonialism destroying the existing cultures. It’s absolutely not caused by simply having more resources. Which, what the hell are they going on about rich places (their implication being the US and Canada) having existed for not that long? No no, it existed for ages, but y’all killed all the indigenous people and installed a fake culture on it and are pretending that it was the first one. Also, what about Western Europe? It’s existed for ages too, yet is about as (un)diverse as the US or Canada with each country basically being its own ethnostate. In fact, the US and Canada are more diverse than most Western European countries due to having more immigrants.