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.