The movie The 11th Hour is a chilling documentary about the extreme climate changes of the environment and its causes and effects. Not only does this movie feature people we have read such as Heinberg and brilliant thinkers such as Steven Hawking, it also shares the ideas of some of the people who wrote the texts we have been reading.

As the movie began, one of the scientists said that the Earth is behaving like an infected organism as Lovelock said in the first chapter of his book, The Revenge of Gaia. Not only did Lovelock point out how the harmful gasses are influencing the Earth as the scientists did in the movie, he also brought in the age of the earth and how important that has to do with the way it is reacting now. The scientists and speakers in the movie pay a lot of attention on the age of humans compared to the age of the earth. They stressed how amazing it was that we single handedly, as a race, irreversibly destroyed the planet.

Another term that came up in the movie that can be connected to something we have encountered before was "thinking disorders". According to one of the scientists, humans have an illusion that they are apart from nature and are suffering from a thinking disorder. This is similar to what Kuntler said the day he gave a presentation at the Skidmore college about the American impediments to thinking. He said that Americans suffer from thinking impediments that make them act a certain way without concern. This is similar to what the scientists in the movie were saying about how humans in general think. We think we are apart from the Earth and because of that, we do not realize how we harm the Earth with our actions.

The movie did not show me anything I did not know but at the same time it changed my way of seeing the world. I do not know what to do anymore. I feel like the world is coming to an end and I would have lived a life without even making a dent of change in it. Someone once told me life is about leaving the world a better place than it was when you found it and my greatest fear is that I will be forced to live in a world that I can't even change.

GAIA

The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock is a powerful piece that should make us all feel guilty. It is rare to find someone who thinks of the Earth as a living breathing organism and that is truly sad. The Earth is living and breathing and we are just killing it. Gaia means the goddess of the Earth, in other words, mother Earth. If humans can give the Earth such a loving term as endearment "mother" then why do we continuously treat her like she does not have feelings?

The word revenge is the most important word in this text because it takes the Earth to another level of feeling. Not only does the Earth have feelings but she is very upset and we are the cause of it. She is lashing out in the form of natural disasters and now she is just packing up. In the text on the third page, in the end of the paragraph stretching from page two, it says "when the Earth was young and strong, it resisted adverse change and failure of its own temperature regulation; now it may be elderly and less resilient." This is just saying that the Earth has grown old and cannot take care of herself anymore and instead of helping her and supporting her, we constantly destroy her even more. Human beings are cruel, ungrateful, and spoiled organisms that do not understand the gravity of our actions.

Another word that is important is the word threshold. In the context of the reading, threshold is used to explain the outcome of passing the carbon dioxide levels in the air, but i think humans and the Earth are on the threshold of existence. We are standing on our entire existence and holding our breaths because we do not know what will happen. Everything is in the Earth's hands and the Earth is too tired to hold us anymore.

The book, What we Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel, tackles the extreme climate changes that we have been facing and why they are occurring. The book brings up many important reasons as to why we are dealing with climate change and the affects it will have on our world. It is a scary book to read because it is all factual and it is predicting a very bleak future for humans. Out of all the things she brought up in the book, the most terrifying to me is found on page 62, the first bullet point, where it says "the global mean temperature is now greater than at any other time in at least the past 500 to 1,000 years". That means that the planet is at the hottest it has every been in 1,000 years. The earth is getting to hot to handle and pehaps to even live on. I blame this on humans and the fact that we have led ourselves into dealing with a "runaway greenhouse effect". A runaway greenhouse effect is the outcome of too many carbon emissions and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and now we cannot control what happens to our environment. We never really could control what happens to the environment but we could have tried to keep it in a good condition. Now we have poisoned and destroyed the environment so much that we have no choice but to sit and watch it end.

We are at the highest mean temperature that we have never been in 1,000 years and we cannot fix it now. Even if everyone was to stop using gas powered cars and walk everywhere and all the factories in the world shut down, the problem would not be fixed. This especially stood out to me in the text because it was a hard pill to swallow that we are the reason for our demise. We struck the final blow to ourselves and now nature is making us pay. Our existence as a race is coming to an end we caused it. We, as humans, will suffer greatly.

