Last Post

As next week is finals, I'm guessing this will be my last post of the course (but I think I may keep it going after the class is done).

As this course concludes, this post will be a summation of what I learned on top of the final projects.

During this course we delved into dozens of fields, which led me to understand that the three topics that provide the name of this course-- culture, religion, and the environment, make up the core of what our world is. This reminded me of the philosophy taught by the Polynesian Voyaging Society-- that the earth is a boat on which we are all traveling, and can only carry a limited amount of resources for us to share and understand. I was constantly reminded during this course of the image of "the blue marble"; the first time humans had a chance to look back at each other. This photo was the most selling photo of all time (a fact I recently found out from Cash Cab), and this tells me of the interesting we have in ourselves. If we can spur on this interest in this blue marble that we are all right now, we might find a way to try to protect it.

Culture, Religion, and the Environment are the veins that run through the human population. There is no one on the planet who is void of any of them or can try to remove them. They have a symbiotic relationship, and if any one of them is hurt, the other feels its pain. We can see this all over the world as the destruction of environments harms cultures, as changes in the human culture harms the environment, and as religious fervor harms all three. While there has probably never been a perfect relationship between the three, it is a perfect relationship we should strive for.