CH.20

As I was reading Chapter 20, I found it interesting to read about "Economies of Wage Labor; Working for Europeans". People of low class had to work for the Eurpeans because they were in need of money to help there families survive. Although sometimes it wasn't just to help the families but because they were told so by the authorities. What really caught my attention was to read about how most Africans got paid very little for doing alot of work. It got me thinking that Africans were always looked at as something less than "low class". My grandma was talking to me about how in her country Guatemala people were always judged based on there skin color. The darker the person was the less respect there was for them. So it wasn't just in Europe that Africans were paid very little for working alot, it happend all over the world. Because these people really needed the money they never said no.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

        As I was reading this article I found myself wanting to keep reading more because the topics were relevant to what we are living in our world today. It caught my attention reading the section about chemical industry on page 491 towards the bottom. It spoke on how chemicals that are used affect us and our offsprings. We might not think that chemicals harm us because we are not exposed to them on a daily basis but the truth is that it does. In this article it clearly says that these chemicals are synthesized and released by humans in larger quantities than the natural ones. It it crazy to hear this but it's very true when you start thinking about all the people in our world and how many people are near toxic chemicals that are very harmful. It is sad to know that because of the damage these chemicals cause, there is birht defects, mental retartdation, and or damage to our immune/reproductive system. Innocent children born with defects and it is not even their fault, it just breaks my heart to hear that because our society should work of the control of the chemicals being exposed to where it is not suppose to.

        Another topic that was interesting and I immediately thought, "this is relevant to what we are living and to our future lives". Human Poplulation. It is said that human population is rapidly growing and it is causing many issues such as water issues. In a previous article I read about water it was said that each human needs at least 2Liters of water per day. Well, today we still have it but soon we won't and the worse part of all is that it will be available but to those who have the money to afford it. What about our third world countries? Some are very poor and don't even have enough money to feed their families and so they get sick and die. "Collapse" article says that our world population will take a long time before it stabilizes and maintains. Although there are many controversies about how we should handle this situation, I would say that the best way to do so is by having less babies. Especially those in the third world countries, they should know that it is expensive to raise a child so they should take care and be cautious about producing more babies. The article points out that yes parents will die and evetually the population will be stablized but that won't happen for many more years. So as long as the offsprings don't decide to have more than two kids than everything should work out. But the only problem is that in today's society we have a lot of youn teenagers bring babies into this world while they are still babies themselves. So our society chooses the "fail" or "succeed".