Wants In The Galbraithan

Throughout history there have been many examples of tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is when people in a certain area over exploit a common resource which leads toa higher problem. Tragedy of the commons normally happens when people get greedy and get more than they really need. For example, if one farmer is public grazing area were to add a cow over the limit the field can sustain it won’t do much damage but if the other farmers also add another cow to the field it could end up harming it to the point where it is no longer usable.This comes to show that if even a single person becomes greedy it could ruin so many things for other people. Ideas will be pulled out from Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” to be used in this essay.

Money— sweeter than honey but oh so destructive. It facilitates a man’s life, while a lack of it imprisons him in the streets of penury. It raises his social status, while an absence of it leaves him unnoticed. It gives him an aura of superiority and importance among others, while a deficiency of it makes him worthless in society’s eyes. Considering these two roads, most do not take more than a second to decide to chase riches.

In a fascinating statement, Stenger says, engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domestication ourselves” (112). By controlling our natural environment, we control ourselves, and essentially we would become domesticator and the animal. Stenger is not alone in his belief that we become something different when to take away the wilderness, Annie Leonard comes to similar conclusion, even though she does not state it in the same way Stenger does. In her video “The Story of Stuff” Leonard outlines how humans have created a culture of consumerism. We want stuff, we need stuff, and stuff is our life. The only thing that makes life worthwhile, is acquiring stuff because it gives us status (Leonard). However, like Stegner says, this was of life that promotes the world we create over the wilderness, even at the cost of the wilderness does not make us happy. Leonard points out that our national happiness started declining right at the point when our society started becoming driven by consumerism. Destroying the environment, forgetting about the environment to focus on ourselves as the biggest and most important thing in the world

Famed author, Mark Twain, asserts in this excerpt of “The Lowest Animal” that as a result of man’s greed and incessant need for more, it makes man less than animals, who have no such insatiable hunger for all things in excess. Many would disagree arguing in the contrary to Twain. Although some people, Mark Twain for one, believe that man’s thirst for more is what degrades us, the reality is that it is what builds up the species as a whole and is what has gotten us to our current elevated standing with advancements in medicine, technology, and society.

Jared Diamond, in his article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human race”, explains that the worst mistake that humans made was the decision to change from a hunter gatherer society into an agriculture society. Jared Diamond gives evidence of how switching from an agricultural society was a bad mistake. Many believe that adopting an agricultural society and leaving the hunter gatherer society was the way to a more qualitative and sustainable lifestyle. As Diamond says, it is true that because this society was adopted and evolved because we have longer lifespans and live better now than how people lived back in the old days. But Diamond`s claim that the hunter gatherer society gave humans more benefits individually than what the agricultural society had to offer is agreeable.

Diamond explains that our worst mistake was the transition from hunter-gathers to farmers. Diamond believes that humans were better off chasing our food rather than planting it due to the consequences that followed after such a dramatic change of life. His reasoning expands further out than one might think of about this subject. He talks about the social changes that were created when agriculture began. Diamond spews empowering points that leave a reader pondering if he is correct. People are only sure of how the world is now but the possibilities are endless on what our world could have been if agriculture had not begun.

The transition from the traditional hunter gatherer societies, in to an agriculture based living system, has allowed humans to increase their population size, putting strains on the Earth’s environment. Agriculture has also brought along with it a decrease in women’s roles in the community, while also bringing about a class system where the wealthy rule, and were the weak and poor obey. As humans began to domesticate more plants and animals, they settled in permanent areas. The Change from hunter gatherer benefited few, but had dire consequences for the earth and groups with in it. One such consequence was the population increase, which has lead to major issues throughout history, and one that has ties to current global issues.

From the early prehistoric society until now, we often heard the word “adaptation”, which means the process of changing something or changing our behavior to deal with new situations. The ways people adjust their natural environment varies according to time, place, and tribe. Foraging is common way of adaptation that people uses for most of human history; however because of the population pressure, some people adopt agriculture to fulfill their need. This essay, will discuss the positive and negative aspects of life in hunting and gathering societies compared to the agricultural societies based on Martin Harris’ article “Murders in Eden” and Jared Diamond’s article “The Worst Mistake in the History of Human Race.”

The relationship between people and their environment in A Land Remembered is one where the profit from land exploitation is naturally corrupting and exponentially increases the exploiters lust for larger profit, leading to the exploiter planning larger scale endeavors in the future. The author, Patrick D. Smith (1984), suggests the idea that communities naturally grow in a hedonic cycle to crave more resources to fuel loftier endeavors that require even more resources from the environment, an idea that is also discussed by Aldo Leopold in the Land Ethic as wholly negative, and that is also part of my world view that is rather more optimistic.

Greed is a common flaw in all human beings, coaxing individuals to pour in all their effort without ever being satisfied. The ultimate goal for greed is generally achieving affluence. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s insightful novel, The Great Gatsby, wealth is portrayed as the key factor in determining whether one is successful or not. Most people value prosperity over morals and ethics during the heat of pursuing their own ambitions; yet all unscrupulous behaviors do not escape God’s eyes. By utilizing eye motif, repetitions of sight words, and tone changes, F. Scott Fitzgerald justifies that avarice will always end in vain and amoral decisions will always end in regrets.

Lastly this text says, “Early humans, who lived by hunting or gathering, didn’t always have enough food” (82). This quote shows the reader that humans are becoming less active

The book, Affluenza; All-Consuming Epidemic, De Graaf, Wann, and Naylor refer to comsumerism as a disease, affluenza. Affluenza, meaning placing a high value on obtaining material things in order to help us to feel more affluent, is contagious, which, in turn, has caused negative consequences with our health, families, communities and the environment. This book discusses the symptoms, diagnoses, and cure for the disease known as

First, I would like to discuss the strategy of hunting and gathering, the sole strategy until twelve thousand years ago. Hunting and gathering is a form of subsistence dependent upon wild plants and animals for the majority of the calories of the diet. While its name underscores the importance of hunting in this lifestyle, this is misleading as the majority of caloric needs in societies practicing this strategy are met by gathering wild edible plants and berries.

The understanding of the root of material advancement has become a human quest for the key to the secret of wealth and prosperity. Looking for an answer, Jared Diamond searched human histories over the last 13,000 years from the end of the last Ice Age to the twenty-first century. When visiting Papua New Guinea island, he was fascinated by his friend Yali’s question: “why is that you white man developed so much cargo, and we New Guineans have so little?” The question turned out to be “far bigger and complex than it first appeared, it is really about roots of global inequality”. Unlike many who tend to believe that a well-developed society is based on genetics and intelligence, Diamond argues a connection between physical surroundings

However, those people with the means are reluctant to sacrifice an excessive amount that they would descend in status (Mill 89). Those who are of lower faculties #, and thus have less enjoyment, are more easily satisfied (Mill 90). Compared to their inferiors, people of higher classes continue to seek happiness and are never truly satisfied. Mill links this continuous search with dignity (Mill 90). Due to the sense of dignity, “someone will not feel envious of those who bear imperfections because he does not understand the benefits of those limitations” # (Mill 91). In explaining this concept, Mill compares a human being dissatisfied to a pig satisfied and Socrates dissatisfied to a fool satisfied. The pig and fool reason that they are well-off, but the human being and Socrates know they are superior because they are further educated (Mill 91).