This summary got me thinking quite a bit about our future on this earth and who’s going to deal with the mess we are creating. My whole life when thinking about the apocalypse and the end of humanity it’s always been about social struggles between humans and other humans. This has been a general mindset ever since the start of globalization. We no longer had to worry about starvation if food can be transported across the entire globe in a week. If all your crops fail you don’t just starve anymore. Money gets tight and maybe you go homeless but even then there is no such thing as starvation in a first world country. Following the world wars and creation of nuclear weapons it seems like a safe bet to say that the world might just end in a massive explosion. This thought is obviously very common among the older generations who experienced the affects and cultural shift of the time, and are therefore bound to be common in todays youth since their culture gets taught to us. This fear of the near explosive apocalypse has pushed the fear of running out of trees far out of our minds. No one is worried about starvation when there’s a nuclear bomb dropping in an hour. This cultural ideology is what’s at the root of our lack of motivation to figure out sustainability. Why worry about the distant future when right now in this very moment that money could go towards people in need somewhere else in the world. It just seems like a waste to invest in solving a problem that hasn’t had consequences yet.

After this reading it just seems more and more likely that the death of the human race will be a slow gradual starvation brought on by our aspirations. In the end when we all realize that there’s only one forest left, the effort we put in the save that last forest will be twenty times the amount of effort that we could use right now to prevent that future. An ounce of sustainability is worth of pound hopeless last attempt endeavor at the end of the world on a planet that no longer can sustain life.

So I guess there’s two ways to look at it, the world will end in ice or fire. Our cultural and political failures due to differences of opinions will result in mass chaos thus destroying our civilizations (fire). The slow inevitable strangulation of our planet until our sheer population mass can no longer be sustained and we desperately try to turn back time (ice). The “collapse” brings great insight into this death by ice, and hopefully we all are aware of death by fire. I’d like to think there’s a third option, where we don’t go out with a bang and never have to chop down that final tree.