A Walk in the Woods "vs./and" Hurricane Katrina

In English, we just finished reading the playwrights, A Walk in the Woods. In this play, two negotiators spend a year or so debating over the limitations of nuclear arms throughout the USSR and United States of America, in addition to forming relationships with one another that carry their negotiation to an entirely new level. One of the characters, Botvinnik (he is Russian) realizes and communicates the point that technology is moving at a much faster and efficient rate than government and humanity is moving at. In other words, the pace of technology is outrunning humanity, and humanity can never win the race. This relates identically a main theme which emerges form Hurricane Katrina, in that humanity instituted a technology which was unreliable and unstable, and cause humanity to take an enormous step backwards and evaluate what was feasible and dependable enough to build an entire community upon it. We created the technologies of the levies to break the ocean waters and divide it from the land; if not for the levies, the city would be underwater. But, because of the prominent ambition for advancement and progression in the world humanity developed a groundbreaking, complex, and unstable technology which allowed humanity itself to expand as well as its capacity and knowledge of engineering, construction, and technology. Essentially, humanity has grown itself into something bigger and better than humanity had ever conceived of, and is outpacing nature. The theme of a fight between technology and nature becomes relevant, as each is trying to dominate the other. Just like in the playwright, humans are using technologies which are not meant to be used, let alone established, in nature. But, the pace, quality, and quantity by which these technologies are inventions are moving at and playing a bigger and bigger part in society is defeating the pace by which humanity is moving at. Eventually, the technologies which were so ahead of our time and beyond our capacity of sustainability will come to hurt us, just like the Hurricane eliminated most elements of humanity and society as well as the negotiations of limiting nuclear arms separated humanity and turned it against itself. It is impossible to slow down the pace of technology and speed up the pace of humanity, so, instead of establishing a mutual pace by which each progresses, I think a theme of nature and technology should replace one of nature versus technology. Nature should work along and in line with technology, creating a system which both benefits from the other. In other words, humanity must overcome its determination to become bigger and better than nature itself, and apply the limited technology to nature and discover as well as implement ways which the advanced technology could improve nature, as the two would be working together rather than against each other. This would prevent disasters like Katrina from destroying human installations of technology and causing something much greater than it would have been if humanity abided by nature’s law and built New Orleans on land which is naturally above water/sea level. If technology and nature work together, than humanity in addition to nature has the potential to collaboratively become something bigger and better than one could have ever conceived.