Living With Trauma: The Healers, 41

So then a lot of the problems we have caused ourselves and the planet could be traced to our insistence, ancestral and present, of having to live in climates to which we are not biologically suited. This has panned out rather favourably in some ways. The stress and hardship of living in a cold climate often causes people to pull together because individual survival is that much more dependent upon collective endeavour. In Canada it has often been noted how much friendlier and more generous are Canadians who live on the prairies and in other colder parts of the country. This is from the communitarian traditions made necessary by having to survive in a harsh and unforgiving climate. It would also seem that the need to work well together also has encouraged the kind of industriousness and industry that produced the many scientific discoveries and technological advances that can be traced to Europe, North America, and in an earlier era, China. By the same token, the tropical regions have very little to show for themselves, perhaps outside of the advanced civilizations of the Maya, Aztec and Inca of Latin America, though they were all but exterminated by technologically more advanced Europeans, in this case the Spanish. My guess is that the relative ease of life in warmer countries makes survival easier and people aren't as likely to be that aware of their mutual need of one another, except perhaps in hunter-gatherer societies where basic survival is always at a premium making life outside of the collective unworkable and unfeasible. This is, of course, a very simplistic rendering. For example, the very technological and industrial achievements in the northern countries have so fouled the environment and set in motion the whole dreaded advance of global warming and climate change that we have clearly become the arbiters of our own destruction. All of our advances in technology, it seems, are but the bitter fruit of our insistence not only on having our rightful piece of the planet, but complete global dominance by the human species at the cost of the loss of species diversity, fouled oceans and air, and accelerated warming and climate change. Add in that many of the technological advances have been purposed to make it all the easier for us to bomb one another and the rest of the earth out of existence and it doesn't take a genius to wonder if something might be seriously wrong with our species. In redesigning this planet to conform to our own needs and wants we are rendering this earth useless to all. Love, compassion and empathy, the qualities that must be the most central and strongest in our human nature, still remain in the shadow of our greed, fear and hatred of one another. We have become like little gods, but almost entirely void and empty of that single principal that would make us truly divine: Love.