Christopher Columbus Created Privilege in America
Every person on earth has been exposed to nature in one way or another. People all around the world have different mindsets or views on what nature means to them. A person in India might have a completely different way of describing the environment comparing to someone in the United States. Historical or cultural differences could change a person’s outlook on how to take care of the environment as well. Native Americans have always looked at nature as something that’s sacred. When Christopher colobus came over to America in 1492, the land was already inhabited by the native Americans. In the book “Communicating Nature”, Corbett describes the Native Americans being, “environmentally smart for they used the land competently without spoiling it” (20). More groups of people other than just Native Americans agreed about taking care of nature as if it was a living thing. When the Europeans arrived, they had a very different mindset about how to take care of the land. ‘Manifest Destiny”: the Europeans belief that it was their true calling to conquer all the united states from east to west. This brought a lot of conflict between the Europeans and the natives because the natives looked at nature as a “mother” while the other side “looked at nature as a storehouse of commodities, there for the taking” (Corbett 22). With Columbus’ people taking over a lot of native Americans were forced to move from their home and the United States slowly turned from being a place of sacred, plentiful land to a place where one’s goal was to conquer the soil and environment.
I’m not saying that Christopher Columbus and the original settlers set us up for disaster, but it is the first domino on the effect of people in the United States just assuming that every resource is renewable and will never run out. Of course, we are not as unexperienced as the first settlers were and we do have different mindsets now than the people did then, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that we are over using our resources. According to a video from ‘GOOD’ called “Water by the Numbers,” an average person in the united states uses 105.7 gallons of water- per day. While in a third world country like Mozambique, the average person only uses 1.3 gallons of water per day. This is a perfect example of how culture effects how we use our resources and what type of mindset we have when talking or thinking about our natural resources and environment. There hasn’t been a day in my life when I have been nervous about getting sick from drinking water or worrying about where my clean water is coming from, when really one sixth of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to clean water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5eBfZhE4M&list=PLE7EBB5F57EA9F190&index=44
For a very long time now, people in the United States don’t know what depleting resources look like. Including me, we have never had to experience a shortage of clean water or green, healthy land. We have grown up with the conditioning that water will keep flowing, land will keep expanding and trash will continue to “disappear” once it is placed in a trashcan. People in America are privileged when it comes to the use of water and other natural resources. According to another video by GOOD called “Use Less Plastic”, Americans throw away approximately 2.5 million plastic bottles away every hour. Every piece of plastic that has ever been around still exists today, but that is something people will worry about later when it is too late to take action to save our oceans. Culture has a very big impact on what kind of attitudes and beliefs people have when it comes to taking care of the environment. I feel like people really need to broaden their outlook on the environment and really find out what nature means to them and realize how sacred it really is. (655).
