The Environmental Problems Of Human Societies

According to an annual Gallup survey, “Americans are way more worried about water pollution than global warming, air pollution, or other major environmental concerns.” (Loughlin). Drinking polluted water will harm individuals and their families but global warming has not appeared to danger us and so we do not worry about it (Walker). In the article, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, by David Suzuki, it is indicated that humans have lost interconnectedness with nature. In other words, people have put importance to the more unnecessary things, which are the main causes for us consuming chemicals in food and creating dangerous pollution and diseases. The ignorance of our modernist society faces has led us all to severe problems. One should be more aware of what 's happening around us instead of just letting things happen. We must be more cautious so that we can live in a safe environment.

A Short History of Progress Written by Mister Ronald Wright, talks about the progress and the issues of having too much change occur to a civilization, and how it can affect the outcome results of a healthy progressing community. He mentioned the ups and downs that occurred to some civilizations and how some triumphed while others did not. Which leads to the main dilemma Wright argues about, which is the current destruction of the environment around us. Over exploiting nature, over expanding, and overpopulating are problems that past societies have come across and is now occurring in our time. These things are what helped societies prosper during certain moments in history but they are now causing problems because we as people are abusing the

As the world looks on, people start to realize that the problem of environmental pollution is a global

The first is that humans needs and natures needs are two separate issues. The idea that they're not irrevocably intertwined is inane, because we want the environment to thrive so that we can continue to exploit it. The second misconception is our reliance on technological advances that may or may not happen to save the environment. This diamond implies is a foolish thing to do, as many monumental issues are all waiting to be fixed with technology that isn't coming, or that if it does ever come, it won't be an instantaneous thing. Third and finally, is the perception that those who fear for the environment are fear-mongers, doom-sayers, and rabble rousers. Their cries of warning falling on deaf ears because the effects of environmental damage has yet to reach the public. While the citizens of America may not feel the effects, there's a great many third world countries that do and are. Places where overpopulation and famine are rampant are prime spots for wars, terrorism, and emigration which then spreads the very same problems to other

Americans, as a whole, do not care about the environment anymore. When we watch the news or simply talk about our day, there are always more pressing topics that come up. However, as a nation, the threat of a failing environment seems to be forgotten because the effects are not as obvious as other threats. Bill McKibben’s “Waste Not, Want Not” discusses how much time, money, resources, and people America has actually wasted and how little effort has been made to try to change. McKibben causes readers to think it is too late to save the environment from our wastefulness because we put our efforts into systems that do not help the environment, spend more money and resources than necessary, and refuse to acknowledge how much were wasting.

This environmentally friendly objective is quite the opposite of Americans’ scouring past to use up all the resources on the continent. Today, Americans know that they must create a sustainable future so that their descendants can survive on this planet for generations to come. To understand this current American ideal, one must look at the past and the damage that has been done through

The world is being sickened by the needs of man in today's society. People, love to live in luxury without knowing the consequences of their actions. This is because man lives at a pace set by himself, and not one that is naturally set by nature. This is shown excellently in a quote inside of the novel Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. The Quote states, “the rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” The Earth is experiencing such rapid and disastrous change due to the wants of man. Man demands too much from the earth and not only is this changing the Earth, but it is also depleting many non renewable resources

The average U.S. citizen consumes eighteen tons of natural resources per year and generates an even higher volume of wastes. These wastes get dumped and unloaded into rivers, lakes, and oceans and other landfills; only a small portion are recycled. The spread of mass consumption over the U.S. and its effects are staggering. The production and processing of our wants and needs is done by the extraction of natural resources such as fossil fuels, wood, ore, and water. This requires the creation of factories which gives off poisonous byproducts, while the commodities create more pollutants and waste themselves. This process keeps cycling over and over to create a bigger and more detrimental problem on our environment. Who is paying for this? The Earth; our environment.

