Blog Entry #3

Hot, Flat, and Crowded was such an interesting read, I think my favorite chapter out of all of chapters two, three, four, and five was definitely chapter five. Especially the section called “Let us Pray”, what I found most astonishing about this section was that in Australia there was a drought called the “Big Dry” that began roughly in 2000 and ended near 2007. When I read this section, I found this completely shocking because children who were six and seven years old had never remembered playing in the rain before. I cannot imagine being at that age and never seeing rain in my life so far. The sad thing about that whole situation is that these incidents such as the ‘Big Drought” can happen at anytime and anywhere because of drastic climate changes.

            Another interesting part in this book was in chapter three called Our Carbon Copies (Or, Too Many Americans) and an interesting concept of this chapter was called cradle to cradle. A way to think about natural resources and how to take care of our environment was in a book called Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. I like that this concept was trying to show that the environment can get better if we do something about these problems instead of going straight to another concept called cradle to grave. We just need to realize that it is not too late to make a change for our environment.

            Hot, Flat, and Crowded was really an eye opener on how much we have done to this fragile planet but it also gave us an insight on what we need to start right now and this minute to turn this situation around. As I got to the last sentence of the chapters that I read, this quote really stood out to me, it said “every day you look in the mirror now, you’re seeing an endangered species.” It is already enough that the river dolphin is extinct and that many other humans are making other animals extinct. If we think about all of these problems, we are basically doing the same thing and making ourselves extinct because we are ruining our environment and not making it a sustainable environment that we can live in. So everyday now that I am living on this planet, I need to find a way to make it sustainable.