Look upon my works, ye Mighty
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822
This is the epigraph to a fantastic piece by Jared Diamond in last month's Harpers Monthly (Jeez, it's a pity these guys don't have their web act together at thils late date). Diamond's stuff is always fascinating, always informative; if you haven't read Guns, Germs, and Steel, you're really missing something. Anyway, in the Harpers article Diamond is arguing, persuasively, that the collapse of civilizations is often the result of ecological collapse, and that we shouldn't, as too many leaders do, brush off ecological concerns:
Foremost among these misconceptions is that we must balance the environment against human needs. That reasoning is exactly upside-down. Human needs and a healthy environment are not opposing claims that must be balanced; instead, they are inexorably linked by chains of cause and effect.
Terrific stuff; I don't think the magazine is still on the shelves, but it's great reading.
While reading the piece, I was thinking about Shelley's poem; it's ironic that Diamond uses it. Ozymandias' civilization is dead, gone, with only the two trunkless legs of stone left of it. Diamond doesn't mention it, but a big contrast between Ozymandias' civilization and ours is that we will leave lots of reminders of our civilization: a polluted world bereft of thousands of species which are extinct or will be that way. Our pollution, not our monuments, will live long after us. Future civilizations will look on our works and despair, but not for the reasons we might think.
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