Nature is Speaking, We ALL Need to Listen
This was originally written as a social commentary piece for my Creative Writing class.
Humans like to think that they are invincible, but as we continue to expand our technological abilities and the space we take in the universe, we will start to face problems we have never faced before. Despite humanity being decades from space travel being a common luxury, we are already facing problems that we can not seem to control.
The biggest of these issues is population growth. The global population growth rate has been going down over the last twenty years, but the amount of people on Earth has just about doubled in that time(Roser, Ortiz-Ospina I1). This is possible because although fewer people are having children, they are living longer due to technological leaps made over the last fifty years. In a broad term, technology has been growing exponentially since the invention of electricity, but the succession between new types of tech has rapidly gone from years to weeks since the creation of the microprocessor (Roser). As with all technology, medical technology has followed. New medical tech has allowed people to live longer in the comfort of their homes, raising average life expectancy by at least twenty years, in almost all countries, over the last fifty years. In addition to living longer, infant mortality has gone down by 40% in the last two centuries and about 16% in the last fifty years. Medical technology, which can allow doctors to learn more about fatal conditions, has led to the extension of both human life and the human population. The world population has reached 7.4 billion people (Population Clock), all of whom have different needs for survival and wants for themselves.
To provide for all these people, the Earth will not be enough. All people need to eat, to have access to drinking water, and places to live. As more and more people live on the planet at the same time, resources for food and shelter will start to dwindle. According to the article, How many Earths do we need? by Charlotte McDonald, if everyone lived like a lower-middle class American it would take 4.1 Earths to sustain everyone. This simply means that there are already too many people living on Earth. And with new inventions being built and released every day, humanity has become obsessed with having the newest gadgets, clothes, etc.. Apple, for example, releases new phones, iPads, and laptops every year, which people make the effort to go buy. Building this new technology leads to massive factories with not just huge inputs for the creation of the tech, but infinitely more expulsion through used electricity and fossil fuels. Gas fuels impact the atmosphere, but liquid fuels (oil and gasoline) in water runoff deplete the amount of drinking water we have. This, as with food and shelter resources, takes away drinkable water and makes the planet less sustainable, as contaminated water eventually seeps into the ground or ends up in the oceans, taking away more resources.
While the destruction of resources is more prevalent to humans, climate change is another factor of human creation and expulsion. According to NASA, long-term warming is continuing, and although we have had record colds in the North East at the start of 2018, it is a form of extreme weather. The National Climate Assessment of 2014 recorded that “over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.” Taking a holistic view of all the hurricanes, snow storms, and earthquakes in the last six months, it is not difficult to see that Mother Nature is trying to tell humanity something. Over the last seventeen years there has been an extreme spike in people injured by acts of nature, and while the amount of deaths due to extreme weather has gone down, we have to return to the new technology that can be used to both rescue and save people in dangerous situations.
Historically, drastic changes in climate have led to the greatest mass extinctions in history. While paleontologists are “unsure” of what caused most mass extinctions, they say “‘most had something to do with rapid climate change’” (Richter). The largest of the first five mass extinctions (the third one), which led to the loss of 96% of all species on Earth, was 251 million years ago and “‘set life back 300 million years’” (Richter). It was caused by a “cataclysmic eruption” of “CO2 into the atmosphere,” (Richter). The suggestion that an explosion of CO2 could cause 96% of all species should scare people, as what humans have been doing for the last two centuries is essentially pumping the atmosphere full of the chemical. The highest rate of extinction during the third mass extinction was of coral polyps in the oceans. This sounds counterintuitive, but to counteract the inability to get as much sunlight, bacteria discarded methane (a greenhouse gas), which acidified oceans and bleached, then destroyed coral reefs. At the moment, some of the largest reefs on the planet are starting to bleach due to the same effect that human CO2 emissions are having on the atmosphere (Richter). We should be taking this all as a sign that we are leading into another extinction, but instead, we are continuing to pump out greenhouse gases and use fossil fuels. All the while, Mother Nature is trying to tell us that she can not keep going if we continue as we are.
Our planet is dying. Our oceans are becoming depleted, the skies are starting to fill with more and more chemicals, nature is trying to get our attention by altering the weather, battering our coasts, and is falling apart before our very eyes. Yet we do nothing to change this. Our leaders have no intention of doing anything that will take money from them. They do not worry about the people who will have to clean up their oily messes in the future, nor the people who might never live because they chose to destroy nature more than it can repair itself. Someday nature will give up, and humans will be left with nothing but the terrifying truth that the generations before them are the reason that their species will go extinct.
But that's what I think. What about you?
Works Cited
McDonald, Charlotte. “How many Earths do we need?” BBC News, BBC, 16 June 2015, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712.
“National Climate Assessment.” National Climate Assessment, nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/extreme-weather.
Richter, Viviane. “The Big Five Mass Extinctions.” Cosmos, 6 July 2015, cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions.
Roser, Max. “Our World in Data.” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/.
Roser, Max, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. “World Population Growth.” Our World in Data, 2013, updated April 2017, ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth.
