Star Dogs Book Report

The book “The Captain's Dog” follows Lewis and Clark's expedition, which took place from 1804 to 1806, to find A waterway that travelled from the east coast to the west coast, were they end up in modern day Oregon. Most of the U.S. had not been claimed by Europe and was owned by other countries. The expedition was started by George Washington who was the president at the time, sent out Lewis and Clark after the Louisiana purchase, which was when the U.S. had bought A large amount of land from Spain. Lewis and Clark had started the expedition in missouri, following the mississippi river. Though they did not discover A passage way, they discovered many new species of animals. Captain Clark had also brought along his dog, Seaman, who had gotten

Humanity is confronted by multiple environmental challenges which threaten to undermine the advances in health achieved over recent decades. The Rockefeller Foundation/Lancet Commission on Planetary Health showed how climate change, loss of biodiversity, land use change, ocean acidification and overfishing, nitrogen and phosphorus loading and environmental pollution more generally all have the potential to adversely affect health through a range of pathways1. A recent joint publication by WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity articulated the myriad connections between biodiversity and health and the threats to both posed by environmental change2. The dramatic changes in the global environment have led many scientists to conclude that we are living in a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which the activities of one species – homo sapiens -have become the dominant driving force transforming the Earth’s natural systems3. These natural systems provide food, clean water and air and modulate the global temperature within limits in which humanity has been able to flourish for around 11,500 years during the preceding Holocene epoch.

There have been five major mass extinction on earth triggered by a distinguishable event, but in The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert writes of the narrative of the sixth extinction caused directly by human impact. The book identifies the effects of human activity on how, over humans history on earth, the natural world has been affected. Every environmental impact stems into three basic groups of global problems to nature: Pollution, Habitat loss and Invasive Species. Kolbert explains that each impact can be traced back to one source, human industrial development. With each impact various types of life in the natural world are affected. Deforestation, urbanization, and sea level rise contribute to habitat loss worldwide. When humans began to travel they also brought invasive species and disease along with them; as boats only became bigger more and more invasive species travel. This reverse engineering of the planet species, brings new species that don’t have any natural predators, thus having an easier time driving native species out to endangerment or extinction. The different outcomes that come from human pollution is separated throughout the book, but the idea remains constant; with the development of human culture, pollution has drastically impacted a vast extent of species habitats and their environment.

It cannot be denied that, in at least some areas, the invention and progression of technology has benefitted the human race. With the growing industrialization of the world in the last centuries the lives of many people have been made easier. But, this growth of technology is not without its consequences and people are not without their concerns. While industrialization has had its benefits, the environmental cost of this progress is immense, and the impact it has on nature can be hard to swallow. It may seem like talk of the environment is something to be left to scientists or activists specializing in that particular field, but they are

Our planet is so perfectly designed to support complex life, but it may become uninhabitable within the 21st century if the industrialized world continues with its unsustainable economic model. The unprecedented increase of atmospheric greenhouse gas levels due to excessive fossil fuel consumption and resource extraction is contributing to harmful climate change and if left unchecked, could potentially set off an irreversible feedback loop of runaway global warming. Unless a real change is made in our consumerist culture and economic model, life as we know it may no longer exist on our planet.

The first challenge in this essay is to shift the way people think about some of the biggest environmental problems that are affecting humanity in a global level, rather to see them as independent and isolated problems to view them as a whole, as a part of a system and as a consequence of other different problems that are being faced in other parts of the world.

Humans will not be able to survive the results of human activities due to land degradation, lack of water management skills, pollution, and increasing carbon footprints. In 1750, a revolution started globally. This revolution was called the Industrial Revolution; it changed agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation & technology forever. It has even changed lives economically and culturally, but most importantly, the great effects it has on the environment. “A glacier in the high Andes 5,200 meters above capital, Lima, where one of the main water supplying glaciers has shrunk by more than a kilometer over the last decade...Eskimo villagers are going hungry because global warming has changed the migration patterns of seals and

In today’s society, environmental problems are a big problem that plague our world. These detrimental changes are creating astonishing problems for every living organism. Global warming is not a myth. Glaciers are rapidly melting, ecosystems are being destroyed, trees are being cut down for profit, and the globe is warming up and changing our normal climate. Everyone is a contributor to these changes, whether it is a big contribution or a small one. Big businesses and governments all around the world are contributing to the increase in pollution. Factories release chemical waste into our air, and oceans which over time causes holes in our ozone layer. This is not a small easily reversible problem. Chemical air pollution causes problems to not only our environment, but to all the species living on this earth.

The future of our planet has been a great concern for the global community for many years. In their article ‘Can a Collapse of Global Civilisation be Avoided?’ Paul and Anne Ehrlich explore the current ecological and socio-cultural trends that they believe, if left untreated, will lead to the inevitable collapse. Unlike past civilizations, the modern global community has the knowledge, skills and technologies to solve the several pressing issues Ehrlich presents in this article. So what are those issues?

Rapid unfolding of devastating changes in the ecosystems, historically high air and water temperatures, resulting in escalating number and frequency of natural cataclysms, prolonged droughts and record rainfalls leading to massive floods, raising sea levels, exponentially increasing levels of air and water pollution - all these factors should prompt us to stop and reconsider the role of our contribution to the environmental chaos in the universe. Acknowledging all the emerging scientific data, the preservation of our environment becomes our principal personal duty not only to the future generations but even more so to ourselves. The gruesome perspective of the fulminant development of the destructive consequences of ever-rising consumerism,

This book is the story of an opportunistic approach to remedy and adapt to the drastic changes humanity has caused to the Earth while also embracing the role humans play in the Anthropogenic era. Humans will always continue to build environments, but the concern now is how are we going to build better environments. These issues will challenge humanity and question our values. How we build the environment around us in the future will be based on whether or not embracing the Anthropogenic era will indeed lead to a sustainable planet or just be a quick fix to the deeper issues of human behavior that have led us astray from maintaining a sustainable planet.

In the decade of the 1970s, the United Nations organized several important meetings on the human environment to study a very serious problem . We humans are destroying the world around us . We are using up all of our natural resources . We must learn to conserve them, or life will be very bad for our children and our grandchildren .

To commence with, Hayden (2010) points out that the overwhelming increase in population of human, global economy, and both industrial and agricultural productions has dealt severe blows to various aspects of the environment. Besides causing irreversible damages to the Earth, according

50 years of innovation and urbanization, we were blinded by the city lights and smokes that we do not seem to see the importance of taking good care of our environment, especially the nonrenewable sources. The consumers’ needs quickly became wants, and for the producers, wants simply mean profit, and profit is money. Money is everything to people nowadays. We would resort to everything that could provide us even the littlest amount of money, no matter what the repercussions would be, thus, the destroying of the resources. We are slowly killing the planet but we cannot see it because we are too busy trying to get things we believe we need. It is said that the earth’s weight is still the same as it was first created. Come to think of it, we do give and take with the nature, we take its resources, invent something useful that we consume, but we give it back as waste and

It has always been important to look after our local environment if only so that we can pass on to our children and grandchildren an environment at least as good as we have enjoyed. Today, however, it is not just the local environment that is at risk but the global environment. Small amounts of pollution for which each of us is responsible are affecting everyone in the world. For instance, very small quantities of chlorofluoro- carbons CFCs emitted to the atmosphere from leaking refrigerators or some industrial processes have resulted in degradation of the ozone layer. Of greater importance is the carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, which is leading to damaging climate change. Pressures from rapidly increasing world population and from over-use of the Earth’s resources are making such problems much more acute and exacerbating the