Summary and Response to Civilization: A Vision for Human Occupancy of Earth in the Fourth Millennium by Roderick Frazier Nash

 “Island Civilization: A Vision for Human Occupancy of Earth in the Fourth Millennium” by Roderick Frazier Nash is basically a discussion about how Nash feels the world will be in a thousand years. He starts it off by saying that his ideas maybe controversial to some and they may disagree. If so he challenges them to think outside of the box and create their own descriptions of how the world will be, but you need to have logical evidence and reasoning behind your theories.  Nash used this tactic to grab his audience’s attention and let their minds wonder how the world could be in a thousand years.  Then, he proposed four theories of his own on how the world would end due to human interference to nature and the wild.

The wasteland theory was the first of the four. It went into detail about how the earth would end due to a polluted planet. This is true in ways because today all you ever hear about is how the gas from cars is breaking down the ozone layer, or how we are dumping trash into the ocean. Once mankind realized what we were doing to our once aesthetic planet we tried to repair it by recycling and manufacturing cars that run on electricity. Needless to say it may be a little too late in my opinion.

The garden theory is where mankind uses its technological ways to better nature. This is false to me because as the years have progressed we have only thought about the human ways of life and forgot about nature. For instance as we advance technologically we take up more of the wild and nature. We do experiments with nature and its animals. We have forgotten that God put us here to look after the animals and show them compassion not dominance. As time continues to progress we may not have any food left to eat because we will be used all the resources we have.

The third theory is future primitive were mankind goes back to the homo sapient lifestyle of hunting and gathering to survive. This would be almost impossible to accomplish because of all the advancements we have made over the years to improve our own ways of life. Not to mention it would be a waste of all the centuries our ancestors put forth trying to better the world. We should not have to compromise our ways because of the wilderness and nature. We are the dominate species of the world and we let it be known with our improvements to Earth.

The final theory of Nash’s is Island Civilization. This being the main theory Nash supports the most. He believes we could drop the population to 1.5 billion people and learn to adapt to our surroundings. This is most absurd because it is almost physically impossible to decrease the world population to that much. There would have to be a mass genocide all over the world. Honestly I would like to have known how it would be to roam the wild and just let nature take its course. Unfortunately I may never know what the fourth millennium holds because I will not be living.

In reading this essay it helped me to realize that we change our world every day. Without us helping to reserve some parts of this planet as wild; someday it might all disappear. This would be tragic because God put it here for us to love Mother Nature as well as us. It all started with Adam and Eve disobeying God, so now we all were banished into the wild. Every day it gets worse. We may not have the wild animals to worry about but we do have each other to be skeptic about. Nash opened up my mind with his theories and now I will do my own reasoning for the worlds end or beginning.