"United States Census Bureau." Population Clock. Web.
Humans like to think that they are invincible, but as we continue to expand our technological abilities and the space we take in the universe, we will start to face problems we have never faced before. Despite humanity being decades from space travel being a common luxury, we are already facing problems that we can not seem to control.
The biggest of these issues is population growth. The global population growth rate has been going down over the last twenty years, but the amount of people on Earth has just about doubled in that time(Roser, Ortiz-Ospina I1). This is possible because although fewer people are having children, they are living longer due to technological leaps made over the last fifty years. In a broad term, technology has been growing exponentially since the invention of electricity, but the succession between new types of tech has rapidly gone from years to weeks since the creation of the microprocessor (Roser). As with all technology, medical technology has followed. New medical tech has allowed people to live longer in the comfort of their homes, raising average life expectancy by at least twenty years, in almost all countries, over the last fifty years. In addition to living longer, infant mortality has gone down by 40% in the last two centuries and about 16% in the last fifty years. Medical technology, which can allow doctors to learn more about fatal conditions, has led to the extension of both human life and the human population. The world population has reached 7.4 billion people (Population Clock), all of whom have different needs for survival and wants for themselves.
To provide for all these people, the Earth will not be enough. All people need to eat, to have access to drinking water, and places to live. As more and more people live on the planet at the same time, resources for food and shelter will start to dwindle. According to the article, How many Earths do we need? by Charlotte McDonald, if everyone lived like a lower-middle class American it would take 4.1 Earths to sustain everyone. This simply means that there are already too many people living on Earth. And with new inventions being built and released every day, humanity has become obsessed with having the newest gadgets, clothes, etc.. Apple, for example, releases new phones, iPads, and laptops every year, which people make the effort to go buy. Building this new technology leads to massive factories with not just huge inputs for the creation of the tech, but infinitely more expulsion through used electricity and fossil fuels. Gas fuels impact the atmosphere, but liquid fuels (oil and gasoline) in water runoff deplete the amount of drinking water we have. This, as with food and shelter resources, takes away drinkable water and makes the planet less sustainable, as contaminated water eventually seeps into the ground or ends up in the oceans, taking away more resources.
While the destruction of resources is more prevalent to humans, climate change is another factor of human creation and expulsion. According to NASA, long-term warming is continuing, and although we have had record colds in the North East at the start of 2018, it is a form of extreme weather. The National Climate Assessment of 2014 recorded that “over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.” Taking a holistic view of all the hurricanes, snow storms, and earthquakes in the last six months, it is not difficult to see that Mother Nature is trying to tell humanity something. Over the last seventeen years there has been an extreme spike in people injured by acts of nature, and while the amount of deaths due to extreme weather has gone down, we have to return to the new technology that can be used to both rescue and save people in dangerous situations.
Historically, drastic changes in climate have led to the greatest mass extinctions in history. While paleontologists are “unsure” of what caused most mass extinctions, they say “‘most had something to do with rapid climate change’” (Richter). The largest of the first five mass extinctions (the third one), which led to the loss of 96% of all species on Earth, was 251 million years ago and “‘set life back 300 million years’” (Richter). It was caused by a “cataclysmic eruption” of “CO2 into the atmosphere,” (Richter). The suggestion that an explosion of CO2 could cause 96% of all species should scare people, as what humans have been doing for the last two centuries is essentially pumping the atmosphere full of the chemical. The highest rate of extinction during the third mass extinction was of coral polyps in the oceans. This sounds counterintuitive, but to counteract the inability to get as much sunlight, bacteria discarded methane (a greenhouse gas), which acidified oceans and bleached, then destroyed coral reefs. At the moment, some of the largest reefs on the planet are starting to bleach due to the same effect that human CO2 emissions are having on the atmosphere (Richter). We should be taking this all as a sign that we are leading into another extinction, but instead, we are continuing to pump out greenhouse gases and use fossil fuels. All the while, Mother Nature is trying to tell us that she can not keep going if we continue as we are.
Our planet is dying. Our oceans are becoming depleted, the skies are starting to fill with more and more chemicals, nature is trying to get our attention by altering the weather, battering our coasts, and is falling apart before our very eyes. Yet we do nothing to change this. Our leaders have no intention of doing anything that will take money from them. They do not worry about the people who will have to clean up their oily messes in the future, nor the people who might never live because they chose to destroy nature more than it can repair itself. Someday nature will give up, and humans will be left with nothing but the terrifying truth that the generations before them are the reason that their species will go extinct.
But that's what I think. What about you?
Works Cited
McDonald, Charlotte. “How many Earths do we need?” BBC News, BBC, 16 June 2015, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712.
“National Climate Assessment.” National Climate Assessment, nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/extreme-weather.
Richter, Viviane. “The Big Five Mass Extinctions.” Cosmos, 6 July 2015, cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinctions.
Roser, Max. “Our World in Data.” Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/.
Roser, Max, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. “World Population Growth.” Our World in Data, 2013, updated April 2017, ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth.
"United States Census Bureau." Population Clock. Web.
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