Infertile soils are what create people to be resilient in creating a functional society with adequate food resources. If you cannot handle soil infertility, then you are likely to have a very tough time with producing higher tier industries to compete.

The less religious people become, the more productive and pragmatic their work. One of the features of the Australian people was that it took 6 months to travel from England to Australia. I bet religious beliefs went out the porthole on the journey over to Australia. And then to be welcome to an unforgiving landscape and stifling hot climate would have had new colonists using their pages in the bible as toilet paper.

UnSubRocky wrote on Dec 22^nd, 2017 at 4:31pm:


Thucydides opined that Athens became so powerful because the soil of Attica is relatively infertile - causing two things: 1. no one wanted to invade them, thus keeping the population stable and homogenous, allowing them to develop and maintain a functioning society free of outside threats and 2. their lack of agriculture-based prosperity forced them to expand outwards, which caused them to develop a powerful navy and create a large empire.

Interestingly, its generally held that one reason Europe became so advanced and powerful was for the opposite reason - they were constantly invading and conquering each other, and this caused them to focus on advancing technology for their defence - plus the added factor of different cultures constantly interacting and mixing and causing advances in civilization. In this vein, you can argue the opposite of what you argue - that fertile soil is what causes people and societies to be resilient - if that fertility attracts outsiders to try and invade and conquer you.

You compare to countries like the United States and Australia. They are two countries that had origins of settlers from Europe. The United States has soils that are highly fertile down to moderately fertile. They can produce every kind of food product they need and have no necessity of importing food. Australia has vast land of mildly fertile to moderately fertile farmland. The problem is that rainfall is not abundant as it is in many regions of the United States. Australia produces large amounts of food products, but we still need to import some food from overseas.

When you consider that Australians have to survive with a climate and landscape that can be brutal to farm production, or general town and city development, the citizens develop a type of personality known as Australian stoicism. We endure the problems we face with grit and determination. We get labelled "rough diamonds" by the British because they can't understand why we need to be more serious about our survival than they. Our industries are not as advanced as other first world countries, and our psyche to competition is not so focused killing the competition. To an extent, we have a type of sustainable lifestyle with a mild materialistic culture among Australians.

Americans, however, generally have a favourable climate and landscape to reside. They don't have to worry as much about lack of rainfall and soil fertility. Their secondary industries are more developed. They basically have an advantage of being able to develop a competitive industry in whatever they want. But they are also closed off to any connections with other communities. It is like they are competing with each other, which is to their own detriment. But the bigger problem is that they (Americans) have become so spoiled in their lifestyle that they have stagnated creatively in their development. Given a massive power outage over there for a week, the citizens are likely to die like flies. But it really is up to the community as to how they react towards adversity.

Strength of a nation depends on the right attitude of the citizens to succeed.

freediver wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2017 at 12:29pm:


... or they died trying..........................................................................
       

Yes and their civilisation prospered and grew surpassing all others technologically etc, etc, etc...  puhlease

buildings -10
clothing -9
language 5
literature -10
art 3
music 3
agriculture 1
etc, etc....
60,000 years of almost nothing.

Who was it who said ... "Empires and nations are not destroyed by murder, but by suicide" ?

Yes some of my friends are aboriginal or part aboriginal.

Unlike you eh.

You never get it do you...

The thing about the Modern World is that it is introducing stuff that has never happened before in the entire history of such areas experienced by Europe, Asia & Middle-East ...even to go so far as North America - which 'fell back' into the past of Europe and the known 'civilisation' and history.

For one thing, you have 'white people' down in the Southern Hemisphere now - that's a whole new ball game right there and you can see in the Australian society those that still 'fall back' to what is 'KNOWN', not (as Joseph Campbell once said) what is there is ....