your snide remark about cholera being "imported from India, as it happens"

Not snide. A statement of historical fact, noted for irony given the nationality of the person I was responding to. I was relying principally on James Burke's statement in episode 7 of The Day the Universe Changed, "What the Doctor Ordered": http://fixyt.com/watch?v=wM2UZ26b1EQ (19 minutes)

It's readily corroborated:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/bio_cholera.htm

Cholera is a disease caused by the bacteria Vibrio cholera. The disease first emerged in the 1800s from Calcutta, India where it had caused disease for centuries. Since then, 7 cholera pandemics have swept through the world.

I'll note that even recent epidemics are traced to south Asia. The cholera epidemic in India was imported from Bengali UN relief workers:

Cholera strains isolated in Haiti were genetically most similar to strains detected in Bangladesh in 2002 and 2008; thus, cholera was most likely introduced into Haiti from southern Asia (2). Despite the genetic similarity in the strains, no attempt was made by the researchers to ascertain and rule out the source of the outbreak in Bangladeshi policemen stationed at Mirebalais between September and October 2010. Another, although less likely, source for the introduction of cholera into Haiti could have been travelers or relief workers who may have recently been to southern Asia.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310591/

I'm not blaming India for the epidemic, and I'm well aware that England was engaging in uninvited management activities in the region at the time. Though it's interesting to note that one of the first effects of globalization was importation of a mass epidemic -- we're dealing with similar issues today (various influenzas, SARS, AIDs), and there were earlier and other cases (syphilis imported from the New World, smallpox exported to it).

On Greer: he's very unorthodox. I'd suggest weighing his concepts on their own merits, and as I've noted in another response, the idea of catabolic collapse is really him putting an identifier and mechanism on a trend and mechanism others have noted.

it was not as if these changes were driven solely by a spirit of inquiry or general altruism

I am making absolutely no assertion that this is the case generally. The question of why industrialization emerged where and when it did is a fascinating one. I've been revisiting Burke's Connections and viewed The Day the Universe Changed both of which spend a great deal of time covering this period. I'm well aware of the social inequities which accompanied the transition.

In the large view, though, that's incidental to the larger problem: we (humans) have to figure out how the hell we're going to get past a confluence of multiple impinging crises: dwindling fossil fuels, climate change, other resource limits (water, topsoil, phosphorus, copper, "peak everything"), and underlying all of it, a fundamental problem of population, per-capita resource consumption, and equity in allocation both within and between nations. I'm very strongly pessimistic for the future, spanning a period probably roughly paralleling the duration of the Industrial Revolution -- the next 250 years. Though depending on what decline scenarios you subscribe to the fall could be more or less gradual.

One very real possibility is that the developed world make concessions to the undeveloped / developing world in terms of carbon emissions. Another is that the parties fight it out. Pursuing growth for its own sake will, simply put, backfire in the worst possible way. It's one of the larger prisoner's dilemma games ever constructed.

On Greer, what specific references do you have to his "non-evidence-based healing techniques"? I haven't run across those myself yet (he's a recent discovery of this past year).