Excerpt via Essay:
Human Ecology
At the beginning of this program, I offered that my own stance for the human environmental situation was generally depressed. That posture has not changed, since I do certainly not see how virtually any thinking human being could be positive about the current state of human ecology. However , I would really prefer to note that pessimism can be not the same thing because quietism – this course provides inspired me to change my thinking about particular subjects, and caused myself to resolve to modify my own behavior as well.
Normally the one reading that a lot of deeply affected me, and that did one of the most to confirm my personal overall negativity, was Jared Diamond’s Firearms, Germs, and Steel. That is because Diamond’s procedure is to take the very long perspective of man civilization and cultural progression – in addition to the long-term, things will not look very good for societies that are in a position of outstripping their assets. Diamond’s simple insight is always to suggest that the dominance from the western paradigm for world – with its agrarian and militaristic factors – was able to spread and so rapidly certainly not due to “superiority” but as a result of certain fundamental facts of cultural progression. What is many chastening about reading Diamonds is to know the rapidity with which the western paradigm spread – and to recognize that some new paradigm could quickly spread as rapidly, particularly at a historical minute when the traditional western paradigm is both unsustainable (in conditions of resources) and unjust (in terms of problems like income distribution, food distribution, and the like). Diamond’s view from the rise of European-style civilizations is based on the fact that it was material factors outside the house human control (such since geography and technology) that permitted the rapid distributed – and it undoubtedly seems most likely from the picture he chemicals that these kinds of material elements might very well prove to be the undoing with this model of existence.
At the same time it can be worth recognizing the point of Greer inside the conclusion to his content “Entropy Gets No Respect”: “I occasionally suspect that one of the reasons so many people want to imagine a great apocalyptic end to the industrial age is that sudden annihilation is easier to contemplate compared to the experience of slowly waking up fully extent of the own communautaire stupidity. inch In other words, the idea suggested simply by Diamond the fact that consequences of unsustainable methods of living might incorporate a society that is certainly simply eliminated and changed is likely to cause us to envision scenarios
