Jonathan Holzer - Sustainability: The Final Assignment

     On the surface, sustainability simply means the ability to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely. We have to dig only slightly deeper to find a complex chain of environmental events and human interaction withe the environment. Sustainability is so much more than just trying to survive and adapt. If the human race wants to attain sustainability, we have to work for it harder then we've ever worked for anything. The process of attaining sustainability begins with first assessing the major problems affecting sustainability and then solving said problems. The first and most prominent issue is human population. With the world population having recently reached seven billion people, the Earth is beginning to collapse under the weight of all our needs and whims. Humans are rapidly running resources dry, and the more humans there are the faster the resources deplete. Throughout all forms of humanity, those under the homo genus have been expanding across the Earth. Now, in the 21st century, humans are running out of places to go. Along with population growth comes the other major problems of sustainability. A major problem that is being faced is water deficiency. People assume that they will always have water, but they could never be farther from the truth. Every day countless gallons of water are being poured down the drain because first world citizens think it will always be there. Unfortunately, third world countries and even some American cities are facing water deprivation. Companies capitalize on this by selling the water back to communities at insane prices, and get away with it because necessity outweighs price. Another large problem with sustainability is industry. Industry drains resources at a appalling rate. Industry strips entire forests, decimates wetlands, destroys mountains, and depletes nonrenewable resources. Unfortunately, the problems don't stop with the draining of resources. Industry also causes a large amount of pollution in the creation of the products consumers love to buy. Acid mine drainage, CO2 emissions, and dioxins are just a few of the pollutants industry causes. Its fairly hard to stop industry because corporations control governments, and as long as we keep buying the products they will keep being made. The only way to fix these problems is through hard work. Population growth will be hard to fix, but hopefully if education and medicine is applied then communities won't reproduce as often. To lighten the load of human weight on the Earth, we must conserve and recycle all of our resources (especially water) and learn clean, renewable ways to produce energy and the products consumers love to buy in a more sustainable manner, a manner that doesn't rip through natural resources and cause the a very agonizing extinction of the human race.

     This ecocolumn represents the balance of and ecosystem I learned throughout the year. Having done the project in the first trimester, I was able to truly learn how energy flowed through a system. It starts with the plants, who gain energy from nutrients in the soil, then it moves to decomposition, who gain energy from the decaying, and finally it goes to the fish who gain energy from the chambers above. Not only did I learn about the flow of energy, but for several months we were able to take care of an entire ecosystem and see what caused the downfall of said ecosystem.





     I always knew that the three R's were important, but I never fully understand just how important they were. Throughout my year of study environmental science, I learned an immense amount about the stress placed on resources and how they were quickly being diminished, and thus learned how important reducing, reusing, and recycling are to obtaining a future for the Earth. These techniques should always be implemented and encouraged throughout the seven continents. If we're not careful with out resources, we will need to complete the task of finding a new planet to live on.

     I choose this picture because it depicts how detrimental population growth is to sustainability. The cartoon shows projected population growth and how difficult it is to handle resources with such a large population. Prior to AP environmental science, I never came close to imagining how bad population impacts the Earth, and now I leave APES a changed man. Population growth is a major inhibitor to the goal of achieving a sustainable society