Bambury's Article 'Getting Coffee Is Hard To Do'

In Stanley Fish’s article “Getting Coffee Is Hard to Do”, he explains his frustrations with getting a cup of coffee. In his article, Fish emphasizes the point that people have to work harder today just to get a simple thing or task done. Fish claims that getting a cup of coffee itself has become a coordination problem. Not only have coffee shops as a whole completely changed ,from a nondescript place with seats at a counter to concrete floors, lines of people, and an indie feel to the place, but they also have longer wait times where it used to take twenty seconds top for your order. The complexity of ordering a cup of coffee has definitely change, now people use words like “double shot” or “grande”. He emphasizes the point that today people

As much as we as humans try to protect and conserve our planet’s natural resources, there seems to be no going back. We humans have already destroyed our planet. In the article “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” Karieva starts off by saying that “By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline… Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we're saving.” Karieva also defines this time period in which we live, referred to as the Anthropocene as a “new geological era in which humans dominate every flux and cycle of the planet's ecology

Humans have understood the damages they are doing to their planet, and have overlooked the topic for some time. The time they thought they had to solve the problem is gone. Humans can not go back in time and reverse the things they discovered. Through advancement in technology they will find the path that will lead to their well-being. The human population needs to focus all efforts on discovering new energy sources, food sources, and space travel technology in order for the human race to continue to

The debate of whether humans as a species are destroying their planet and violently pushing life to extinction has only intensified in recent years. But evidence has proved what we don’t want to hear time and time again – humans, and our actions (direct and indirect) are heavily involved in the extinction of flora and fauna species across the globe. We carelessly dump enormous amounts of c02 into our atmosphere, leading to ocean acidification and global warming that kill millions of animals and plants, and continue desecrating fragile ecosystems and habitats, resulting in the slaughter of now-rare life forms. We tamper with our climate as if it is a rather interesting puzzle piece, not the planet that supports our own existence.

Human activity since 1945 incite a significant change in the environment and causes climate change. Both J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke in The Great Acceleration expose that humans exploit energy from alternative resources to survive and thrive. Their activity to gain these resources impel the extinction of biodiversity.

The animal kingdom, being the kingdom that we interact with the most is becoming threatened by us, the humans. The process of evolution and the survival of the fittest are processes of natural selection. Nature will evolve and get to a point that current animals wont be longer existing, but humans are accelerating and stopping that natural process. Humans are the most responsible when animals become extinct, threatened or endangered. Mainly humans don’t realize the damage they are causing to the environment by making small actions that seem insignificant, but when many humans in the planet do the same, small, insignificant action, it becomes something big and it can affect the environment, animals and nature.

Our earth, where we are born, where we grow, where we live, is our home. We as humans interconnect with the environment by influencing and affecting each other. Our responsibility is to cherish and take care of our home. We are stewards over the earth and we should preserve the earth and its natural resources, but we cannot have a reliable planet if populations are growing out of control. E.O. Wilson said, “We are in a bottleneck of over population and wasteful consumption that could push half of the Earth’s species to extinction in this century.” (1)

We as humans are causing an excessive amount of habitat destruction due to industrialization and creation of infrastructures. We’ve polluted the air with smokes and fumes, torn down forests to build shopping malls and highways, and degraded and overused the soil for our own profit. We are so concerned with furthering our industries and businesses that we forget that the earth is the main source of it all. We also fail to replace what we use. Because we continue to hurt and destroy mother earth, she will eventually become a pile of nothingness.

The issue of whether mankind is dangerously or negatively harming the environment has been a debate over a long period of time. Individuals and scholars make quite compelling arguments on either spectrum of the issue. From the argument between Lester Brown and Bjorn Lomborg, it is evident that the debates on this issue may continue for a much longer period of time. Both authors did agree to some extent that humans do deplete the earth’s resources; however Lester Brown had a more sonorous argument because he equated the effects of such depletions towards the livelihood of mankind.

