After seeing all the interesting posters that were presented at the poster session I could not help but ask myself if climate change would cause an increase in terrorism. This question may sound a bit extreme because how in the world could a global increase in temperature cause people to want to hurt each other? Well, the answer to this question is not as hard to wrap one’s head around. When the world becomes hotter, farmers around the world will find it harder to grow and harvest their crops because of droughts caused by global warming. This will cause the farmers to migrate towards the cities in their countries and use up resources that are already scarce. With all these people in one place there will be a high demand for jobs, but there will not be enough jobs for everyone, which results in high unemployment numbers and lots of unhappy and desperate people. As time moves on, the poor and desperate will look towards any path that will change their world for the better, even if that means hurting others. This effect of using desperate people to accomplish one’s political agendas is what saw Hitler rise to power.
It is interesting to see such a phenomena take place because of our treatment of nature. In another poster I saw a student who looked at examples of human attempts to control nature and the unintended consequences that came about because of those attempts. One example of an unintended consequence of humans trying to tame nature was the Plague. Back in the mid-1300’s the Catholic church convinced Europe that the cause for this disease could be linked to cats and dogs. This claim by the Catholic Church resulted in the massacre of lots of cats and dogs. Obviously this did not solve the problem because the disease was in the fleas that were on the rats. With no cats or dogs to hunt down the rats, the rats with fleas were flee to breed and spread the Plague. This was just one example of the unexpected consequences of trying to control nature.
There were a lot of other examples that were shown on this poster and every single one one those examples further proved how little we as humans understand how the world works. Looking back at the class, this was the overall theme. We kept looking at different areas in which we seemed to have mastered or coexisted with nature, but there always seems to be something that is not working properly with it, like how people use plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons. Sure, they may look beautiful, but on the inside they are insecure and looking for something to complete them. So, sure humans may have made a way of changing our outwards appearance, but it cannot fix the broken soul that some possess because it’s a force of nature that is longing to have its day and win the fight against the idea that man’s way is the best way.