The human population has grown to be a species of consumers. We consume way more than we need too, slowly destroying our environment in the process. In the last thirty years, we have used more than thirty percent of the planet’s natural resources. Eighty percent of the planet’s original forests are now gone. In the United States, almost half of the waterways have become undrinkable. There is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today than there has been at any point in time in the last 800,000 years. Margaret Atwood very cleverly shows this consumer culture in her novel, Oryx and Crake. She shows how this consumer culture is bringing us, as well as our planet, to an end. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the degradation of the environment

In Section 1 of Simon Nicholson and Paul Wapner’s text, Species Unbound: Humanity’s Environmental Impact, the authors bring significant insights into how humanity is producing a negative impact on the environment. Partly because “seven billion people” coupled with an ever-growing population are consuming scarce resources such as wood for paper/furniture etc. at rates faster than regeneration which is leading to resource depletion (Nicholson and Wapner 2015, 9-10). Furthermore, other key sustainability challenges are climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels and biodiversity loss, to name a few. Thus, humans are a negative impact on the environment in terms of not sustaining the Earth's resources, life, climate, and so forth. Since this effect on the environment is so profound some believe we are living in the Anthropocene- in which humans have become the central force in reigning supremacy over earth’s changing environmental conditions and resource depletion (11-12). The author’s claim that one way in which humans are altering the

Additionally, I came to realize that people don’t fully understand, or simply don’t care about the repercussions of what their actions may or have caused to the surrounding ecosystem. The desire for wealth has made individuals numb to the extent of their actions, as long as their actions are beneficial for themselves. By this I mean that individuals will essentially destroy the planet in order to get rich, without thinking about what their actions will cause to the local ecosystem. This search for raw materials in many ways is a double-edged sword, by this I mean that the gold rush has made California into what it is today, but it has also caused irreducible damage to the environment. This means of using raw materials can be applied to any location, in which individuals have no other means to provide for their family, whether their occupation is drilling for oil, mining for ore, or deforesting for farming. It saddens me to watch most of the world to search for wealth, rather than preserving the environment for future generations. Moreover, I understand why people in developing countries destroy the local environment for money, but when the natural recourses ultimately diminish, what will they be left with? The way the environment is currently being destructed makes me think of WALL-E, the Earth looked after all the natural recourses were gone and how no life could even be sustained, aside from a

Lastly, destroying our environment is another social problem facing Americans in the 21st century. In "The Divine Revolution" Havel writes, "We also know that we've been destroying the environment on which our existence depends and that we are headed for disaster by producing weapons of mass destruction and allowing them to proliferate."(254). Havel sees our world as a time bomb waiting to go off. Our world's

White’s thesis in The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis states that in order to confront the expanding environmental crises, humans must begin to analyze and alter their treatment and attitudes towards nature. The slow destruction of the environment derives from the Western scientific and technological advancements made since the Medieval time period. “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them” (RON p.7). Technology and science alone will not be able to save humans until we adjust the way of thinking and suppress the old ideas of humans power above nature. Instead, we need to learn how to think of ourselves as being

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.

Every year the human population on Earth increases by approximately 1.12%, or 80 million, according to the United States Census Bureau. This drastic increase in population has created a big strain on the environments around us. As the population increases, so does the amount of fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, deforestation, and other detrimental impacts on the environment. This, in turn, causes the extinction of at least 10,000 species per million per year and pushes countless others to the brink (“How Many Species Are We Losing?”). It is important to maintain Earth’s biodiversity, the variety and abundance of organisms and their habitats, to keep humans healthy and happy. The ecosystem is very delicate, and the more species disappear, the more the entire ecosystems become vulnerable and would eventually fall apart as the links in the food chains become broken (“Endangered Animals of the World”). The ecosystems around the world, however, provide humans with a wide range of food, medicine, and other industrial products. For example, honey bees are responsible for 80% of pollination worldwide. That means that if honey bees were to go extinct, there would be a drastic decrease in agriculture yield and the amount of food available for consumption, resulting in a massive food shortage worldwide. It would also result in a sharp decline in the diversity of plant species which would have other implications. To stop the further extinction of other