Chapter 4

Im still finishing up the book, so I decided to discuss part of chapter 4.  I loved how Wessels talked about agriculture in this chapter.  I recently read a book called The End of Food by Thomas F. Pawlick, which was all about our agriculture and food industries today.  A lot of the things he explained in the beginning of the chapter about species richness in ecosystems and why it is important were a great setup for the rest of the chapter.  If we don't make changes in our global economy, our ecosystem will become unstable and vulnerable to natural disasters and other big changes.  The example of Hurricane Katrina as a "pertubation" was a great one to show how fragile our economy is right now.  

This quote summed up, for me, one of the big ideas of this chapter: 

"Where natural systems grow more diverse, integrated, and efficient, with each specialized part working to support the other parts in a stable system, our global economic system is moving in the opposite direction. It is moving toward simplification and homogeneity through competitive exclusion, wasteful use of resources, and lack of integration, with each corporate entity looking out for its own interests-profits-rather than the well-being of the whole system." pg 89

This quote explains why other systems are becoming sustainable and why we are not, which is why we need to change our way of looking at our system and make changes towards becoming more sustainable.