The Security Implications Of Environmental Degradation And Resource Decline

Often in an individual’s life they run into situations or events that prevent them from obtaining the services and products that they need and/or desire. For instance, every year American citizens are turned away from hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies, unable to get an annual influenza vaccine. Recent gun legislation in the United States has created ammunition stockpiling within gun owners. (LoveToKnow, Corp., 2015) Furthermore the recent El Nino has created a heated debate on which California farms will get sufficient water this year. Each of the aforementioned examples illustrates how the scarcity of products and services can result in serious consequences (social, health, economic, and political) in the Unites States and model similar conditions globally. Around the world, clean water, food, fossil fuels, minerals, and other natural resources have developed limited availability or reached scarce status due to the demands of the growing human population. As the world’s population and demands to raise the quality of life grows exponentially, it is the ethical and moral task of the global community to define, implement, and educate the world on sustainable practices to prevent scarcity and limited availability that can hinder economic, environmental, and political progress of the global society presently and in the future.

An increased use of solar and wind power will lower the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air. To ensure healthy future generations society must safely dispose of 200 billion tons of carbon (213). So that we stop damaging the environment, we should collaborate with other countries to stop emitting harmful gases into the atmosphere. One example of this would be all countries working together to put safer jet fuel emissions into the air. To solve this crisis we need to acknowledge that “trees, maids, education, governance, [and] economic development” are all interconnected” (298). While more developed countries use more resources, underdeveloped countries use a lesser amount of resources in more environmentally harmful ways. Furthermore, every nation must acknowledge that pollution knows no physical

With an ever growing human population and an ever developing world of technology, humans have found new ways to change the dynamics of the natural world for their own benefit.

problems. Humans moving from rural to urban areas of the country allow people to use

In the age, where the collective value of goods and commodities, the strength of economic markets and the accumulated wealth of individuals dictate the ease of life and the standards of living within society; it is imperative that we as a species reiterate to ourselves that the natural resources that enable us to fulfil all our basic needs, fashion all our desirable wants; and provisions the framework on which we build our cities, economies and daily lives remains limited and finite (McMahon, 2001 ; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board, 2005). The finality of such finite resources demands

A majority of people consider natural resources as gifts to a country. They are innate superiorities and bring people wealth. However, since the mid-1990s, many scholars gradually realize that natural resources can be one of the causes of civil wars. The more researches they conducted, the more evidence they found. In fact, abundant recourses could affect the countries’ stabilities in many ways and make them vulnerable to conflicts and wars. The advantage of abundant resources could turn out to be a fatal weakness. In the article “The Natural Resource Curse: How Wealth Can Make you Poor” , Michael Ross describes the situation as “the natural resource curse”. In this paper, I would like to fully explain what “the natural resource curse” is and in what ways the curse is affecting those countries and how different countries react to the curse.

Our increasing human population, continues to extract and develop to support our needs. As conservationists and biologists warn, human activities gone unchecked, can deplete naturally occurring or sustaining systems and resources. In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a policy analysis paper asserting:

Human influences effect the natural occurrences in the environment and as we have discussed throughout this course the Anthropocene must be protected. The evolution of Earth has continued to transition and transform into a planet that has the ability to nurture life. Everything that we do as humans is in response to the environment and our lives are influenced by earths systems. This paper will discuss the negative life threating issues that are to come from the neglect of our atmosphere. As the greenhouse gas problem still lingers, this paper addresses Kurt Cuffeys predictions for our word in the coming years. This speech will address the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and give the audience ideas on how to be the change our environment so helplessly needs.

The precious natural resources of the green earth are excessively exploited by humans. This includes overharvesting animals to the extent that these species become extinct. It also includes overconsumption of natural resources such as timber and fossil fuel which take years to regenerate. This is a direct threat to biodiversity.

The climate crisis is a defining struggle of our age bringing political, economic, religious, and environmental tensions and conflicts to surface. At this moment in history a great transitional worldview needs to take place, but is depressingly out of reach, and humankind seems woefully unprepared/interested to confront monumental challenges and change. The climate change crisis directly affects planetary boundaries, ecological cycles, and limitations on a domestic and international level. It is no secret that anthropogenic motives are causing climate change and harming the planet. Our habitual practices of cutting down forests, dumping pollutants into our waterways, and releasing toxic gases into the air have become a way of life. These practices influence the dominant political-economic system, resulting in environmental justice issues, affecting power dynamics, and ultimately delaying action for systemic shift of worldviews. The climate crisis ties humanity’s fate together like no other challenge. Looking to the future, those in the environmental field, and those who see the urgent need for change have come to the conclusion that only major changes can be accomplished by catastrophic crisis. Climate change poses the greatest threat to human survival the world has seen, yet there is a notion to ignore it.

The empirical paradox between levels of economic development and the presence as well as abundance of natural resources observed in many countries around the world has given rise to the popular theoretical argument that natural resources create conditions that are favourable to conflict (Ross 2006). Researchers who are in support of such a view frequently

Resources like forests, fish, fossil fuels, and healthy soils are rapidly being depleted and could vanish very soon. There are various reasons for this resource depletion.

On our world there are about seven billion people living at once. With all the resources available to us versus the increasing rate of people born a year, we will face a huge problem of surviving. Our earth will not be able to sustain more than ten billion people and with the rate of births versus deaths per year, seven billion is closely approaching ten billion in a matter of decades. If we do not change the amount of resources we consume and create efficient ways to reduce total consumption of resources we will be doomed. Taking in affect how we use our resources today, the most important resources that allow for our survival is oil, energy, fresh water and food are wastefully used.

At the time it was written, The Limits to Growth (TLTG) was groundbreaking in its modeling, analysis and subsequent predictions of future trends. It is a policy paper pushing for sustainable development, coupled with technological modernisation. This essay will examine TLTG through an ecocentric lens. First, this paper will briefly summarise ecocentrism. Second, it will discuss TLTG and its findings in a contemporary context. It will be argued that TLTG ultimately failed in its ambition, because it utilised a discourse system that did not address key systematic causes of resource depletion. TLTG recognises human’s overconsumption and disregard for the Earth’s finite resources as a cause of exponential growth. However, it very much focuses on the survival of people rather than the Earth’s intrinsic value. An ecocentric perspective argues that each fragment of the Earth has an intangible value and should be treated accordingly; a concept that TLTG does not address.

Current outputs, which refer to any natural resources taken out of the ecosystem, are outweighing the inputs. This is causing an ecological imbalance. The human population rate steadily increased for a couple hundred years until the industrial revolution in 1850, during which an exponential increase in birth/death ratio is observed. There was an equal amount of births in the two hundred years prior to 1850 and the fifty years leading to the next century (pg.17). Industrialization catalyzed this population growth and established the marketplace within American culture. With demand exponentially increasing, the resulting issue was the supply of irreplaceable natural core resources. Garrett Hardin, an American ecologist, was extraordinarily distressed over the global harm being caused by this rapid population growth and the system in place. Hardin is worried about the rate at which these are destroying the environment. He ties together many argumentative reasons of how the population growth and system imposed are causing great environmental harm, which are causing a tragedy to our commons, and also benchmarks to fix it.