McKibben

McKibben brings up vital points about the environment and how there is not much time left before the world collapses from the all the abuse.  Something serious has to be done or there will be no more life on planet Earth.  McKibben also addresses the fact that Earth is not the same planet as even 30 years ago.  Earth has transformed into a completely different place; a place that is on the verge of catastrophe. There are simply too many people, and this creates too much waste and CO2 emissions and in turn is destroying the planet. In addition, there is not very much time before this catastrophe happens.  There is not another 100 years to figure out a solution, steps should've been taken yesterday to prevent a catastrophe.  Time is running out fast.

A Need for an Island Civilization

A Need for an Island Civilization

                Noting the way we, as humans, treat the Earth, it’s clear that something disastrous is in the forecast.  I’m not normally one to preach about global warming, but the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.  Global warming doesn’t just make the air temperature hotter; it intensifies all of the seasons.  This means more hurricanes, longer droughts, and unbearable heat waves.  It has been recorded that in some areas, the winters are more mild and shorter; but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Coming from a small farming community near Erie, Pennsylvania, I know a few things about the importance of a lake-freezing winter.  Back home I can just walk through a couple acres of grape vineyards and be at Lake Erie.  Actually, nobody can go too far without seeing the two most important aspects of my town: the grapes and the lake. However, when the grape roots don’t freeze during the winter, the sugar content in the grapes lowers which makes it more difficult for the farmers to sell their crops.  Some of the crops even started blooming in February instead of May, causing a panic during March when we had a small snow fall. Because this winter was one of the warmest ever recorded in North East, Pennsylvania, the farms are going through one of the hardest times in history.   Not even the lake froze over and, much to my dismay; we didn’t have a single snow-day at school.  Of course because of the fact that the lake didn’t freeze, nobody was able to go ice fishing which in turn caused numerous businesses to suffer during their normally most prosperous season.  So you see this weather is affecting not only our environment, but our economy as well and in turn our wellbeing. 

In all honesty, if something isn’t done, my hometown will no longer be in existence and I know it’s not the only one of its kind. Developing into an island civilization could be a solution.  Within an island civilization, there would be less pollution and therefore fewer greenhouse gases which would at least slow down the process of global warming, if not, reverse it. But trying to be realistic, full-on island civilizations are not exactly necessary here; we could just take certain aspects of the concept and apply them to each town like mine.  Everyone could live the same as they do now, just more consciences of the environment and how it directly affects them.  By driving electric cars, recycling, planting more trees, and making aerosol cans go extinct, we could really start something. 

This movement will be a lot like the acceptance of African Americans in United States.  At the start, it seemed virtually impossible, and it was very hard in the early decades. Because of the way children were raised by their parents, racism stayed alive for a long time after African Americans were able to gain all the same rights as everyone else.  But because I grew up in a completely different society as my grandparents, the fact that our President is African American doesn’t seem like much of a feat to me.  If we can change our mindset from thinking “slave” to “President” in 143 years, then I’m pretty sure we can change our mindset to start being more friendly to the environment.  We just have to teach the upcoming generations to treat the Earth with respect and in time, an island civilization could be very possible.

Island Civilization Summary/Response

            Although it’s true that we humans have been “bad roommates” to the other species on our planet, regressing into how our ancestors lived isn’t the answer.  There is a reason why we don’t live the same way anymore; people wanted change, they needed to keep improving.  The quote, “humans stopped adapting to their environment and began to create it” is not necessarily true.  We adapted our ways of thinking and in turn, our minds became more inventive and intuitive.  Sure this caused us to alter the land and push all the animals to the unwanted corners of the earth, but does that doesn’t mean we should feel guilty and live like Tarzan. It means that we should keep evolving, and ironically let nature take its course.  After all, it’s not our fault that we are the obvious superior species.

            Everything we have invented over the past years has helped create an easier lifestyle for us today.  It’s much more convenient to have a machine wash and dry clothes than using a washboard and clothesline to get the job done.  It saves time, and that time can be spent doing other things such as figuring out a way to travel from one side of the Earth to the other faster – which would save even more time and that time could be spent inventing something else to make our lives even better.  It’s a snowball effect, and our snowball isn’t even close to the bottom of the hill.  Slowing down is not an option, but we could slightly change the course of direction.  We could gear our inventiveness to being more environmentally friendly, but honestly, creating the Earth into one giant Island Civilization is completely unrealistic.  Too many humans are too attached to their comfortable lifestyles to run with the wolves, so to speak.

            As mentioned in the essay, reducing the population by 1.5 billion would be necessary for this Island Civilization to work.  Now, I’m sure we can all agree that the current population is a little too high for our tiny planet, but there’s no way we can reverse the growth.  Because of the fact that we know modern medicine, we could never watch our loved ones die from a curable disease.  Island Civilization would eliminate large hospitals, or at least easy access to one. This would cause disease to spread among the people and plagues would take out whole civilizations.  Of course that would bring the population down to the desired number, but those are 1.5 billion potential geniuses, inventors, or even politicians that would die.  

            There’s still so much more out there to explore and to create, we need to embrace the fact that we have the capabilities to do so! By not embracing this, we would be wasting the wonderful gift of superiority we were given.  Think about it, if you told someone in 1912 that in approximately 50 years people would be able to walk on the moon, they’d call you insane. What could we do in the next 50 years? Maybe we won’t need to kill people off the Earth; maybe we’ll just move people off the Earth.  There’s no telling which path our snowball is on, but one thing is for certain; it’s not slowing down any time soon.