Poverty + Famine = Biggest threats to civilization

While on my most recent trip, our guide who had a lot of wisdom, an anthropolgist said to us, that poverty is the biggest threat to democracy. When there is poverty, people will do anything including looting, killing, injuring for money to buy food.

In Guatemala City, the largest city in Central America, if a person has lost their job, the city will "hire" them to clean the streets. Rather than pay them, they provide them food. The interesting thing about Guatemala is that people own their houses because they build them by themselves. They buy the raw materials and put them together, so at least no one has to worry about foreclosure and the bank taking their houses.

But, food, nutrition, they are so important to a person's overall wellbeing. That is why paying the people food and eventually moving them into paying positions is such a wonderful idea. The U.S. certainly has a lot to learn about what works.

As we are all aware, food has become more expensive as gas becomes more expensive. Well, unfortunately even in third world countries, gas and food are also more expensive and it has become signficantly more difficult for people to feed themselves and their families. The cost of food is a much higher percentage of income for the people down there than it is for American's.

So, really, poverty, the inability to purchase the necessities of life, and famine brought on whether by lack of food, lack of purchasing-power, or by naturally occuring events (read: honey bees dying off), these will become the downfall of modern civilization!

It is postulated that ancient civilizations including the Romans, the Greeks, and the Mayans may have perished due to nutritional consequences, the Romans may have lead in the water pipes, Greeks and Mayans may have grown to big to have their land sustain them.

Malthus, a demographer saw that societies through history experienced at one time or another epidemics, famines, or wars: events that masked the fundamental problem of populations overstretching their resource limitations:

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."--Thank you Wikipedia.

Well, aren't we in contemporary society at risk for overpopulation? Stretching our resources to the max so that we may run into finding that we have fun out of food? out of clean water? When there is not enough food production or there is a blight to destroy all foodstuffs, will there be massive nuclear wars strong enough to wipe out the world as we know it?

Well, I truly believe that it is very possible. I think there is a big risk that we will find ourselves in famine and poverty sooner than later. If we can learn from civilizations from the past, and I know there is a lot to learn, maybe we can take the necessary steps to prevent world calamity for the future.

I think the bandwagon to change the way our world works, ie. different energy sources, green living, health change, may finally be taking hold.

Knowing that food is a basic need that must be fulfilled before anything else, I would love the opportuntiy to study cultures of the past and apply that knowledge to what is occuring now, with modern civilization...

I know it's been said before, but we can learn a whole hell of a lot from our past...let's use it.