Collapse Assignment 2

After reading about Easter Island and the inevitable collapse they faced, I realized that if everyone in the world keeps living the way we do, we might also have a collapse. At the rate that we are using up natural resources such as fossil fuels and oil, our world is moving toward a slow but steady decline or collapse. Although not many people are aware of this, we too are using up natural resources, and at an increasingly fast rate. According to the “Crude Impact” video we watched in class, we are using up 1.4 trillion barrels of oil a year. That is a lot of oil to waste. Even though people don’t realize it, we use oil and fossil fuels in everything we do. From the clothes we wear (which were manufactured using machines that use up oil and coal) top the transportation we use every day, the amount of natural resources we have in the world are slowly declining. We see ads talking about global warming and the demolition of our earth, but we don’t think too much about it because we don’t think it will directly affect us. This however is not true. Every time a car buys gas from a gas station, we are taking fossil fuels from the earth. Fossil fuels and oil are natural resources, and cannot be replenished. If we continue to use up these resources, we won’t have any left. It’s true the production of products that use up natural resources will still continue because we have some saved up, the production will slowly decrease once we run out of these resources.

Another hint that a collapse might be on the horizon for our way of life is the amount of people that are populating this earth. According to “Crude Impact”, for 50,000 to 100,000 years, there was a steady population of only two million people populating this earth. Once the year 1800 came around, there were one billion people living on the earth. With the increase of population came the use of more natural resources. Instead of using timber, people started using coal, which means they could cut down trees and not worry about the timber, which meant they could grow more food and more people could be born. But once the demolition of forests happened, the animals that lived in those forests had nowhere to go, and slowly died off, turning people from hunter gatherers into farmers. People began to rely more on agriculture then they did on hunting and gathering, which used up more natural resources. 130 years later, in 1930, there were two billion people populating the earth. Every so quickly, the population on earth increased. In 1960 there were three billion people, in 1974 there were four billion people, in 1987 there were five billion people and in 1999 there were six million people. The estimated total population for the year 2010 is around seven billion people. With the increasing growth of population, came the decrease of natural resources in the earth. For every calorie of food we eat that uses oil to create it, 10 calories of oil go to creating/gathering that food. That is a lot of oil that is being used up at a rapid pace.

Easter Island collapsed because the people were greedy. They used up the precious trees to build the biggest statues, instead of creating canoes that could help them gather food. Once all the trees were chopped down, people started starving to death. Instead of thinking of the consequences of their actions, they could only focus on power. Our current situation is comparable to the collapse of Easter Island. Everyone takes advantage of natural resources, and every country wants to have the biggest oil reserve. So far 15 countries have reached their oil peak, including the United States, which peaked in 1971. Each country wants to have the biggest reserve because it represents power. This thirst for power that everyone has can lead to the collapse of life as we know it. Instead of pondering the consequences, we act on impulse, taking more then we need, and using up too much of what we take for granted. If we don’t stop over using oil and fossil fuels, the production of oil and fossil fuels will decline, and a collapse of our world might be in our future. However, no one knows when this collapse will happen, we can only hope it does not happen soon.

The collapse of our beautiful earth.