“Real Home”
Before watching the movie home, from my perspective all I imagined about h
ome was the warmth of family and an apartment building in Korea. However this perspecti
ve changed after watching the movie “Home”. The real home after all was this 
planet earth that billions of us reside in. This planet provides us the platform for humans to build man made s
structures which most people phrase as home. However, as a political science major and a law societies and justice minor, it was rare for me to actually think about the planet earth in a scientific way. Even more, I have not had a chance to actually experience how the world is and has changed over the past before taking this class. In other words, I never really knew how home (earth) looked like due to its enormous size.
Living in the state of Washington where trees are common, I never realized how these trees decompose into life and eventually into soil by repeating the process over and over again to help the earth provide a home for human beings. Importantly, it is fascinating how our lives have changed from getting everything done with our hands to machines doing all the work for us in the present. Many will think that our lives have advanced since oil beats man power but when thinking about pollution, it seems like the outcome of our laziness. From watching the movie I came up with the conclusion that humans favor comfortable living environments because currently, more than half of the world’s population is cramped inside of busy cities where our basic needs can be purchased from a store across the street. If people were more diligent we may have the human population evenly distributed around the rural areas of the world. However the convenience that we are desperate for makes the cities seem like the oasis where more and more people are being attracted to.
In the beginning of the movie where e
volution was emphasized, the movie pointed out that the first evolution for the human civilization was agriculture. This also implies that agriculture was the first evolution of our home. In the century we live in, it may seem as if humans are closely engaged with agriculture by consuming everyday nutrition from food processed through agriculture but only a few of the population make agriculture possible. To think about it, having more than half of the world’s population in cities, less than the half of the world’s population is in charge of providing the city people with crops. Unlike the past, large tractors, sprinklers, and other machines provide the needs of the crops. Not much of human strength is required for crops to grow. As time goes on and generations pass, we humans are taking hands off our basic needs (agriculture) and even with myself, I have zero experience of raising crops. I have never experienced agriculture myself
As the movie progressed to the end, I felt guilt. As a fact, everyone taking this class probably lives in the city of Seattle. Therefore we are included in the 20% of the population consuming more than 80% of the world’s resources. This is a fact because first, we live in a city and second, we live in a city located in a developed country. I felt the guilt when the movie stated that over 1 billion do not have access to resources such as safe drinking water and 
it felt
like I was hogging all the resources. Furthermore, it is tragic that me changing my lifestyle such as using less energy and water does not make a difference at all. Due to the emotions that rushed up my body while watching the movie, I was a bit irritated of myself and was having a hard time to continue on with it. I was almost tempted to turn off the movie for I could not handle the guilt.
More importantly I was shocked by the tremendous amount of water used by the most popular vacation sites. Just because we do not live in Las Vegas or Palm Springs, as visitors we are still responsible for the consumption of water. What is more shocking about these vacation sites is that Las Vegas and Palm Springs is a desert where water is very rare but with the improvement that we have from man power accessing water from the desert areas is not a problem at all. The guilt increased in these scenes because we have the power to access water from deserts but do not use the power to help those facing difficulties of access to water.
After the movie was over, I was able to share my thoughts and feelings I had from watching the movie with two of my classmates. It was interesting that the three of us had the same idea of guilt. I was surprised by how the other two were informed about other sides of the world where life is different from us and learned more through the discussion that went on. From this discussion the three of us came up with the Idea of our Action projects for th
e class. This idea has not been confirmed yet, but we thought that it would be interesting to research the amount of resources that people consume in other countries and live like them for a couple of days while filming it to turn it into a documentary film. However, after researching in depth about the consumption of resources I am worried that I might get too disappointed of myself and that the guilt I feel might increase to a whole new level.
Photo Credit:
http://www.urban-wftp.eu/en/project/what-is-the-water-footprint/,13
http://russia-insider.com/en/business/russia-plans-lease-land-free-agricultural-investors/ri7675
http://kite4water.org/mission/
http://www.clintonfranciscans.com/news-and-events-news.html?id=220