12/21: Day 1, Cambodia

"Is isolation the key? Globalization, on the flip side, shows certain destructive trends:
-monoculture dilemma (in agriculture)
-divorce from and forced mutation of nature (via pollution)
-victory for few at cost of many
-eventual end of human race due to man-made disaster (nuclear, "environmental")

"If we isolate ourselves, would our ignorance offer saving grave from unknown travesties? If we did not know (in the Americas, Asia, Australia) about the Nazi's attempt at world domination, would we have been free from the responsibility of its atrocities? Is it our job to actively patrol the earth? If a man from Mongolia steals a chicken from a Swede, what business is it to a Tanzanian? Perhaps the UN only acts for its own ends. If we give the UN (or the US since America tends to think itself as an ultimate authority) the authority to control, to monitor we are doing so on the assumption that a mono-glot (my neologism for a supreme power) needs be. The universe does not abide by such faulty, human politics. Why should our minds.

"If we believe and act upon an individually derived set of morals, we will not need police and punishment. The goal of a well-functioning organism, a single being or group of individuals, should be autonomy. A worm eats and performs its duty according to nature. No board or committee, let alone active consciousness, tells the worm to turn dead organic material into soil––it just does (and the world is better off for it). I believe that if given the opportunity and encouragement humans can learn to look past the invisible lines on the globe and find where we connect to the earth and each other in an ethically existential way. This means living would be derived from our roles as homo sapiens––hunters, gatherers, farmers––as participants in the food chain, not engineers of it.
(Although I did not state it clearly in my journal, I am implying that by playing our role as animals who contribute to and take away from nature in a sustainable fashion would mean that we fill niches in geographically isolated communities as animals do. Hence why you do not see American rattlesnakes in Australia. Also, the introduction of foreign species, i.e. the Kudzu vine in America's southern states, or Black Bass to Lake Biwa in Japan, often destabilizes the preexisting balances between flora and fauna. By globalizing humans are disrupting patterns woven into the earth in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom, and while not all of these changes are not all necessarily bad, my hypothesis is that by agreeing to the rules nature has provided--that homonids have succeeded by for several million years and the rest of the Earth for billions before that--we have a better chance for autonomous survival and a higher quality of life.)

"Current thinking patterns are entirely self-focused and greedy. We have come to understand that our consciousness is greater than the unknowable process/deity that gave us life. If we are animals, and we biologically/genetically are, we owe respect to the process of miracles (or randomization of evolution) that birthed us. We are not the centerpiece, we are a tip of the iceberg, and we should accept it. If we do this, maybe we can learn to forfeit our authoritarianism dreams and look to a deeper truth that encompasses all life.

"-Would isolation serve as a form of autonomy, geographically defined?

-are we mature enough to handle the world? don't think so"