Sustainability Final Project - Renee Lassen

At the beginning of the year, I defined sustainability as the ability of a natural or human system to remain diverse and adapt to a changing environment. While the definition is technically correct, I learned throughout the year that a definition so simple as that cannot begin to encompass all that sustainability means to a growing human society. To me now, sustainability means the ability of an environment to continue to perform its natural services and adapt to changes as they occur. This can be made possible as humans learn to use natural resources more efficiently and prevent degradation to the environment. The human race, as a whole, is responsible for using the Earth in a way that cannot be supported by natural means and is damaging the Earth to a point that is quickly becoming beyond repair by a number of irresponsible living practices. These are problems are those such as the overuse of fossil fuels and other materials (we only have so much of any given element; nothing can really be created or destroyed), a growing human population dependent on large supplies of food and water, a lack of education on the practices that are harming our environment and how we can correct them, deforestation (which can lead to erosion and more carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere), habitat fragmentation (which bottlenecks populations of organisms and prohibits them from adapting as quickly as possible), and a lack of green technology to help slow our environmental impact. At the beginning of the year, it was easy to pretend problems like these were not happening, and the environment’s natural cycles would solve anything that we messed up on. Global climate change was a media myth that was exaggerated by environmentalists for their cause, and fossil fuels were something I could put in my car and not wonder where they came from, where they were going, or how much we had left. But throughout this class, I have begun questioning where all my stuff comes from and goes, and wonder what I can do and what can be done on a larger scale to limit that input and output system, and turn it into more of a cycle. I see now we all need to change our practices to limit the growing number of environmental refugees and give the environment a chance to adapt to our practices, and education is a huge part of it. I understand that the population is growing to numbers that we will not have the resources to support at some point in the near future, and that the strain on the food supply is causing erosion and desertification that only hurts the environment more. Although at first poverty seemed the antithesis of an environmental problem, I see the problems associated with waste disposal, burning of wood and other biofuels for cooking or heat in homes, and the simple desire to survive that can cause environmental degradation. With all that I have learned in this class, I cannot look at the world and the way we use it the same way anymore, and I believe everyone should take an environmental class so that we can begin to make real changes once awareness is brought to the subject.

I chose the cartoons about greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change to show people's opinions on the subject, and how little is being done in comparison to how big the problem is. People would rather ignore global climate change and hide from the knowledge of it because it's scary and an inconvenience to change their way of life, but global climate change is happening and is quickly making the world a warmer place to live. Although policies are being enacted to try and help the environmental degradation greenhouse gases are causing, the policies are going to take a while and need a lot more strength to kick in and make a difference, and greenhouse gases are allowed to turn the world to desert while the policies crawl along. These issues are happening now, and this class helped me realize we need to face global climate change and change our ways if we want to live sustainably.

The picture above represents a forest cut down and burned for paper or for agricultural space in developing countries. This becomes a huge problem to organisms dependent on the forest, as their habitat is destroyed or fragmented and they suddenly have to subsist on a smaller area of space with little or no time to adapt to the changes. Organisms cannot respond to such a drastic change, especially if it continues over time, and many populations of organisms are being shrunk or becoming extinct as a result. Without the necessary organisms to perform natural services, we loose out on our environment's ability to fix our degradation, and may cause irreversible changes if we don't act soon to stop unsustainable practices.

I chose the graphs representing world population growth because I feel this is one of the most serious problems the world as a whole is facing today. Not only is the world population growing at an exponential growth rate, which puts a greater and greater strain on Earth's resources and food supply, but the majority of the world is being added to the developing world. While the majority of those who exploit resources are in developed countries, people in developing countries pose problems as they will continue to reproduce at high rates due to need of children and lack of female education, they will continue harmful wood burning practices to heat homes and cook food, more people are dependent on limited fresh water and arable land supplies in developing countries, more people are doing anything they can to survive and therefore hurting the environment as much as necessary, and less of a percentage of the world's population is educated on the negative environmental impact they are creating. As seen in India's population growth model, even if the growing population is curbed now and the fertility rate comes down to replacement level fertility, a reproductive time lag will ensure that the population of the world continues to grow for years as most people are in the reproductive age, and the problem will continue to get worse. This is a serious problem that needs attention now to help stop environmental degradation.