jueves, 5 de marzo de 2009

Summary 2

This is the point were I start to become aware of the situation, and where I start to think that a change must be made in order to make this world, a better world (or at least not worst). Throughout this month I have learned some important facts about human life conditions and the problems of the earth (mainly us).

Some important ideas that I learned:

It feels good to help other people, perhaps this power is the fuel for some people to truly keep helping others. There is a problem though. If you help someone, the person or people that one is helping need to know exactly what we are going to do and for how long. Furthermore, if we are doing a project, this project better be sustainable or else people may feel awkward after a failure thus distrusting any further attempt to help them.

I learned that the system or the society that we live in may not always be as fair as I thought it was because sometimes it could be misleading and/or partial. For example, wealth is not distributed well enough in the world, and some people that really try to be successful, fail because they don’t have enough resources.

I think that above these problems of equality and wealth distribution, the greatest problem that we face nowadays is the destruction of the world and the consumption of natural resources. I think that these problems arise from other two problems which are:
Overpopulation: We have had an overwhelming amount of natural resources in the past century thus it seemed as if the world could really support us all. This problem is enlarged with the ignorance of some people that are not aware of the situation or that simply do nothing about it.
Economy driven society: We no longer care about the care of the world. Instead we seem to care more about the economy. This incorrect idea that we have might be a product of our minds since we think that we are disconnected from nature and we live on an artificial world made by mankind.
To be able to overcome these problems, the society most change the way it thinks. For the time being, we could help by teaching our awareness to other people.

I don’t want to think that we will become aware of the earth’s problems when it’s too late, but it might happen. As an example, when we played the world resource simulation game (with the newspapers), we realize that we were in great trouble only when we stared at the floor (after being told to do so) and saw what had happen to all of our resources. I think that the movie 11th hour documentary clearly shows that there is a problem thus more people need to watch it in order to become aware of the situation.

Conclusion
I think that I have learned a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about. I also started to become aware of some of the problems that we face today, while doing fun activities in class and writing in this forum.

After thinking for a while, I have decided that while I am in Luis Gerardo class, I will teach kids and adults of what we should do to protect our home (the earth). Thanks Luis Gerardo for everything ^^.

8th week

In this week we played two fun games. The one that I liked the most is: The Climate Change Game .

In this game I reached level 10 with good popularity and great environmental care.
What I learned from this exercise is that if we really try to help the nature, we indeed can, will is the only power that is needed. I think that this game was just way too easy because we knew how things were going to behave, but the reality is that systems tend to be more stochastic and the deterministic behavior is hard to measure. Still it was fun and now I know that we should try to be less destructive.

In this week, we also watched the 11th hour movie that deals with the destructive nature of human kind. This movie literally make us open our eyes to “see” that we are relatively a new species but we have caused so much destruction by selfishness thus if we continue with this madness we will eventually destroy ourselves.

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I agree with most of the information that is present in this documentary because everything is based on evidence and scientific research. Most of our actions nowadays are economic driven thus we are part of a materialistic society that keeps destroying the world by polluting the earth, changing the climate, deforesting the forest and taking away too many natural resources. Also the human population keeps increasing exponentially because we are using non-renewable resources of energy so the problems of resources will become more and more evident as times goes by.

I think we should change the way we look at the world. The world should not be viewed as an infinite source of resources; instead we should try to live in harmony with nature. It will be too dangerous to corrupt the ecosystem because it gives us (for free) a lot of things that we need like fresh air, food, etc. The problem is that we generally take these benefits for granted hence putting at risk our own existence.

7th week

Resource world Simulation Game
In this game, every student grabbed a piece of paper and placed it on the floor. After doing so, we had to wonder around for some time while the teacher removed some of them. When he made the sign of “stop”, we had no choice but to step on a piece of newspaper.
The newspaper represented the resources of the earth (every turn there would be less resources).
The behavior was as follows
1. Everyone started the game without sharing and they try to find their own piece of newspaper.
2. When there was like 70% of the resources left, everyone started to believe that sharing was a good idea.
3. When we had like 30% of the resources left, everyone started to bring the resources together (pieces of paper) in a false attempt to stop the removal of the resources
4. When we had less than 15% of the resources we stared to share massively in order to continue playing the game.
5. After a while, there was just one piece of newspaper to share among thirty people or so. This time we knew that it was not possible to share it together; therefore we decided to split the resources in parts, so we could still land on a piece of paper.

After playing this game I realized that this pattern is very similar to the pattern that we as humans do to the earth. After we finished the game, Luis Gerardo told us to look at the floor. When we did so, there was nothing but destruction. All the resources that we had at the beginning were all gone and there were just some fragments of what was there before. I think that this is very similar to what is happening today to the earth. Every day, there are more humans, more pollution and fewer resources in the earth.