I found this week’s topic vastly interesting. One thing that I contributed to the conversation was the topic of biodiversity loss. While I thought a lot of topics in the movie were of extreme importance, for some reason, I chose biodiversity loss. I think everybody contributes to biodiversity loss in some way. I am not calling anybody out for it simply because, as humans, we have to do things to survive on this planet. Unfortunately, our worlds ecosystems are at the brunt of it. Animals, plants, and biological life serve an important role on the planet. When we, as humans, interrupt the natural flow, the planet suffers in more ways than we can even imagine. I understand that animals and plants work together to create an ecosystem and preform natural selection. However, do we as humans truly understand the consequences? One of my peers mentioned that our planet survived an entire ice age and is still alive. I thought this was an extremely interesting point as it really added to the topic of the power’s ecosystem. How is it that ecosystems can survive natural causes, yet they fall to our harmful doing? This raises interesting points about evolution as well. I wonder if it is truly our doing or if it is simply unexplainable natural causes. We touched on this a little bit about how there are many natural causes such as forest fires, that will happen regardless of our living or not. Just something to consider. 

There were a lot of things that stuck with me this week, but one thing that I was left thinking about was the collapse of Easter Island and this idea of collapse. I feel like we are more aware of our damaging effects, specifically in the scientific community, but is there still a lot that we are missing? Is our collapse coming sooner than we think? Easter Island collapsed largely although not entirely, due to the fact that they were extremely unaware of their harmful ways of life. Additionally, it would be nearly impossible to tell people to stop living a certain way when that is all they know. These same ideas got me thinking about our world. I cannot say whether or not we are aware of the extent our affects, nor is it a question with a simple answer, but I can say that we are living in ways that harm the planet. It is our way of life, we cannot simply stop living a certain way after it is all we have known. For some of us, it is a spiritual or religious reason and, just like the islanders, we do want to give up certain things if it is a part of our belief system. Again, this just got me thinking about our own collapse and the predictability of it. I hope we do not collapse as the islanders, but there are many parallels that I could see it. I was also left thinking about deforestation. I was thinking about the similarities and differences between Easter Island and our world today. One thing that stood out to me was the fact that our world and our country is so much bigger than the island. Does size of land mass have anything to do with our motives? These are all just ideas that left me reflecting this week.