War is Bad

In my opinion, war is bad. I'm not saying that it's bad because I dislike violence or because I believe that there should be peace on earth, but because overall, war has proved to be for the most part, a bad thing for us. Through out history, our governments have resorted to wars as away to get what they want, but to what cost? Valuable money from taxpayers. Although we say money can’t buy us happiness, it sure can buy us health, or better said, help us be healthy. With money being used for war, as the war progressed and the government felt a need to prolong the war in order to win, they usually sought out to raise the cost. This in turn rose the percentage of population living under the poverty line, which led to malnutrition issues in families. But all the negatives that are usually cause by the government's need for war, including debt and lowering the economic status of the country, in the future, whether close or far, lead to improvement in living. Of course, that is only once the war has ended. When looking at individual countries and their progress after a war, most of the time, that progress is in such an amount, that if it were to be graphed, it would be highly noticeable. This is the good thing about wars, and post war times, people are brought together in search of a better way of living because war is a terrible time.

War is a terrible time. Although not in all wars, but in many through out history, men (mostly) were drafted and forced into fighting. Since in most families, it’s the men that were in charge of maintaining the family economically well, or as best as possible, the drafting that occurs in wars, such as in the Great War led to women having the chance to step up. This "stepping up" was a great step in women empowerment through knowledge. Its crazy how something as terrible as the Great War can lead to something as productive as the empowerment of women, through means of jobs. Another thing that war can do is can create job opportunities which in the long run helps pay off war debt and like in the United States, can boost the economy. But as we learned in class, while wars may have positives to it, it also has really bad negatives. For the Great War, millions of people from various places got together in a small area and fought one another for long amounts of time. We carry many viruses within us but we don't have a reaction to them since we've lived with them for so long, developing an immunity. This however, does not mean that others whom we meet wont get those viruses, that is exactly what happened in WWI. So all the interaction with people who carried various viruses and diseases got many people sick who later, if they lived through it, would return home and give it to others. So many people die not only because of war itself but also because of the conditions in which soldiers live in while in war.

Creating a First Civilization

In class, we were given the project of creating/ inventing our very own first civilization. While many might think it is something that comes very easily, there were many factors that we had to consider while making our civilization. Just coming up with the area in which it would be placed in was difficult. We had to think of things such as to what environment would be the most convenient to our civilization based on it's fertility, access, and available resources, primarily water. We also had to think of what we would have to face in such environments. Would this civilization be affected by hurricanes? Could it receive significant damage if it was hit by an earthquake? If a disease came to the community, what type of resources would the civilization have to be able to overcome it? Were floods a possibility?

Considering the fact that as a primitive, first civilization, it possibly had no real way of accessing water easily as we do now, my group thought the best way to have access would be for this civilization to be placed near some kind of body of water, preferably a fresh body of water. We chose a river because unlike a lake, it has a constant flowage of water passing by which would be good for us since it would serve as a place where we could bathe and also get clean water out of without risk of having to ingest what was used to be cleaned and also avoiding the ingestion of dirty water due to accumulation of animal's waste.

With the idea of a river, we then came to trees and vegetation if any. We thought of various possibilities and settled on a lush green forest, to be precise, a rain forest. It is said that the rain forests are one of the most diverse places both when it comes to plants and also animals/ insects. This would be a positive thing for us because it would provide our civilization with a great amount of food already there, it could avoid the need to farm, and to storage large amounts of food. This doesnt mean that we decided it wouldn't farm. There are many things that can go wrong with the forest's food so farming would be something needed, not in a large amount but more of a small amount in which way the civilization wouldn't have to be dependent upon the environment's production patterns and possible tragedies/disasters.

All in all, we used this type of critical thinking to come up with our civilization. While in this process, i wondered, Would it be as simple a thing to just die out and fail as a civilization if those settling in the area, who planned to grow later as a civilization, made the wrong decision or forgot to factor something in while choosing a place? Did this happen often, or where there some that found ways to overcome their mistakes?

