Ishmael Book Report

“With gorilla gone will there be hope for man?” Our civilization is destroying our planet, More importantly how we see our planet is destroying its inhabitants and diversity. The book Ishmael talks about how our society came to be and more importantly how our culture came to be. “With gorilla gone will there be hope for man?” as said in Ishmael asks a serious question. Ishmael points out that we are products of our culture. The two cultures Ishmael talks about are the “civilized” and “non-civilized.” Life is full of trial and error. Ishmael talks about the fact that if we as humans do not change our ways and learn from our errors we will go extinct. As many other cultures have exhausted there resources we would not be the first civilization

This all began 10,000 years ago when “civilized” culture started to take shape. The story of how our world got to today is told to us by “mother culture.” These stories are how we perceive the world and interact with it. When humans started to shift away from nomadic lifestyles we began our “myth” that mother culture has shaped into our heads as fact. Religions have developed a scary story. The main thought of religions has led us to believe the earth is a possession of man. As Ishmael talks about this in great length. We are told the world was made for man not jellyfish or any other critter on this planet. Also mother culture tells us evolution and creation has stopped when man was made. Humans today are the climax and end of evolution. This is a scary way of thinking and will led to our demise if we do not change our view of this. The idea that earth was made for man is unhealthy because its tells us we can do as we please with earth. We can consume and

It kept our population and consumption in check. Our modern culture does not know how to live. As Ishmael says “trial and error is a good way to learn to fly but not a good way to build a civilization.” Ishmael talks about how when humans started agricultural lifestyle we didn't have the knowledge to do it with the limits of our earth. The lessons learned from 3 million years on this earth were pushed aside to begin a new way of living. The knowledge we have gained in the last 10,000 years has not been fast enough or successful to curve our destruction of the earth. The laws of the earth have been set for billions of years and each civilizations had different ways of success. Success is living within the “circle of life”. If we continue business as usual we will not have success, we are living outside the circle of life. Living outside of the circle of life is destroying the diversity of out planet that ecosystems are so reliant