The Not So Shocking End To Suburbia

After watching The End of Suburbia I was shocked. It opened my eyes to the fact that the lives we lead will soon be very very different. I entitled my blog The Not So Shocking End To Suburbia for two reasons. The first being that after reflecting a bit i realized that the news delivered in the movie should not be so shocking. We have been talking about recycling and fossil fuels since we were in elementary school and it has be going on long before that. The second reason is because our government is fully aware of what is going on and what is projected to happen yet still they do not properly inform the public. I feel they should be taking more action than they currently are. Gaylord Nelson the founder of earth day felt the same way. Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, proposed a national protest in 1970 "to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda. " "It was a gamble,but it worked." he said. Earth day and that first protest lead to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and to the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts. Since the 70s there have been more agencies and acts passed although they have proven to not be enough. We saw this in The End of Suburbia. The suburbs grew quickly in the early 1900s and the population and growth of the suburbs has not stopped over a hundred years later. In my history class with Professor Wittern-Keller we learned about the US in the 1900s. The rapid immigration to the country lead to and insane growth in cities and than the suburbs and we did not have a strong enough government to deal with the growth at the time. There was hardly any government regulation in those days and I feel that our current situation definitely has contributing factors from this period of time and everything onward in history. During our class discussion it became clear that the different things we are reading and watching are all very interconnected. The class video we watched entitled Stuff addresses consumerism and displays the amount of waste and excess things we have. It also explained the cycle of how things are made and all the flaws in the process. Humans make and consume entirely too much stuff. The creation and consumption of all of this stuff uses our finite supply of fossil fuels. The processes we use for all of this pollutes the earth. The growing number of people on the planet who consume and pollute is stressing the planets resources and all of these things will ultimately put end to "suburbia" and life as we know it. Reading for class and watching these films has opened my eyes to this situation that i along with many others have been ignoring. Being in this class for only two weeks makes me want to get up and do something about it while will still can. I feel like if other people were are informed as we are going to be by the end of the semester they would be willing to do something about it and more things would get done.

http://www.earthday.net/node/77

The End of Suburbia

Stuff