The article, A Hole in the World by Naomi Klein in The Nation is about the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. According to the article, the reason deepwater horizon even occurred was because of BP's delusion that they could control nature. They did not take into account that drilling in areas like the gulf was extremely dangerous and this is why the spill is such a huge catastrophe right now. The article had many key terms, of them, the most important was risk and the idea of control.

On the third page, the word risk shows up as a way to kind of taunt BP for their ignorance in it's drilling. According to Klein, BP claimed, in a government report, that Deepwater Horizon had "little risk" and later explained the stupidity that they meant by that. Honestly, I think BP knew exactly how risky it was drilling in such a dangerous environment and the outcomes of that but chose to overlook it. That is where the idea of control comes in. Not only did they think that they could control the environment but they were so arrogant about it. They did not even take proper safety precautions when they began drilling or when the explosion occured. The risk of the drilling may not have seemed like it out weighed the benefits of oil but it did. Now not only is there massive amounts of oil floating around the gulf and but they have entered the marshes of states like Louisiana and Florida, and have created "Oil marshes". To think that something like oil drilling under water has such "little risk" is ignorant and selfish because now thousands of people and sea life have to suffer for it.

BP has not only failed as a company to protect it's main profit but it has altered many peoples lives in the process.

In the first chapter of the text, The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg, the most interesting thing that stuck out to me was how humans are Omnivores. An omnivore is an organism that eats both plants and animals. We are meat and plant eaters, and without having to say, it is obvious that in our "omnivoiurosity" we are consumers. The bad thing about being a consumer is that, most of the time, a consumer can never be a producer; at least not a natural producer. It goes without saying that the advances humans have given to the world is amazing but at the same time they still don't compare to the things that have been naturally made by the earth and the ecosystem. Humans however think that because they are at the top of the food chain, they do not have to respect the benefits of the earth. As a result, humans have over consumed. Now we face possible extinction of certain species of plants, fish and even animals.

The events that led to "Deepwater Horizon", which was not mentioned in the reading", were a prime example of human excessiveness. The level of the catastrophe is beyond anyone's control and it has defiantly knocked certain humans off their high horse. Now it is obvious that being at the top of the food chain does not mean the rules of the earth do not have to be followed. We as consumers and omnivores have stripped the earth of so many natural resources that it is lashing out on us in a violent rage. According to the text, "consumers feed on order and excrete chaos in order to survive." Sadly, the top consumers have excreted too much chaos to even survive.

The two texts, The Maya Collapses chapter in Collapse:How societies chose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond, and the Sleepwalking into the Future chapter in The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler are similar in more ways than one. They both not only discuss the issues of collapse but how societies in particular collapse. Of the similarities,I think the most important is the way their economic and social dependencies were the cause of the collapse. During the Maya era, the Mayan people were very dependant on their corn and their crops and did consistent harvesting to make sure their food stayed fresh and dependable . As the Maya depended on corn, our society depends on oil. We need oil for everything we do, as well as food. We need oil to survive because without oil we have no food, transportation, or the basic comforts for the lives we lead. The Mayan economy depended on corn as our economy depends on oil. When the drought occurred and slowly destroyed the crops, the Mayan economy followed. As our oil drought has become more stagnant than it was before, our economy has followed and is at a constant decline. We are facing a Global economic depression because of our lack of oil.

The Mayans needed their corn the way we need our oil. I think that the way the Mayan civilization collapsed may not happen to us because although we are dependent on our oil, we still have other technologies that can be used to help us be accustomed to the loss of oil. Not replace it. As corn could not be replaced for the Mayans, oil cannot be replaced for us.

The Crisis of Profligacy

In The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich, he revealed the secrets of American power; war. Through out the first chapter of the book, The Crisis of Profligacy, the topic of war kept coming up. It seems that America's root of all power comes from war. In the grand scheme of global power, the nation that stands on top is the nation who defeated another great nation. Throughout American history, war has been one of the things that has always given them an upper hand. Through war, they had gained power, money, and top nation status.

