(oh the) HUMANITY

Have you ever thought about how our society actually operates?  I mean when I just got my first paycheck for being a grad student, I immediately went and put the money in someone else's hands.  There are things set up, like banks and credit unions that are just people who handle money.  Why did I go give them my money?  Somehow western society agreed upon this as the best way to deal with having money in our lives after we moved away from direct barter and reciprocity.  They have the best business model ever, they  just wait for me to come bring them money for free and then they keep my money.  It is seemingly a big ponzi scheme, but we have all agreed that it isn't as a society. 

I also just had lunch with James Syvitski today where the topic was the Anthropocene which is the conjectured new epoch in geology in which humans became major agents in the shaping of the earth's surface.  The point being that humans greatly affect the landscape today, like this uranium mine in Canada:

Maybe we should stop worrying about all trying to become extremely wealthy and share some wealth.  It is money that is driving almost all environmental damage on Earth today.  Poor countries would not have large mining, logging or factory operations if two things happened; One if we just gave them money, they wouldn't need to take easy money by raping the wilderness; two, we could also act as an economic force and not demand and incentivize poorer countries to do activities that in turn hurt the natural landscape.  There seems to be a general issue where in theory the educated westerners want to not hurt the earth but still demand all these goods and services that pollute and remove biodiversity.  I think one problem is that people would do something if there was a quick easy answer but there is none offered right now.  
I recommend that we become more of a global populace and really say to hell with differences in cultural history and curses to political borders, and may Thor smite down the person who tries to power grab in a time when we try to work together as a global populace.  This needs to happen because pollution is not good, and disease is not good, and neither of them need to exist at the scale they do currently.  We actually can work together to fix them if becoming rich was not underlying every individual country's motives (like I mentioned first).  I remember an arabic saying from Jordan that I heard from a random taxi driver that goes something like 'Never look to your neighbors bowl to compare to see if they have more food than you, only look to their bowl to make sure it is full.'  I think we should really take this to heart because I don't think everyone actually needs a GPS and a microwave and two laptops and an outdoor television and water bottled from across the planet to be shipped 6,000 miles to your town.