Connecting the Courses

I have been aware for a while about the fact that everything is connected, but for the last month I’ve really gotten the chance to examine this idea. Learning about all these different issues and how they relate to each other has added a lot to my image of the world. Also thinking about the topics of nature, food and sustainability, human rights issues, peace, and violence in terms of the iceberg model has helped me to analyze these issues in more depth. What I’ve come to believe is that all the issues that we have been looking at and discussing are the result of widespread mindset. This worldview and belief is that we are separate or distinct from each other, and from our environment. This kind of assumption is obviously pretty inaccurate, and it’s hard to believe that if asked, anyone would say that’s what they think. Maybe it’s because I’ve already internalized this idea of interconnection. Either way the actions that result from this mindset imply that it is prevalent in our culture. This assumption that we are separate from each other and our environment has some really serious consequences. I’m pretty sure that any of the large scale problems we are facing today and most of the smaller scale ones can be traced back to this assumption. If they can’t than they can at least traced back to a lack of consideration, or disregard of our interconnectedness. For example with the problem of feeding everybody in the world, it’s overpopulation that makes it such a dilemma. The things that made overpopulation possible were mostly agricultural innovations, or ‘conventional farming” which consists of oil dependant machinery, synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and GMO’s. The use of these “achievements” didn’t take into consideration any implications of the imbalances in nature that they would cause, the fact that they are unsustainable, or the question of how food production would be able to keep up with the quickly growing population. This lack of consideration was because of the assumption that we wouldn’t be affected by the damage inflicted on our environment, or the consequences of producing that much food. That’s just one example but I believe that any of the issues we’ve looked at can be linked somehow to this disregard of the interconnectedness of everything