World War II was the major war that influenced Americas position in power. Bacevich has said "from World War II into the 1960s, more power abroad meant greater abundance at home, which, in turn, paved the way for greater freedom". America joined this war as an ally for Great Britain. After their victory they gained the title of global and economic leadership. Their involvement in the war not only gave them the image of "top dogs", but it also helped pull them out of the economic depression that they had been facing before the war. Being so successful after the war, they gained control of all modern weaponry. America's power is pulled from their ability to be bullies; and now they they face defeat in the middle east, their world is falling apart. With the lack of oil and victory, America is losing all sense of what made them so great.

collapse

The documentary Collapse, released in 2009, directed by Chris Smith, is an 80 minute interview of Michael C. Ruppert. Ruppert has been called a conspiracy theorist, a crack pot alarmist, and plane old crazy. In this documentary he expresses all the ideas and "prophesies" that has had him deemed as crack pot. His earlier work as an LAPD police officer helped first get his name out into the streets as the police officer who busted the CIA drug smuggling in 1976 and '77. Ever since then he has been on the search for the truth about all that the government has been hiding from the people; and not just the American government, but the governments of nations around the world.

Ruppert is a real no nonsense realist in a world of people who are too afraid to admit their wrong doing. The problems of oil have been going on for a long time now and it is only now that we are at the point of no return that people are being told about it. In fact if was not for the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, most people would not even know how desperate the government is to find oil. We as humans have stripped the earth of everything it has to possibly offer and now the only thing we can do is hope that we can fix it but meanwhile the whole world is going into a panic on trying to figure out what to use while we fix this problem. Oil is done. There will be no more oil when it officially ends and according to Ruppert" ethanol is an absolute... joke" as well as other materials that has been thought to be used as a replacement for oil.

Mainly what I got form all that Ruppert said was that we as humans have nowhere to go but down from here. He said that at this point in history we at at "peak oil" and it seems like it is peak oil not only for the oil but we are at the peak as a race. Right now we are at the peak of anything and because of that we are heading for an inevitable crash that will drastically change the world. Honestly, the end of oil is not going to end the world but it will change the way life is and if we do not open our eyes now it will be the death of many people. Humans have become too realize their mistakes before we do face a coll ape.

"overshoot"

Humanity is living in their last era of glory. Ever since the beginning of the 21st century, all the achievements humanity has gained is slowly depreciating and becoming a thing of the past. In the reading, Overshoot, we see how man kind has just pushed everything far beyond the next limit; we pushed it right off the cliff. This attitude has played the biggest role in the murder of the earth. Wherein humans have forgotten that everything on Earth is not really a necessity but a luxury. Before the discovery of so many things, humans had no choice but to survive, but now that so many things, such as oil, electricity, and transportation, have become a way of live, we are striving to keep them. What we don't understand is that the chance to keep them has gone, because we have already used them up. However,living in our current state is the best time to change the way we live and do something new.

On page two, towards the bottom of the page, the line "Throughout this text....a population an economy that have grown past the support capacities of the earth." This line embodies the whole reason we are faced with the situating of overshoot. However the definition of overshoot is to go beyond, unintentionally and i feel like in the case of population and economy, humans didn't not go beyond unintentionally, we wanted to see how far we could go. Our curiosity has led us to a dead end and now we want to say things were unintentional. The issue of over population has been a problem for a very long to. To a point where the Chinese government will not allow its citizens to have more than a certain amount of children. So it is an issue that has been publicized and known, but as spoiled humans, we shun it and think we can go around it. Now it has come back to prove us wrong. We are living on a planet that cannot hold our weight. We have become too over populated for the Earth to even feed us. More than half of the planet is living in abject poverty and hunger.

Humans are selfish. We forget that we only have one planet to live on and the knowledge of the damage we have been inflicted on it has been known for a while; it is only now that we are steering down the barrel of a loaded gun that we want to make a change. We can not change anything until we change ourselves.