yikes

Coming to age at the end of nature, these words have been on my mind since the day the book was given as a reading assignment in class. It has made me think hard and with every thought I get carried away to another thought. In all honestly, these words still continue to scramble my mind right now and it has been this entire weekend. For example, on Sunday I went on a little hike with a few friends and instead of this guy walking, talking, and listening to the beautiful sounds of the wind through the trees and the ocean waves smashing the rocks as each set came in, this guy had his headphones on. Who know what he was listen to but all I kept thinking was about those words “coming of age at the end of nature.”  In my thoughts, I felt as if the worlds pollution has drowned him and trapped him under the time that we are going through. A time of ecological degradation, climatic changes, social and political structures. This is how I view are political leaders today, they just simply insert a set of headphones when it comes to the environment.

As for me, these words keep brining me back to the idea that a coming of age… is a coming of age as an individual to help reform this time in history. In my Environmental Sociology class, we had a reading assignment from Sing C. Chew. It was entitled Globalisation, Ecological Crisis, and Dark Ages. In this reading Chew poses a question if we a going through another Dark Age area as we have gone in the past. Dark ages are a long period of time where the mass exploration of natural recourses are used, socio-economic and political downturns come for those issues. During this time, you see the collapse of human communities and civilizations.  Which I do believe that we are going through another Dark Age. Here in the United States, we aren’t seeing the collapse of human communities as those in Yemen, Libya, etc.… experiencing a water scarcity where wars are arrived from not having water. Chew does say that these dark ages are a time of learning and drastic transformations and this is what we are doing here as ENST students. We are a part of this transformation, in hopes that we don’t get ourselves deeper into this “Dark Age.” Help our future so they no longer drown in this ecological crisis and take those headphones out and enjoy the beauty of the natural world.