Dominic
| Name: |
Dominic Skinner |
| I live: |
Adelaide, South Australia |
Human Chauvinism was a word frequently thrown around on a recent camping trip to Kangaroo Island. So, I began to think about it (after firstly looking the words up in a dictionary to find out what they meant - I am the master of small vocabularies).
In the early twentieth century, the world was preoccupied by two huge world wars, in the seventies, the threat of nuclear bombs was at the forefront of peoples minds. These days, I stay awake at night in constant turmoil over the effects of Global warming and Climate change, desperately trying to think of solutions.
The point is: the threat of the world ending seems to play a large role in history, and this is the human chauvinism mentioned previously. But what does it mean for the world to end?
Throughout the Earths history, huge upheavals in climate varying from ice ages to volcanic activity have shaped the earth’s surface and created specific niches for species of Flora and Fauna to thrive. The huge biodiversity on Earth allows life to survive these drastic changes, just as it will survive the global ramifications of global warming, whether or not Homo Sapiens will survive with their current standards of living is what is really worrying everyone.
Our addiction with economic growth and huge cities in the western world, is leading to constant, and rapid growth of our population, and our living standards, and recently huge countries like China and India are following in these footsteps. But this growth comes at the expense of our natural resources, and the less fortunate third world labour market, but this has been known for quite some time, the new development is that due to the exploitation of stored energy from fossil fuels, climate change is likely to destroy all or most coastal cities, reduce most agricultural land to infertile, arid land causing world wide starvation of humans. Sadly, all of these problems can be directly traced back to recent human activity. This seems to show me a fundamental problem with our attitude to the world in which we live. The Earth is thought of as our property, and long-term sustainable practices are exchanged for immediate plundering of our natural resources in the quest for immediate profit. Until everyone changes their attitudes regarding our place on this Earth, and begins to develop cyclical practices of business, with new resources coming from another business’s waste instead of directly from the Earths resources, Humans will always be faced with problems which will plague all of Civilisation.
