Collapse Assignment 2

What if the people that live in the Easter Island did not have the culture of cutting down trees and using those trees to help move the stone statues they make? But I guess it's impossible, since that is their culture. Same with us, we relied on technology and the surrounding things to help us live through. In Bao Lin's blog, she said, "We resemble the Easter Islanders as the way Jared Diamond described one of the theories, “Easter Islander surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them.” “Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood’?” I think most of us think like what Jared Diamond said; we rely on technologies to solve the problems for us instead of paying close attention to what is happening now. Other than that we have different situations as the Easter Islanders, I believe that our consequences will be very similar." We will collapse even if there are technologies because the technologies that we use, the materials to make the technologies comes from earth. If the resources on earth that we have found are not enough to make the things we need, then collapse will happened. We are not that different from the Easter Islanders and even if their environment is different, we are making the same thing (not mistakes since it is their culture, but would be mistakes since America is a diverse country, many cultures) they are, by not realizing that we are using too much of the valuable resources than we should. I wonder how many of the important resources that we still have left that we can still use? And how if we extinct one of the resources, who will we blame on? Us? or blaming it on a few countries and start a war because of it?

A really really important resource that we use in everywhere that is going to run out is "oil". "Oil-derived petrochemicals are found in the most mundane household and office items ... from condoms, clothes and cosmetics, to nappies, pantyhose and the much-maligned plastic bag" (An Australian Case Study ). We use oil to make everything and using oil as energy resource as well to make our car running. It is not that if a class of people that knows about it and starts to recycle, reuse, and use less plastic bags and cosmetic items and other things that the collapse would not happen. That is because we need a huge group of people to spread the word and even if there are, it is not helping the America economy because it does not seem to reach into the people's minds that well. So why do it? I ask myself a lot of the times. I save the electricity and close the lights or other things so that I save money but really, it doesn't feel like it is making any difference. We need a lot of the things that has been already created for us and because we are so use to the supplies and resources that we thought it was going to be available all the time, we don't think that it is going to run out by the time we die.

I agree on how some Americans are quite blind to see what they are doing to the environment and how that can lead to a bad collapse. They only mind their own businesses and not caring what is going on; "Others are so caught up in bumming at home that they do not realize the amount of electricity they waste by leaving the lights on and watching TV all day long. Americans are so eager to show their wealth in the country that they buy cars; not knowing the barrels of oil and energy needed to power the cars." (Maggie Blog). Because we think that there would be other resources that we can replace after oil ran out so we do not care about the consequences so in the past, they gather up barrels after barrels of oil, thinking that the earth has so much, even if they take that much, it will still have inifinite amount left. Which is so not true considering Hubbert had made a graph showing "Peak Oil", where when we use half of the total oil, the amount of oil that is going to be used will start to go down because oil is limited. "In fact, the recent run-up in global oil prices is an example of those limits to growth, which was foreseen by energy scientists many years ago" (Limits to Growth - Oil). If it is foreseen by sciences manyyyy years ago, then why does it seem less than may 3% or a bit more people know about it like the U.S. representative in the Crude Awakening that knows about Peak Oil.

Is there going to be an alternative? I don't know but it seems the phrase, "history repeats itself" happens more than we expected. Like having the economy collapse is a must for we have many collapses in the past and it is going to happen now. What would happen if the whole world collapse because there is no oil left or that there are no alternative? If that happens, I wish I was dead before it happens. Can we actually save it because it seems like we can but time does not wait for us. I think the way the collapse is going to happen will affect us so much because we rely on resources that are limited and did not think of an alternative before the collapse happened. A lot of the times when someone tell them that this bad thing is going to happen, the others just brush it off like, "Yeah right...". I think we should take in consideration for what people said even if it is small because in the end, whatever happens, the collapse, the fault will fall on everybody.