Throughout this term we have read many short stories and talked about how over time our world is going to run out of resources to support everyone. That there will be changes needed to be made whether that is changing our main source of energy from oil to water or other alternatives. What really has been sticking out to me is the idea of how regulations could potentially become tighter when it comes to how many children a women can have. Child regulation is already put into place in areas around the world that is condensed and over crowding, but is it necessarily a morally correct restriction? In “The Siphoners”, we see the elderly group being affected and targeted so that there are less people to have to support. It is clearly wrong to kill another human being based on how old they are, so is it okay to limit a woman from having a family because as a world we have encouraged global warming?
Now there are many perspectives to this that could be argued and I think the idea of having restrictions does help in efforts to save resources, but in my opinion, shouldn’t we be doing our best right now to change our ways so that we do not have to resort to restricting individuals rights?
It is mind boggling how if we were to inform individuals around the world who are unaware of global warming and climate change and the affects it will have on us in the middle of our life time and the start to our children’s that there will be an immense amount of positive change. So my main question is how do we make people more aware of global warming so that we do not have to risk the chance of limiting woman’s chances of having a big family? Do we use social media or writing books or even podcasts?
There are many online steps being taken that are reaching out through Twitter, Facebook, and many other websites that are trying to gain as many followers as possible. I think that it is brilliant to reach out and create awareness through social media because our world revolves around it. According to Debate: How Can Social Media Save The Planet, “It seems this December’s COP15 meeting in Copenhagen has created an impressive surge of activism, especially through social media.” Relating back to child regulation and so on, if we as a world really put in the effort to take care of our planet we could avoid putting individuals rights in danger.
Brooke — your post raises some really intriguing questions about climate change, the future, and regulations. What’s interesting is that to mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions so that climate change doesn’t get out of hand, we need some sort of regulatory mechanisms (for instance, regulations on how much CO2 emissions industries and corporations can emit). This is something that many conservative politicians really dislike, the idea that we need to regulate the economy a bit more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/climate-change-conservatives_n_6124028.html
However, the irony perhaps is that if we don’t choose to regulate now, we might have to regulate (and restrict) more in the future out of necessity. And those regulations in the future might be — as you suggest — a lot more drastic and a lot more detrimental to individuals. So how do we get people to see this irony and realize that we might need to change our lives and have more regulation on corporations now as a way to avoid worse regulation in the future? Your mention of social media is really interesting in this regard. I wonder whether it would be possible to leverage the power of social media and create a social media work of climate change fiction (like a story written on Twitter, or Instagram) that’s really powerful and reaches many, many people.
Thanks for sharing this interesting post!
I am extremely intrigued by your post because I have never dwelled too much on this sort of regulation. I completely agree that as many individuals as possible who are aware of climate change, should be doing whatever they can to prevent such an issue from arising in the future. I like your suggestions of how we can reach out via social media sites and believe that would be very successful.
I think one thing that you pointed out well is that if we don’t act now about the changing climate, is that then other things may need to be regulated. This gets to be a touchy subject when it comes to what would make the most sense to regulate. The easiest solution to that problem is to fix the underlining problem before it reaches to that point.
It’s very scary to think that one day in the future the Earth may over populate and either restrictions on how many kids a person can have will be made or our resources will run out altogether. Social media would be an excellent way to inform younger generations of climate change since these younger generations will probably be affected the most. Plus, I’m sure many people would riot if the government decided the world needed to constantly be regulated for size purposes.
Your post brings up a very interesting point about a future issue that probably will arise from climate change. Regulations do have their purposes, but sometimes too much regulation can cause a problem of it’s own, even though it was meant to address a previous issue.
This is a very interesting post. I do agree with you that we should inform the people in the world today about global warming and how it can negatively affect our future. Social media would be a good way to do this because everyone is on it however, it is harder to inform people then it seems like.
I found this post interesting and creative. I agree that if there is not a dramatic change now, the future generations will have to deal with these severe issues head on. I do believe that regulations have their specific purposes, but sometimes they can do more harm then help.