Some Knowledge

The world is a very big place.  There are a lot of people in the world.  It takes a lot of resources to keep so many people alive.  Human beings are wasteful.  We waste most of the resources we use.  What will it take for people to use only what they need?

A lot more people could live on this planet if we managed our resources better.  Instead of wastefully feeding crops to animals to manufacture meat, we could make good food products out of grains and vegetables.  Instead of driving all over the place and burning limited supplies of gasoline we could travel on electric railways and save precious petroleum.  Perhaps electric vehicles will become practical with new advances in battery technology.

Then there are governments.  Governments are some of the most wasteful institutions on the planet.  Not only do they waste money and people’s lives by perpetrating wars on the peoples of the earth, they support wasteful industries with laws and tax breaks.  Only an idiot would use a gallon and a half of petroleum products to produce a gallon of ethanol for fuel, yet governments support this wasteful practice.

You can rely on the free market economy to provide jobs and money to people, but if you do a lot of people are going to lose.  The free market is all about capitalism and making money for the few at the expense of the many.  The problem with government run business is that government is corrupt and does not know how to run an economy.  A logical system of employment and production that provides for all people has not been created on planet earth.

Then there is housing.  The typical house wastes a lot of resources.  Large buildings are more efficient at conserving heat in winter and keeping cool in summer.  This is because they have a higher ratio of volume to surface area than smaller buildings.  If people lived in great sprawling housing complexes with all the things they need close by like shops for food and items and offices where they could be employed there would be no need to travel far to get things or go to work.  The open areas outside could be used to grow more crops or be turned into parks for recreation.

The weather has been giving people problems for as long as people have been around.  Despite the hazards, people continue to occupy flood plains and the slopes of active volcanoes.  If people would use some common sense and leave these areas to nature, they would not die in catastrophes.  Still, people tend to live near the area they were born.  If your parents grew up on the slopes of Vesuvius, maybe you will live there too.  If you were born into a city that is situated below sea level and that is surrounded by earthen levees then maybe you will stay there to be near your family.

Individual people have some more or less amount of common sense.  For some reason, groups of people tend to have less common sense.  For some reason, large groups of people are inclined to perpetrate violent acts.  Perhaps this is because of the anonymity involved in being part of a group.  People do not feel as responsible for their own actions when they are performed in unison with a group of similarly inclined people.  Large enough groups of people even cooperate to design and manufacture technology to drop bombs on other groups of people they don’t even know.  How does that make any kind of sense in a supposedly civilized world?

But that is perhaps the basic problem with world civilization.  The world is not civil.  The world operates on the cut throat principles of competition and the survival of the fittest.  Yes, there are charitable organizations.  Yes there are kind, caring people in the world who try to help others.  On the whole, however, it is still dog eat dog.  Nobody is going to come up to you and just hand you a bunch of money for nothing.  The economy and the distribution of goods on planet earth is based on getting more for what you have than what you paid for it.  Well, this more has to come from somewhere.  What happens is that some people get far more than what they need, and some people get nothing.

You can live your life and be part of the problem, or you can be part of the solution.  If you take what you need from life and use only the resources needed to keep you alive, you will not be much of a problem.  If you use more than what you need and waste what you have by just throwing it all away, then you are causing problems.  If you help people get organized and promote positive changes in the world, you might actually change the world for the better.  Some day people will wake up from the spell modern society has cast on them with this consumer mentality and realize that it is good to share and support other people.  Some day people will realize that cooperation is far better than competition as far as making the world a better place to live for all the people.