Our global economy is consuming renewable resources rapidly than we can restore and demand has overreached the support of natural systems. Our twenty-first century civilization is encountering an outgrowing capacity, which is moving us onto an economic path that is not environmentally sustainable. Today, we face many environmental problems that put us at risk in achieving long-term sustainability, but we all have the decision to take action and move onto a path that sustains economic progress or watch our modern economy decline and collapse. We cannot say that we do not have the resources to move the world onto a path that can sustain progress because we do have the resources, but we need to respond to these threats at a rapid speed. We are also not the first civilization to face environmentally and economic decline. Past societies that have collapsed are relevant to the environmental problems we face today because they are our main threats, we thereby have the opportunity to learn from the past. The greatest threats we are presently facing to sustain humanity include, deforestation, global climate change, overfishing, population growth, consumption of cheap energy sources, and failing states, which can most likely be solved by introducing a new economic system that meets all the basic needs for everyone 's satisfaction and that is powered by abundant sources of renewable energy.
To begin with, the consumption of cheap energy sources is a great threat to sustainability
ou can only have so much good before it is all gone. Resource depletion is the biggest environmental issues known to man. As humans we’re using what we have to live, but we use more than we give out. Through science, we’re finally starting to understand that people are using too much of the resources and altering the face of the earth. If we’re not careful, these problems can’t be fixed.
Another very crucial environmental issue, besides global warming, involves the finite nature of natural re, which are being depleted faster than their replenishment rates. The development model of the 20th century, which promoted the continuous consumption of products, has resulted in the reduction of agriculture land, food, water re as also fossil fuels. If humanity continues to consume fossil fuels at the same rate as today, oil re will run out by 2030, gas by 2040 and coal by 2200. By 2025, the number of people suffering due to water stress will rise to approximately 3.5 billion and almost half the world’s population is expected to experience high water stress by
Did you know that there are 13 species of animals who we may have to say goodbye to in 2015, or an estimated 2.2 billion tons of waste is yearly dumped into oceans? There is no need to research the litany of environmental changes; news such as global warming, air pollution, or resource scarcity that choke environmental problems to appear daily on TV screens and in newspapers. Even with these particularly cautions, many of us are still facing environmental catastrophes with overly optimistic attitudes, ignoring how serious the matter is. This form of the unrealistic expectation is similar to the blind development in our technological society that engenders a series of environmental and economic problems. Paul Ehrlich, [1] a Stanford University
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
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.
The purpose of the following blog post is to introduce the reader to the relationship between our global Economy, the Energy that we produce and the Environment we are part of, also known as the three Es. My goal is to give my readers a better understanding of the connections these three different areas have and how they relate to one another. Furthermore I would like to enable readers to comprehend the increasing challenges all three E’s are facing, and the implications these may have on our future.
It is a fact that people in different parts of the world have already experienced and realized the detrimental effects of their activities where they live. As much as people do not like to live in a dirty city, they are concerned to cut down all the forests and to poison the entire potable water. The governments of different countries together with businesses are ready to implement and fund programs to restore and preserve the environment, but the difficulty lies in the fact that different countries, like people, have different levels of understanding and implementation of these actions. Mahatma Gandhi said: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.” It is not difficult to understand, that the main geneses
All around the world, people are consuming more resources, than what can be replenished in the same amount of time. The United States has one of the largest ecological footprints around the world; we are depleting resources very
In the awakening of the Industrial Revolution around the 1800s, technology, and science rapidly advanced, leaving the human race unable to resist the manufacturing age that aggressively expanded in the 21st century. With all these changes, the launch of the industrial era witnessed a revolutionary transition from the small-scale and fewer pollutant factories to the full-scale industries that became mass producers and manufacture units through the centuries. However, the lack of policies to control pollution, the unplanned industrial growth, and the industries’ inefficiency to dispose of the waste are a couple of examples that have lead– particularly the U.S., to face major environmental disasters due to the excessive and continuous industrial pollution that arose as a result of industrialization. In response to these changes, it is necessary that our nation as a world power invest in better technology for the disposal of waste and recycling since at this point technological regression is somewhat unreal. In addition, similarly to what Rachel Carson and Jared Diamond implicitly advocated in their essays, we must aim to push policies into place to prevent the misuse of land, promote organic methods for production, and encourage the school system to invest in environmental activities to encourage the millennial generation in every corner of the world to adopt a green mindset.
The environment has been put in a dangerous position of not having sufficient amount of resources for current residents and the future generations that are to come. Many things such as personal needs put the environment in this position, but most of time we use these products because they are needed. Earth has become reliant on the resources, therefore we use up our resources way too fast. Our current obstacle to obtaining sustainability is we don't manage our resources, and they are used too often when there is not enough to begin with. Individually we are responsible for ourselves and the actions that are used to take care of the environment. To reach sustainability, there needs to be a limit of how much is used.
Magdoff and Foster’s book ‘What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism’ aims to motivate people to start critically thinking of solutions outside of capitalism by means of exploring the role of the capitalist system in causing mass environmental degradation as planetary boundaries are pushed. They seek to explain how another social, economic, and political system is essential for solving the current ecological (and economic crises). The capitalist system is driven by profit and expansion, so no matter how ‘green’ the system can try to become, the environment will not survive its constant exploitation. New technologies and zero-growth economies are not the answer to the environmental destruction, but maybe an
First of all, our country has experienced the decline of our natural resources, like tragic forest fires, the pollution of our water supply and damaging air pollution, not to mention food contamination. Anyone with any intelligence can overlook our growing environmental epidemic. Some people may not be aware of the severity of the problem, but most would agree that our communities need to be protected and preserved. This is why now scientists, financial advisors and economists are mutually concerned by the obvious dilemma in recognizing that our society is changing and needs to be redirected into a more stable, healthy and sustainable direction.
Human production and development systems have increasingly made use of the earth's resources, gradually leading to what can now be described as environmental crisis. Without immediate and future concern for the ways humans treat the planet and surrounding atmosphere, humans could be the creators of their own destruction. Economic, social, and political systems have all added to the degradation of the environment, such as mineral resource extraction, wars, political boundaries, and policy for actions taken within those boundaries. In order to attack the root causes of environmental destruction, we must first confront the reasons behind human actions, and develop ways to overcome the
As of recently, there has been an ever-growing buzz regarding the environment and being sustainable, and we need to embrace this movement. As the population grows, our demands on Earth’s resources grow, and this current rate is not sustainable. Barring any change, we will not have enough freshwater and natural resources to support our society in the near future. Each day, we incur more and more damage through the demands of consumerism, and this must come to an end. We must, as a society, take it upon ourselves to make individual changes which will potentially be the start of a global shift to a sustainable lifestyle. Our conscious decisions and actions will determine the future health of our planet. Right now is the time we can make a