The Revenge of Gaia

In the text The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock, he talks about the Earth and why it’s going through changes. The author says that he thinks of the earth as a patient with a fever. The Earth is capable of changing its temperature to make itself more comfortable. The Earth responds to whatever we do. He also talks about how global warming is real and is out of the Earth’s control. The reason why we can’t see that the Earth is changing is because we’re focused on other things; like clothes, food, the new gadget, what movie came out, and more. Since we are distracted we are not focusing on the main problem, which is global warming. Every time we pollute or send greenhouse gases out into the air it causes the earth to heat up.
The Earth changes so that it could adapt to the changes that it going through. The Earth has been around for billions of years and in those years it went through many changes. Just like humans, we change to make ourselves more comfortable. If we’re cold we may put on a sweater, if we’re sick we take medicine. The atmosphere has a lot of harmful gases in it that isn’t good for the environment

The Long Emergency

In The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, the first chapter talks about how in the future there will be something called a long Emergency. The long emergency according Kunstler is economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen. During the long emergency there will be a lot of diseases and that will affect our social and economic systems. The human life span will also start to disappear as well as our life styles. Some places in the United States of America will adapt to the changes better while others suffer.
The term cheap oil comes up often in this text. Kunstler says that we are at the end of the cheap fossil fuel era and that all our necessities and luxuries originate from cheap fossil fuels. The new technology and fuels could never replace fossil fuels in the same manner at which the world consumes it. America runs on oil and cant do with out it. Fossil fuels also have an effect on the carrying capacity of the earth.
At the end of the chapter he states, “If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered…” Nothing that we did will be forgotten. We worked and thought long about things and how it worked.

The Maya Collapses

In the text Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, he talks about the Maya society and how they collapsed. The Maya was one of the most advanced society during their time. There were many things that contributed to their collapse. One of the things that caused their society to collapse was their environmental problem. The Mayas caused climate and environmental changes by deforestation and erosion. Because they cut down the trees in the forest to make more space to harvest crops, the amount of rainfall decreased and caused a drought in many areas. Another thing was political power. Instead of coming together to figure out a solution to the problem, the different kingdoms fought amongst each other. The Maya society was divided politically mainly because of food supply. Corn was the most dominant crop. The humid climate made it difficult to store the corn for more than a year. The Mayas didn’t have any form of transportation so humans had to carry the products on their backs.
The Maya society story is similar to what we are going through today. Instead of saving energy we are wasting it. The farmers in the Maya society used more farmland to make more food than they needed and that caused a drought because they cut down the forest in order to have that farmland. America is doing the same thing the only difference is that we’re using a lot of oil to make products that we really don’t need.

The Collapse

In the film Collapse, which was directed by Chris Smith, Michael C. Ruppert was interviewed and questioned about his views and opinions about collapse. Michael C. Ruppert said that he wanted to find out how the world really worked and not how people said it worked. One of the things that Michael Ruppert talked about was peak oil. He said that Peak oil is the point of oil production when you have used up half the resources and that the world was at its peak. He talked about how there is many alternatives that we can take to save energy but they wont work as good as oil or we would have to use oil to make the supplies to that are used for the alternatives. An example would be the production of organic foods. Organic foods are made by using materials that need oil in order to function like the plows and trucks that carry to food to the destination.

He also said that there is a transition phase that is soon to come which is probably our only solution to this problem. Even though we have different methods on saving oil they all come back to the usage of oil. Michael Ruppert thinks that it to late to try to save yourself because we’re already at the peak and that we’re going down from now on. All you have to do is try to survive

The Overshoot

In The Limits to Growth the first chapter starts of by telling you what overshoot is and how it can affect the world. Overshoot is when you do something that goes way pass its capacity or limits unintentionally. Growth, limit, and delay are all factors in causing an overshoot. Overshoots occur often in people’s lives. An example of overshoot is the rapid population growth. This is an overshoot because we’re going beyond our limit to provide for everyone, there’s a delay on figuring out how to solve this problem, and the rate of this change is moving really fast.

Population plays a major role in global problems. As the population increases the amount of pollution in the air increases too. Industrial production is also rising and it has risen faster than population, which is crazy because its people that are using these products and if industrial production is rising faster than population than that means that they are making more goods than people can use.

The first line in the first paragraph on page six in The Limits to Growth says that people have increased their own population because they think it’s a good thing and it will solve most of their problems. In this case population growth isn’t a good thing and could make the problem even greater because you have to find a solution to the problem you may have caused while trying to fix your first problem.