Our love for animals

For some reason after I had finished the reading due, I could not think of what exactly to write about. But I had two points that I wanted to talk about. One point was more spoken of than the other, but to me, they were equally interesting. My first point was the role that the need of love and belonging played in the structure of our advancement as humans. My other point was referencing the domestication of animals and the impact it had on Humanity. Love and belonging were mentioned on the pyramid of hierarchy mentioned in the beginning. It was not directly talked about but in the image provided, I noticed it. It was interesting that it was placed as the third level, right after the security level but before the esteem level.

According to the image provided of the pyramid of the hierarchy needs, love and belonging is only somewhat important, that’s why it has been placed right in the middle of it. As was said in the reading, the pyramid was originally made to describe the process of a single human. It’s difficult to see how this could apply to civilizations of people and what was required of them. To me, it’s very hard to understand how the safety needs come before the needs of love and belonging. Every person has a family, whether they choose to be recognized or not, they are born into it and receive some love, while every civilization doesn’t really have a solid origin, it develops over time into something big or they perish. If a civilization is made up of people, I don’t understand how this level could be included in the advancement of humanity in general if not everybody develops in the same way. How is the advancement of humanity similar to the development of an individual when compared using the pyramid of hierarchy and analyzing with prior knowledge? Well, to me, the pyramid actually seems more relative to the process of advancement that humanity and each civilization is required to go through if it is wished to continue and not die out. The pyramid goes from basics needs to optional needs. The true basics that are food, water, and shelter, the basics needed for survival such as finding safety. It makes sense for humanity to need to find these first before seeking a higher level of thinking because it is hard to look for something that it needed but mostly just wanted without first taking care of what is more immediately needed.

My other point was the domestication of animals. What caused humanity to feel the need or want to domesticate animals? Why did this process affect our population so much and could this step in advancing been avoided completely or was it necessary sooner or later?  This process and it’s affects were talked about in the reading and I still found myself wondering why these things happened. I think that it could have been that humanity was lonely and felt the need to connect more with nature and the environment by interacting with the animals around them. In the hunter-gatherer societies and ever since that, humans hunted animals and interaction with them happened at a certain level, why did the domestication of some of these animals result in the decrease of population and the spread of diseases? 

The Environment and Humans

 Why is it that humans and the environment have such a strong connection?

In this environmental unit, I came to learn a lot about the way that the environment often affects humanity and how the environment is affected by humanity's decisions and choices. As the reading said, the natural world relies on balance to stay alive and healthy. Everything in the world must have balance. In history, the environment often seeks balance and humanity seeks advancement. 

This advancement that is seeked by us is not necessarily always done so in a way that helps the environment maintain it's balance. It tends to usually affect the environment’s balance, which then forces the environment to seek balance and change a few things that most of the time, seem to affect us. This is the connection that we have. From the information that I gathered, as humans, we have more of a connection to our environments than the environments themselves have to us because our physiological needs, basic needs, such as food and water sources and shelter are highly dependent on the environment. But if we make a bad choice, it is then forced to change and search for balance again. So for things to stop changing we would either have to stop advancing or make good decisions such as choosing the sustainable option that will make the balance shift to help us continue advancing.

             This is the idea of human flourishing through the successful process of satisfying the basic needs. Each time that a level of the pyramid is successfully satisfied, we develop and advance more. The process of the environment seeking balance is something that speeds this process up or slows it down depending our choices before the balance is altered again. Taking into consideration the altering of balance and our advancements after each one, would it be possible that in the future, our pyramid grows to add things that we don’t have now? I think that this idea is mind blowing. I wonder if it’s actually possible. In the past, did they have knowledge of the things that are further up on the pyramid and just didn’t do it or were they completely unknown? It would make sense for them to not know of the levels we have now but I cant imagine there being more to it than there is now because we are very thoughtful people and have gotten down all the basics and emotional necessities, we are just focusing now on intellectual things. But if this process does continue, I think that it could be possible for new levels to develop because we are never really done learning, at least not yet.