Hey guys, I've been reading on and watching environmental stuff. I'm suppose to come up with blog post for a climate change competition. Not in here of course, but I will just post it anyway. It's kind of long and wordy but at least for me I think it's interesting. One of them is considered a leech work from the film the 11th hour but I work it out to be like an essay. The 11th hour documentry is a better one compare to an inconvenient truth, everyone should watch it. So far I've got 2 entries, only gonna post one here.
So here it is:
When you look at the history of humanity it's basically a relationship between the two most complicated systems on Earth, human society and nature. Whether or not people have lived in a good balance between the two, when they don't they are gone. At the end of the day, when we all talk about saving the environment it is misstated in a way because the environment is going to survive. We're the ones who may not survive or may survive in a world we don't particularly want to live in.
Our biosphere is sick. We have a planet that is behaving like an infected organism. If you look at it from space, you see all these lights and it is the lights of planet Earth, the lights of the people but it is also almost like looking at an organism that has an infection on it that is forming a crust of some kind.
What I hear in my dreams is generation in the future screaming back to us in time saying,
“What are they doing?”
“What were they thinking? Didn’t they hear the scientist? Didn’t they saw the evidence? Were they too busy, distracted or greedy? Didn’t they care? Didn't they see they were at a critical point in time?”
We have evolved to be the leaders of our biological community but we are misleading. We are causing the devastation to our very foundation of our life system that has given us birth and we are ultimately committing suicide. So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process. There is no escaping in this conclusion.
Life on Earth is possible only because a number of parameters lie in certain very narrow ranges. Some of these are clearly environmental. Like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure to have lived with water. Well, Earth is a planet that is just far enough from the sun and has just enough of that atmosphere of a certain composition that more heat stays here than radiates out to space. The sun warms the planet and that heat radiates out. There are also gases in the atmosphere that have always trapped some of that heat.
Forty million centuries ago a cell formed and that cell had a gene and it is the password to every single other form of life there is. The amazing thing about the human body is it has one hundred trillion cells and ninety percent of them are not human cells. They're fungi and bacteria, micro-organisms. So within us is basically the back-story of life on Earth right to that first original cell forty million centuries ago. If you could for a moment stop and feel what is happening in your body, there are six septillion things going on at the same time. That is a six with twenty four zeros after it. Right at this instant as you sit in your chair and then in the next instance within 10 seconds, a hundred more things have happened in your body than in all the stars and planets and asteroids in the known universe, and that is called life.
A fundamental illusion in the mind of humans is that people are separated from nature. When the reality is that we are part of nature. In fact, we are nature and that is probably the most fundamental misunderstanding in the world that is causing all this havoc. I think one of the reasons why it is so difficult for people to get that we are connected with nature and to even understand the fundamentals of eco-literacy is because it flies in the face of the assumptions of our culture. We are totally living in disharmony with the planet or even far beyond the planet now. We are zooming around Mars and all of that exploration is marvelous. But it's not really affecting our attitudes. I think our attitudes are based on selfishness, based on the economic situation we have and based on the politics which we have. I mean how many governments in the world have really taken the environmental crisis for what it is? We live in a human-created environment where it's very easy to think we're different from other creatures. We're smart, we create our own habitat and we don't need nature. It’s the economy that is the most important.
The big rupture came in the 19th century with the steam engine, the fossil-fuel age and the industrial revolution. This was a great rupture from earlier forms and rhythms of life which were generally regenerative. After the industrial revolution, nature was converted to a resource and it was seen as, essentially, eternally abundant. This has led to the idea and the conception behind progress, which is limitless growth and limitless expansion.
For all of human’s history, the vast majority of human lived on current sunlight. Sun fell on the fields and the fields grew plants. The plants made cellulose, plant matter. Animals ate the cellulose and we ate the plants. We ate the animals and we wore clothing made out of them. We were living off of current sunlight. It was our food supply, our clothing, our heat supply and our light supply. The sunlight that fell on Earth in a year was the maximum amount of energy we could use. From the earliest evidence of human civilization 150,000 years ago and up until a few thousand years ago that was pretty much how we lived. Our population never surpassed a billion people. We began discovering that there were pockets of ancient sunlight, finding coal here and a little bit of oil there. Slowly between that and the agricultural revolution our population crept up until we hit our first one billion people. It didn't take 100,000 years to go from one billion to two. Our second billion only took us 130 years. We hit two billion people in 1930. Our third billion took only 30 years, 1960. It’s amazing that when JF Kennedy was inaugurated, there were already half as many people as today.
The reason that we've been able to have this exponential growth of population is because we are creating food, clothing, transportation and everything else all with this ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth 3 and 400 million years ago. If we had to go back to living off current sunlight and lacking technology, the planet could not sustain more than half a billion to a billion people. So we live in the most unusual period in the history of the planet in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon. To make that happened, we have used the supermarket and the transportation system to take fossil carbon and turn it into human biomass.
So the cornerstones of this system are all resting upon non-renewable, energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels. The real problem is there are too many of us using too many resources too fast. Now, oil has enabled us to do that. We use oil to increase the rate at which we extract all other resources, everything from topsoil to fresh water and from aluminum to zinc. Oil is really the basis with which we sustain complexity and with which we solve our problems. In a sense, all of our lives are subsidized by oil. And because we're subsidized by oil, when we shop for anything at a store, we don't pay the full price. We don't pay the full cost of what it took to produce it. Oil does a lot of harm. Economists would call them ‘externalities’ because they are external to the price you pay at the pump. For example, the acid rain problem that is caused by the burning of coal.
When we started feeding off of the fossil-fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle. A death cycle of dependency on extraction of those resources set in motion a sequence of events that has led us to our modern crisis of global disturbance known as climate change or global warming.
What is on top is definitely not my english, as I've said it's kind of considered leeched. But still I find the content good.
