Post #5

a) To be honest, El Salvador is too busy dealing with gang violence and corruption to be worried about the environment. Today, “almost 85% of its forested cover has disappeared since the 1960s, leaving about 5 percent of the land area forested.” This is the sad reality of nations that are too busy fighting each other in war. They are stuck focused on individual survival and not focused on the big picture of survival of the planet. When you have gangs running around with weapons and demanding ransoms, kidnapping, raping, stealing, and murdering all over the country, you don't have a lot of time to be thinking, “Oh, we have completely decimated our forests, I wonder how that negatively affects the climate of the planet.” Not to mention the complete and total lack of human rights to the majority of people in El Salvador. Dr. Elizabeth Lindsey talks about the elders of her community putting on a veil and staying quiet for survival, well the indigenous people and really anyone that stands up to the gangs and in some cases the government is either killed or never seen again. It's a blatant disregard of those peoples basic human right to live and be free. I do think Dr. Lindsey has a valid point when she talks about how we will eventually face our own forgetting of our nature. I believe it will take form as a complete ecological collapse that will in turn collapse any sort of social structure  we have made today. It will be a world we must fight to survive and be fearful of the next day. It will be due to our own actions as humans of complete disregard for the health of the planet and ourselves. But it will serve as a great lesson for the consciousness of humanity, and humans will fundamentally be reminded of our nature. A new age in human evolution will begin, just at the end of a transition.

b) Endangered cultures are the cultures of people that are disappearing from existence. Sort of like an endangered species is getting close to going extinct. No longer in existence. In El Salvador, this takes form with the indigenous peoples of the region. The majority culture is from the Spanish settlers that came in the early discovery of the Americas. Catholicism is overwhelmingly practiced within this country, and there has been a long history of the settlers trying to end and decimate the indigenous cultures that were there before they were. I agree with Wade Davis. The elders from these ancient cultures are dying, and with them the tongue of their ancient language. This is extremely similar to the situation in El Salvador with all the oppression of the indigenous cultures.

c) Noor’s main points in “Beyond Euro-centrism” touch on determining the exact scope of the rubric of ‘human rights’ in cultures at different levels of global power, and the issue of political leaders using the concept of values to suit their own political-strategic ends. He emphasizes that “besides maintaining their own Western value system, they will have to accept their inability to force such views on the rest of the world.” (Noor, pg52) They must recognize the presence of alternatives to their own “moral and ideological paradigms” (Noor, pg52) Euro-centrism is the disregard of a wider world view and of the other cultures and history all over the world, apart from European culture and history. It is the ignorance of other values or ideas to be better or more whole than European ideologies and morals. From Oxford Dictionary, “implicitly regarding European culture as preeminent.” This is a disease that doesn't only exist in Europe, but in regards to others own culture exists in every country of the world.