Blog 1 – Human destructive nature

To begin with, sustainability and nature protection are the most interesting, touching and motivating topics of the Better Lives unit for me. I am eager to deepen my understanding about the ways in which fashion industry needs to change in order to reduce its disastrous pollution impacts on earth. Although I found the first two weeks of Unit a bit vague, I did encounter new thoughts and ideas which were intriguing enough to diffuse into my own ways of thinking. In this blog my goal is to discuss the fundamental parts which have examined the collision between Fashion industry and increasing role of eco-friendly attitudes.

One of the most important lectures for me was about Nature lead by Kate Fletcher. She was talking about the huge expansion of human activities and their effects on earth. To summarize her talk I will pick out the most shocking facts that makes me feel bad about the human race and encourage me for change. It is obvious that people have done the most harm to our planet compared to other living beings. And Fashion, in fact, is the world’s most polluting industry at the moment. Over the last fifty years there was a decline of more than 50% of worlds species. Earth change is tied with one’s impact and superficial view about connection between ecological systems, nature and daily life. However, the modern world is not the first one to face destructive consequences of its actions. Kate Fletcher gave us an insight of the Easter Island and a theory of its famous immense sculptures covering the land. Scientists have many hypotheses depicting why the ancient communities of the Island would make such great numbers of these gigantic monuments and why they did not survive. One of the theories suggest that there lived several families. Each of them would carve huge sculptures out of stone as part of a ritual. The leaders of each group started competing and felt eager to create more sculptures than other families. Thus more and more trees were cut down for carrying the stones for sculpture making. The elite of the island was so competitive and so unrealistic about the consequences, that finally all the trees were cut down. The earth which at first was so rich and good for growing goods suddenly became dry and poor. Animals lost their habitats and got extinct. People started to die out of starvation and the population radically declined. There are three key reasons for this catastrophe: a failure to anticipate consequences, an inability to see behind the “creeping normalcy” of the status quo and a disproportionate power of detached elites. Ironically, these points are the same catalysts for inappropriate human behaviour now as they were hundreds, even thousands of years ago. We are no better nor smarter than the Easter island people.

Thus I say let’s not go “with the flow”. I say let’s read and learn more, let’s be intelligent and compassionate enough to take action. This means rebellion from what is the norm of consumerism. Let’s stop consuming the world, because we will not be able to buy a second nature.