The decline of the environment due to natural and human exertion is known as the degradation of the environment. The natural weather occurrences such as heavy rain, flooding, storms, earthquakes, volcanoes etc. are not administered under human control. These meteorological phenomenon’s wreak devastation on the environment from time to time causing the land to become unsuitable to cultivate. On this subject matter, the human population does not contain the power to stop the wrath of Mother Nature. Rather, we are forced to sit back and watch. Nevertheless, humans engage in a crucial role towards the degradation of the environment in which we live in. Unavoidably, the degradation of the environment is a rising and utmost worldwide subject. I accept that the root cause to environmental degradation is the excessive use of resources on our land utilized by the processes under capitalism. As Jensen wrote in Endgame, “The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human and (nonhuman) impoverishment.

The sustainable society Dr. Robert puts forth is a utopia or an ideal world in which nature and human beings live in harmony and our activities have minimal impacts on the ecosystem. Yet, in reality, beside the irresponsibility and ignorance toward the environment of humans, our overpopulation is the main reason why we are increasingly causing damage to nature. The needs for natural resources are getting high and higher while it takes time for the environment to bounce back to its original state. This high demand of resources along with the ignorance of humans has transformed nature and endangered our own life. We have broken the Earth’s natural cycles with our lifestyle and development, and rapidly transformed our resources into useless garbage. This is a linear process of human development and as Dr. Robert has stated, "all linear processes must eventually come to an end," the only way to save ourselves from the consequences, in his view, would be to restore the cyclical processes of nature.

Human-caused global environmental changes are the result of a rapidly growing population and our high dependencies on non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels (Vitousek, 1994). We are part of a consumerist society which keeps us plugged into this dependency on cheap fossil fuels (Ahmed, 2012). Our intensive industrial and agricultural activities cause us to exploit the Earth’s resources, and we cannot continue on this path. Ahmed (2012) explains that this does not mean the end of the world, but it does mean that this is the end of a particular form of industrial civilization which is based upon the idea of unlimited growth.

Do you have kids? Grandkids? How long do you think you will live? How long do you hope that your kids will live. Now what if I told you that just because you think that not taking care of the Earth now is not your problem, that your kids or grandkids may suffer at the cost of your ignorance. How do you feel that you may live longer than your kids? In older generations, a person living a full life was someone who lived into their late thirties at best. Now, due to modern science and medicine, people in current generations are living into their seventies, and eighties, and nineties, and some people even live to reach one hundred. But “At the rate that the Earth is being affected by human issues, current generations are predicted to start living shorter lifespans” (A Potential Decline). A person can not physically live forever, but mentally a person can live on in their offspring and then their children’s future children. As humans we feel that we are the dominant species on Earth, but as humans we are also the most selfish species on Earth. Humans should not just take the Earth for granted and they should not feel that they do not have to worry about the Earth’s problems because when things start getting bad, they will not be around anymore. As the dominant and most evolved species on Earth, humans should take on a parental role for the rest of the species on Earth and care for the Earth itself. Before we can discuss how we must help the environment, we must first discuss why

p. 1335-1343). The negative effects of industrialization and other forms of pollution caused by humans are known to everyone. This is especially true among scientific groups, who are mainly supporters of scientific evidence that prefer to stand by proven scientific data and statistics, as well as environmental groups who are champions of saving the environment along with planet earth. A major part of this awareness is caused by the detrimental change in climate that is currently being experienced. While natural pollutions, such as volcanic eruptions, do not cause such a huge effect on earth as they are few and far between, human pollution is a constant ongoing process, which is slowly eroding the life-giving abilities of our planet.

The Earth is a dynamic, constantly changing environment in which the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere all interact. When one changes slightly the change is then felt through out the spheres. Humans need to understand that the change they cause can have a potential for a disastrous affect on the environment. From injecting the atmosphere with greenhouse gas, or deforestation, all the unnatural things done to the environment will have an unnatural affect that will have to be dealt with. We as humans have a moral responsibility to reduce global warming gasses by changing our modes of transportation, to stop deforestation, and increase government funding into research to inhibit global warming for