Health, Society and Environment

Abstract

In his book Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), Pulitzer prize winner Jared Diamond argues that one of the reasons that different people have different histories is the differences in their environments. It is the environment that largely determined the culture and society of a people-whether they became warriors, were peace loving, became hunter gatherers or farmers. Giving the example of the people inhabiting isolated Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean, he points out that the fates of people inhabiting these islands, particularly the Maoris and the Morioris, were sealed by the environment in which they evolved.