Ch 24 part 2

I have never really been a person who was heavily concerned with the environment. I always understood that one day we will find out that we severely damaged our planet and by then it will probably be too late. However, I do understand that it is a very important issue and I found some of the facts in this chapter to be really intriguing and some frightening. The fact that in the past century we have quadrupled the amount of human beings is really a huge number and has really had an impact on the earth. I always wondered why the massive change in the environment has occurred rather recently instead of before. One of the answers is the sheer number of people and the advanced technology that allows us to alter the things around us. Strayer brought up an interesting point when he said that the future generations may not remember the wars, revolutions, and empires of this century, they may remember this time period by the environment that has been left to them. From looking at two of the charts one thing that really stood out was the fact that although the United States only account for a few hundred million of the 7 billion people on the earth, we produce almost a third of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s a huge gap to account for and one can only imagine how other developed countries would think of that. It really does not make sense for so much pollution to be caused by relatively few people. It seems like the United States does not put much effort in trying to save the environment, we just try to help defend forests just so we do not feel too bad whereas other developing countries around the world fight to save the environment because it is their livelihood. They need the land for farming and herding so their struggle is often one for survival while ours is to not feel so guilty. One concept that would be ideal to take up is to move away from materialism and instead of appreciating the things we make, appreciate the fragile web of life in nature that keeps us alive. I think the idea talked about in the Philippines also makes a lot of sense. Sure it makes sense to start a movement for the environment, however if you mix environmental protest with other movements having them overlap, you can create a much larger turn out and eventually change the established structures of power. Instead of just having one group go out and protest you get numerous different groups for different issues all showing up which could create a different end result to the one that may occur if just one group showed up for one specific thing. I guess in the end the environment will become what we let it become, in the same way that our history is what people decided to let it be, the only question is what will we decide to do with it.

Chapter 24 pt 1

I found the beginning of the chapter to be the most interesting part of the reading. Talking about how toys in different countries are foreign both in look and also in nature and how it may not really make sense to have Barbie and Ken in a Muslim society. The ideals they portray are not necessarily common with the ideals in Muslim society. The irony is that the thing they do share in common is that they were made in China. This story was just about children’s toys but one could really expand upon that to extend it to things beyond toys. It is weird today to think about the time where foreign countries were exactly that, foreign. They were faraway places that if they did not exist then you might not be impacted today. However, with the technology today and because of globalization, it became really difficult not to become dependent on everyone else, especially when so many different places have so much to offer. I also found it interesting that they traced the roots of globalization all the way back to trade routes like the Silk Road. It makes more sense to talk about technology today being a source of all the globalization, but even without the technology we were interacting and becoming reliant upon others even hundreds of years ago. The thing that surprised me a bit was the comparison of America to that of an empire. I never really thought of it that way but I suppose that it does make a lot of sense. It is not so much of a colonial empire, I mean obviously we are not taking over other countries and populating them, rather we sort of influence their economy and politics, a lot of times in a negative way. I thought it was funny that in terms of American global economy and the cultural face of America they used McDonalds as the example. I am not sure if that was just the easiest thing to express it in but I for one think it is not great that the face of our country is a fast food chain. The picture above the military bases in the early 21^st century and you cannot help but question the placement of some of the military bases. For example countries like Greenland, Iceland, and New Zealand, what exactly to we have to worry about from those countries? Or is there another reason for them being there? I mean I don’t know but it is something I found strange. Unsurprisingly however was the fact that globalization helped create the greatest spurt of economic growth in history. It makes sense that if everyone is trading with each other then they must all be getting something out of it, rather than taking over places for the good of one country we began to trade and benefit everyone.

Chapter 22

The second half of chapter 22 seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.  The brief alliances made in World War II between the United States, Russia, and Britain to stop Germany worked effectively in solving that problem but they were not necessarily good matches for each other as Russia and the United States saw each other’s way of governing was wrong. This was the cause of a bitter rivalry and division of all of Europe and most of the world. Fortunately though, the battle that seemed most imminent did not occur due to agreements made by JFK and the Soviet leader. However all these threats and fragile relationships still ended up having a huge impact in the form of the nuclear arms race. Though no one really fought each other in the cold war, the arms race was definitely a huge result which still today is a problem seeing as how we have enough bombs to blow up the world 20 times over. I mean that sounds like a lot of power but what are we going to do with the extra 19 when we destroy the world the first time. Nuclear weapons have been a huge problem since the cold war because of Russia, and now it is still a problem because of countries in the Middle East and North Korea working on these things that could potentially destroy us. In America we seem to think that we should be able to police the whole world and try to control who should be able to have these globe changing weapons but the question is, should ANYBODY have them at all? Furthermore, we have the expansion of military bases throughout the world and the chapter says that there were over a million soldiers in 30 countries including Greenland, because the polar bears were definitely a serious threat to our national security (sarcasm), and we have also had a bunch of roles in different alliances and treaties. Overall, it seems that we just went way overboard on trying to defend ourselves having soldiers all over the world and building even bigger bombs than the Atom bombs dropped in Japan.  Maybe at the time all these precautions seemed necessary but looking back it’s hard to justify the need for all those things looking at how things turned out because of our actions then, but then again hindsight is pretty much always 20/20. A lot of times in history the cold war was a scary time in America because of McCarthyism and the Red Scare and we think that we had the worst of it. However, when you look at Eastern Europe they had it a lot worse than we did. The Russian people themselves were victims of relentless propaganda and the Sovets even had to go into their supposed allies’ counties to put down resistance groups which really says a lot about the freedom of choice Eastern Europe had under the communist bloc during the Cold War. Overall, the cold war was a really accurate name for this time period as the relationships between countries and communication between governments and people were extremely cold; figuratively of course.