"I would like to thank Janice for her work in developing Civilisations and for her wider contribution to the BBC," said Mark Linsey, acting director of television.
Each was glorious, sophisticated, inventive, and each had reached the apogee of its greatness – until everything was pulled under by the deluge and an entire culture, a highly developed civilisation coherent unto itself, was lost forever in a single night.
Like the earlier exhibition, it reflects a changing view about the people who, from the second to the tenth centuries AD, created the most highly developed civilisation of pre-Columbian America.For much of the 20th century, students of the Mayan people considered them to be peaceful horticulturalists, governed by priests and ritual, without kings, cities, politics, violence or war.
When Crusoe describes making a plank of wood, using an entire tree for a single board and whittling it away for months with a hatchet until it finally serves its purpose as a shelf or a table top, it is as if we are watching the aeons it took humankind to develop towards civilisation.
The deep, vivid colours and interesting perspectives draw the reader into a surreal suburban landscape, developing a new civilisation through a child's imagination.
The general feeling is that if there is a clash of civilisations developing, the main culprit is the much-maligned "western media .American criticism of Al Jazeera as a platform for terrorists has also backfired.
I think we're at a point now where we can make that choice, to say maybe we can harness the positives that we've developed with industrial civilisation and develop something new, a post-growth, post-industrial form of civilisation that doesn't reject science and technology but recognises that ultimately you have to be living within the limits of your environmental systems.
When Bostrum described the argument in 2003, he presented it as an unappealing trilemma: basically no civilisations last long enough to develop simulations, the civilisations that do develop simulations are so different from our own that they wouldn't simulate us, or we are almost certainly in a simulation already.
T.S. Eliot might have said the same of companies, had he been a corporate image consultant; but he lived in benighted times, before civilisation developed that fine art.
The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed.
