Your team is giving the graduation speech/presentation at the Honors College ceremony. Your audience is full of your fellow students and their parents. This combined audience is largely composed of individuals with a LINEAR philosophy. Under this philosophy, life is a series of gradual evolutionary steps that proceed in an orderly wayand one by one leads to a better world as well as continued success. Afterall, hasn't this sequence already happened for most of the individuals in the audience? Isn't this what survival of the fittest actual means?

Yet this course has been about the role of RANDOM events (natural hazards) as having a major impact on cultural evolution. This is NOT a linear process and therefore is generally discounted as being historically important or becoming important in the future. Afterall, who wants this linear view of gradual steps toward a better life to be suppplanted by this view that randomness matters?

Furthermoe, as we have discussed in this class in the context of Mass Extictions, we are very likely in the middle of the sixth extinction event caused by our global tampering with the natural pathways in the Earth system. As suggested by EO Wilson in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of the Earth , we have, by now, successively reshaped the manner in which the Earth behaves.

This is quite an achievement and indeed is the necessary outcome of the linear approach. All in the name of progress has now put us on a pathway of extinction 1/2 of the known higher order species on the planet by the year 2100. We have thus operationally become GOD.

Finally, ancient cultures (and maybe modern ones), when experiencing a random natural hazard, should be instantly reminded that we don't actually control nature. Such events should instill a better sense of reverence towards nature but to date that has not happened. Possible such reverence may be in conflict with us becoming GOD.

Your TEAM task in this assignment consists of the following elements:

1. Using some examples from this class, demonstrate the way in which random events may have had a large scale influence on various cultures and link that to the current global climate change experiment.
   
   
2. Convince your audience that just because have no reverence for nature, that does not give us license to operationally become GOD. Suggest mitigation steps that avoid this outcome.
   
   
3. Global climate change is a direct consequence of ever increasing consumption. Pick two of the quotes below and integrate their themes into your overall presentation.
   
   
4. The primary subversive purpose of your presentation is to get your audience to better understand a) what a moral imperative actually is, and b) the necessity of moral decision making in a global consumer world.
   
   

Your presentation can be anything you want - a skit, a video, what ever you like. It is extremely unlikely that reading factoids to your audience will be effective. This will not meet the requirements above and not even come close to illuminating point 4. You need to be direct, bold and subversive as if point 4 was actually important!

Below are 5 quotes related to Consumerism: I chose them because they reflect the kind of apparently lunatic ravings that I have been making in this class regarding our facile sacrificing of the sacred for the sake of the expedient. You are to incorporate the concepts expressed in your chosen two of these quotes into your presentations (Element 3 above).

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”

“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”

“This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products”

“We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us...And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if we don't want a job and are happy to get by we are labeled irresponsible, non-contributing leeches on society. But if we hire a fleet of bulldozers, tear up half the countryside and build some monstrous factory, casino or mall, we are called entrepreneurs, job-creators, stalwarts of the community. Maybe we should all be shut away on some planet for the insane. Then again, maybe that is where we are.”

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis”