Man the Destroyer

     Mankind has come far in the past 10,000 years. From our humble beginnings as hunter and gatherers to our ever growing magnificent cities and civilization. From fending off all of natures dangers to  being called the “destroyer of worlds.”  We have accomplished this with the combination of unprecedented technology  advancements and our undesirable need to want to grow, expand, and conquer.
    With this growth we are approaching a point where we require and want more then what the Earth has to offer. Humans are causing homeless, when we take unclaimed land for ourselves to call home. Humans are causing starvation, when we take more then what the oceans can replenish to feed our growing population. On this Earth there are over 1.5 million species with an average of 10,000 new species being discovered every year. In contrast an estimated 20,000 species go extinct every year, this is genocide. If humans continue of this current path its only of matter of time before Homo sapiens brings about the destruction of there own species.
    The future is uncertain but there are many ideas of what might become of us. In the publication, Island civilization: a vision for human occupancy of EARTH In the Fourth Millennium, Roderick Frazier Nash  touches upon four different scenarios in the year 3000.  A wasteland scenario pictures an Earth (after possible nuclear war and years of neglect) trashed, poisoned, and slowly dying. His second scenario, the garden scenario, humans control everything. There is no more wilderness or biodiversity, if something exist it’s because we need it for our own survival. Where man has conquered the wilderness.  As for a future where humans go back to their roots of hunting and gathering, leaving all technology behind is the future primitive scenario. Then there is Island Civilization.
    Nash goes into great detail about Island Civilization. A world where the population would drop to 1.5 billion; all living in around 500 self sustaining city-state like habitats scattered across the Earth. This would be possible thanks to technological advancement and the imagination of engineers. The rest of the Earth would be left to alone. There would be minimal interaction between humans and nature. Animals could roam free without have to interact with man made object such as roads, fences, poles, building, or guns. Forest would prop up again with out the fear a human axe. The Earth would go back to its natural roots letting evolution and natural selection take its course, as it should be.
    Nash’s vision might be called a Utopia.  A world without wars or conflicts with a managed population in a controlled environment. The most favorable scenarios out of the four. The only issue is getting there. Even with a thousand years,getting our population cut down to a  ⅕ of its current size would be quite the challenge. Countries would have to adopt polices similar to China’s  One-Child policy. Every generation one child would replace his two parents, leading to a negative population growth. With this would come other challenges: tensions would raise between nation, economies would crash, and cities would be left abandoned. All that would be left behind would crumble. Nature with time would take back the abandon cities, roads, buildings, dams and transformed them into pastures, fields, forest, and flowing rivers. While mankind would go out on its own to reach its ultimate goal of Island Civilization. But for man to start anew, it has to leave everything be hide and first destroy itself.