Read 'n' Seed 3: Second quarter of "The Last Hour of Ancient Sunlight"

The second quarter of "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" was much different than the first.  I read 7 chapters from pages 91 to 191.

The first part of the book was more about what's going on in our world with our environment.  It talks about the oil crisis, and deforestation, and climate change.  In the second quarter of the book the author is more focused on how we got to this point in the history of the world.  It's a lot of history involving more westernized cultures swooping in and taking over native cultures (such as the Inca's, and Native Americans).  The other main topic is younger cultures verses older cultures.  Again, that would be more like westernized cultures that seek to instate dominance over other cultures.  Pretty much these "younger cultures" gain by consuming the lives' of others.  They feel that they have a right to everything and that humans are superior to all other creatures and that everything on our planet was placed here to serve humans.  Older cultures on the other hand are the cultures that believe we are a part of the world, not rulers of the world, and that we are supposed to cooperate and live in peace with the rest of creation.

 I learned a lot of history in these chapters.  I learned quite a bit about Christopher Columbus.  He was a rapist, a murderer, and a thief who took advantage of primitive cultures by enslaving them and stealing their wealth.  There are so many misconceptions about Christopher Columbus and the fact that we give him credit for discovering American, teach this in schools, and have a day named after him is a bunch of bologna (in my opinion).  This is kind of a side tangent and has little to do with the environment, but it was in my book, and it was shocking and eye-opening, so I wanted to include it.

More relevant to this class I learned a number of things.  I learned that our population growth is out of control.  Here is a little scale of population growth from the book:
In 1960 there were 3,038,930,391 humans on earth.  That year the earth saw the addition of 40,622,370.
1961 - +56,007,855
1962 - +69,393,370
1963 - +70,987,231
If this many more people are born each year than die we are adding to our population dramatically.  This was about 50 years ago. In about 40 years we had doubled earth's population.  Each person who is born requires a certain amount of resources - 3 meals a day, a couple gallons of water, a certain ration of oil.  These are resources that won't last forever.

The implications of what I learned is basically that we don't really think about ourselves competing for resources in our day to day life, but we are.  We are competing everyday with the 6.6 billion other people who share this planet.  Our resources are far more scarce than we could imagine.  We are running out of oil, we are running out of forests, we are draining our aquifers.  We always think of America as the land of plenty and it is in comparison to many other places...but for how long?  We have a scary future ahead of us if we don't start getting realistic with our quickly disintegrating resources.