Word: coasts
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Easter Island is one of the most isolated patches of land in the world, 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile, a civilization in a bottle. Diamond uses archaeological data to meticulously piece together its decline. Despite its current denuded state, it turns out that Easter Island was at one time home to the largest species of palm tree in the world. It seems the Easter Islanders overtaxed their tiny home's unusually fragile ecosystem. Once they chopped down all the palms, they couldn't make canoes to go fishing in, and soil erosion devastated any attempts at agriculture...
While all that was going on, a colony of about 5,000 tenacious Norsemen was suffering a similar fate thousands of miles to the north. They had audaciously established a settlement on Greenland's comparatively mild southern coast, but they too overextended their environment and paid the price. Among many other blunders, they shortsightedly depleted the local forests (deforestation is a major theme in Collapse), which left them without the wood they needed to smelt iron. Icelanders were stunned when Greenlanders sailed into port in ships held together with wooden pegs and baleen instead of nails...
Incidentally, Harvard senior Martin Wetzel began his collegiate career with the Bulls of South Florida before moving up the east coast to Cambridge...
...billions of dollars, according to Maxwell Gaylard, who heads up the United Nations' Somalia programs. "It's not total destruction, but something pretty close to it," he says. The government-in-waiting in Nairobi has neither arms nor funds. When the Asian tsunami struck the country's Indian Ocean coast, ministers had to beg the United Nations to fly them in to survey the damage. But before they can begin rebuilding the country, they must face down the powerful Islamic courts and placate the businessmen. These groups form a powerful élite that has filled the vacuum left...
...city divided literally: 100 blocks closed, with buses blocking the streets; 13,000 soldiers and police, including 3,000 newly deputized officers from as far away as Seattle and Miami, freshly equipped with hats and gloves. There were cops on bikes, in plainclothes, in helicopters; sharpshooters on roofs; Coast Guard cutters on the Potomac; dogs sniffing for bombs; police confiscating fruit lest it be thrown. They were on guard against the unseen enemy and the visible disruption...