An Inconvenient Tale of Two Farms

There have always been problems within society, and how it functions. Granted, there are some good things too, but we don’t feel a need to change those. How do we change though? For quite some time society viewed it as acceptable for women not to have rights. Now we see this as inhumane and unjust, but how did we get to that point? The simple answer is by studying our society and how it functions.

When I read “A Tale of Two Farms” and watched “An Inconvenient Truth”, I was stricken with grief. Mostly because I had to begin writing my journal about the afore-mentioned items, but some came from what I saw and read. Although I generally dislike Al Gore, and everything that he has done or is still currently doing, his movie has a point. Whether or not he is completely accurate or right in his assumptions, the world is going down the tubes. We live life on whims, buying giant SUVs that pump CO2 into the air, and having factories that do the same, just on a larger scale. Like I said before, I do not like Al Gore, and found that the movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, was annoying at best, I will give him credit for doing something that few others dare to do. With the exception of David Suzuki, I have seen no other person openly profess the dire situation of global warming aside from Mr. Gore. For this he deserves a big high five. He did what is necessary; studied our society, found something wrong with it, and tried to remedy the problem. He has made it a “cool” thing to drive a hybrid, or buy energy efficient light bulbs. He did have help promoting this cause through other organizations and companies, but he made the initial move, and “opened the floodgates”, so to speak. This is what societies need in order to prosper, or for that matter, survive. If we do not turn around the microscope and look at ourselves, how can we expect to see a problem, let alone fix it?

Such is the case in Norse Greenland, nearly 500 hundred years ago. (Collapse, Jared Diamond) If the Norse society had looked at itself and how it functioned, it would have been able to change or tweak some things to survive, or at least attempt to survive. We do not, however, have to limit our studies to present day society. It would not be very helpful to see a problem in our society, but have no knowledge on how to make it better. This is when looking to the past helps us. As Jared Diamond says in “Collapse”,
“The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in order that we may keep on succeeding.” (Pg.3 Collapse)

If we do not look at past societies and how they either failed or succeeded, and compare that to our own societies, how can we ever expect to do any better ourselves?