The changing face of communities in the world

Looking at the extremes of weather affecting various communities around the world it made me think of the forced changes that have to be made to adjust to the planet’s needs, on one level, but to the smallest communities needs on another.

The impact of external influences on communities, be they human or meteorological, are sometimes so significant that a whole way of life for a population changes. For example the recent tsunami in Japan has caused changes in physical structures and defences but also in social provision and therapeutic arrangements as well.

I gather that New York is suffering terribly at the moment with an Arctic winter and I wonder how the changes are being met there. When I worked in New York in the 1970’s we took children of different ages from Harlem and Bedford Styvesant upstate and we lived as Native Americans. Most of the young people had never been out of the city or tried a different lifestyle. They had never been exposed in any close way to Europeans and in fact were very surprised that I spoke English.

These days the internet and social media tend to be information forerunners anyway and so change is less surprising.

In my weekly podcast which comes out this Thursday, I am going to talk about change on global communities – including an interview with  Salaash Morompi a Maasai tour guide at the Maasia Mara reserve about the changes in his community.

I’ve talked before on global warming and there might not be much to recognise about the world in 50 years with increases in draught, hurricanes, Arctic storms and tsunamis to name a few. Ways of tackling  global warming are getting stranger and enter the realms of science fiction. So a recent suggestion was to launch 16 trillion (yes trillion) disks into space to form a giant umbrella that would deflect the suns rays.

So we could imagine, as life expectancy also hugely increases, celebrating our 200th birthday in an underwater city in Norfolk with food supplied by vertical farms watching travel programmes on the empty coastline of America– sipping on water as a special expensive treat, breaking open another test-tube of ham and being persuaded by our 160 year old son that his gift of an extreme holiday adventure  to the space umbrella theatre is the hottest ticket on the planet.

Deep joy or deep despair, but believe me it is going to be very different.

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