The Destruction Of Societies In The Lorax, By Jared Diamond

Before learning a little more about the destruction of past societies, I felt that I had a good grasp of the history of not only our country, but general knowledge about the most important events that took place in the shaping of our society. Growing up as a female in the United States, I find myself coming to the devastating conclusion that the information presented to me about the world has some sort of bias because we are so close minded of the devastation that has happened, or still happening outside the United States. We tend to conform to the social norms that are presented to us throughout our lives. Here in the United States, we have a bad tendency to only worry about the problems on our soil. We tend to think nothing bad could ever
“How could a society that was once so mighty end up collapsing? What were the facts of its individual citizens?”(Diamond 3). I think it is very interesting to see the correlations Diamond presents in his five factors, and real societies destruction. While learning the correlation between the factors and a scenario, I learned a lot from the animated movie, The Lorax. A classmate, Brandon Melchert, describes the plot of the movie as “a story of a society that sees giant economic growth, and then complete collapse. Throughout the story, a profitable business is created using natural resources that are eventually being harvested faster than they can grow back. Eventually, the resources are completely depleted, the environment is polluted and all life flees the area”. Just reading the description provided, it sounds a lot like a scenario that could eventually happen, even in today's society. It amazes me that a childhood movie could depict a real life problem that we still face today. The vastly growing population and depletion of our resources are still happening today. Hardin believes we have two options, either “we can maximize the number of human beings living at the lowest possible level of comfort, or we can try to optimize the quality of life for a much smaller population”(Hardin 195). This is tough to swallow because it is easier to push aside the problems, rather
Reason being, it’s the modern age. Now we learned past mistakes from the people before us and continue to try to change them thanks to the information in the forms of writings, videos, and pictures that we are able to look back on for reference”. This really got me thinking about our mind set of the collapse of societies past. Before this lesson, I would have agreed and said that America could not fall apart because we have advanced so much over the past centuries. With that said, I do not believe that we have truly learned from all of our mistakes. Even though we have advanced, we are dealing with some of the same issues at a different rate. We still are depleting our resources at a fast rate. We only have one planet Earth to harvest from. Ignorance is bliss is a saying that I feel most Americans live by when it comes to issues that are not present, and or in our spectrum of understanding. We are not immune to the five factors that Diamond has established. I do not feel that our society will collapse as fast as some, but I do believe that the possibility of our society collapsing is real. If we are ignorant to the contributing factors, we will continue in the slow downfall. We have learned a lot over the past centuries, but we should