The water crisis is no laughing matter and something needs to be done about it. Too many countries are suffering from drought, which is causing many families’s health to suffer. Sandra Postel attacks this problem in a brilliant manner in her article. The daunting statistics she provides just invigorates the mind to action. If there is little water available and the population keeps increasing then it is obvious that we are going to have to change our ways. There just isn’t enough water per person. Our world is stricken with too much greed- we all want to have our way whether or not the ramifications affect the people that surround us. The common saying is that greed is human nature and I believe if we want to continue living in a healthy world we need to change that.

              I set my Google alerts to search for articles pertaining to sustainability and so far I have to say that it has been quite informative. When typing in my search preference I have come to learn that it probably shouldn't be such generalized topic. The articles I receive back vary all over the place; they range from economic sustainability all the way to environmental sustainability. I have come across a few pretty interesting articles so far. An article I read the other day talked about how Europeans are becoming picky about their source of fish and how it affected stocks based off of which ones they bought. A lot of species of seafood have been over fished in the past decade which is why the European market is encouraging people to try new exotic fish to reduce the over fishing. I have come to find Google alerts very promising and I plan on continue using it in the future to come.

In Necho's video it talked about the water crisis occurring in Africa and how all the people often go to bed thirsty. I was touched by his video and how the people in the Sudan have to handle it. the video stated scary statistics such as 12.3 million people only have access to contaminated water. I can't even imagine living a life in which my water was contaminated on a day-to-day basis. Its a scary crisis that is occurring in Africa and I'm just happy to be fortunate enough to where our country doesn't struggle as bad as this.

water crisis

Why My Academic Discipline is My Choice of Study

                Choosing a plan of study for college is no easy decision. Thousands of factors go into making a choice; such as, course difficulty, percent job placement, likeability, problem solving skills, peoples’ satisfaction rate with this major, its ability to challenge my potential, and etc. Often this decision overwhelms college bound students; I was no exception. As I progressed towards my college career as a high school student, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I tried basing my choice off of what I liked to do, as well as what I excelled at. When I broke down my basic skills I knew my strengths were math, science, art, and philosophy. With these skills I knew I had to somehow shape my future around them. Once I figured out what career choices I was interested in, I then had to figure out what colleges offered promising programs to these choices. My final three choices came down to graphic design, criminal justice, and engineering.

                Growing up I was a terribly slow person. I was always the last one to finish my test, eat my lunch, finish a race, and etc. When it came to figuring out what I was good at it took me up until high school to start realizing my strengths. One of my strengths I mentioned earlier was art; I had an uncanny ability to translate exactly what I saw into a realistic sketch. I had a great passion when it came to doing my art work. The feeling I got from people telling me, “Wow that’s amazing!” or “Did you do that?” was just indescribable. Art gave me a feeling of accomplishment unlike many things in life. Considering the possibility of transferring my pleasurable hobby into a career was a nice thought; however, many problems occurred with this idea. Art Isn’t exactly a field one goes into to make money. There are millions of artist in the world and with millions of artist comes high competition, and I think I have had enough competing throughout my high school career to eliminate this idea as a job choice.

                After scratching out the idea of being an artist I transferred my time debating between a life in criminal Justice or in Engineering. I have always found the work that detectives do to be somewhat fun. One of my favorite television shows has always been law and order, which was one of my biggest influences for considering criminal justice.  There is just something that has always intrigued me about the criminal mind. Ideas and concepts I don’t seem to understand fascinate me, and when it came to criminals I wanted to be able to understand why they do what they do. If I were to go into criminal justice my goal would have been to become a detective. There is nothing better than having the epiphany that solves the enigma. All detectives have to do is be able to make connections, which is nothing more than what the average everyday person already does. That is the very reason why I chose not to pursue a career in criminal justice.

                I wanted to do something that not everybody is able to do. I felt the need to be able to challenge myself, as well as having a career that has the potential of changing the world. The world has too many problems occurring in today’s society and I want to change that. With all the pollution that is going on I want to see if I could somehow divert the contamination that occurs on a daily basis. The world’s fresh water supply is narrowing down at an alarming rate, and in some areas of the world the crisis is being shown such as in New Dheli. As an Engineer I feel as though I could have a chance to make the world a better place and that is why I chose engineering as my main academic discipline.

Resource Sustainability

In our world there are many resources that we use as a civilization; however, many that are crucial to our survival are being exhausted at the rate at which they are being used. Oil, Trees, fresh water, and food are just a few of the resources that are highly vital to our civilization, and as a civilization we must have a balance of sustainability upon our resources. Why are these resources decapitating at such a high rate? Overall I believe that these resources are being drained out due to overpopulation, economic expansion, and greed. As the highly intelligent human beans that we are, we must find ways of overcoming these issues. Sustainability isn’t always the easiest task, but once we find a way to preserve our resources to the point where we don’t have to worry about exhausting them, then we will be one step closer to a better world.

With a world of 6 billion people comes a great responsibility on our civilization to preserve the health and wellness of others, and currently we are not doing this. Everyday America talks about the horrific lifestyle of third world countries and how most of the people that live in them go to bed every night hungry or thirsty. Our world I believe has too many people and this needs to change. Employment rates are low, Money is tight for most families, our food and water sources are limited, and our world’s environment is being destroyed significantly; these issues are capable of being solved if we choose to limit our population growth. When I say limit our population growth I’m not saying kill anybody, but limit the amount of births that come into this world by having one child per family or none. I understand many people will have a problem with this and they find it unfair to limit their freedom, but isn’t selfish when you’re the ones that are hurting others by limiting the amount of resources per person because you chose to have an ample amount of children that must be provided for?

Economic expansion is another concern I believe to be a problem. All companies want to see the same thing- higher profit. They do this by spreading out their business through chains of stores. At first this doesn’t sound bad at all but as you start to think about it you’ll realize that as all these companies are growing the resources that are being used are being used related to the rate at which they grow, and with all the businesses in today’s world we have been using up ample amounts of resources on a daily basis. As a society we must come up with ways of making sure our basic resource necessities aren’t being used up, or destroyed by these companies. A company relies on growth and as it grows so does the amount of resources it uses for production.

Sustainability is no easy task. Every day we have to think of issues we have to solve to make sure our world is in balance. I say it’s time we make it easy on ourselves and do the simple things in everyday life that can help preserve our resources, recycling is a huge step towards this direction and I feel like we know what we have to do to preserve our world but I think we don’t do enough. Our minds our unlimited; however, our resources aren’t.

Food Production

            In life people need three essential things for survival- water, shelter, and food. Food in our world has never been an item too difficult to come by; however, it will be shortly at the rate our population is growing. The technology our society has been using has sustained efficiency for quite some time, but my main concern is will it continue with the rate at which our world is growing? With every environment comes a carrying capacity and I feel like we have hit ours.  The problems that we are facing with food production are the chemicals we are spraying into our crops, the drugs that are being given to the animals we eat, and the question of ethics about how the animals we eat are butchered on a daily basis. Mankind is superior to all species on Earth, and being so we have a responsibility in our hands to keep our world in balance. When I say balance I mean we aren’t doing drastic things to keep our population at its uprising rate in exchange for a higher rate of food production; therefore we should watch ourselves and what we are doing to our world and its resources. http://www.globalissues.org/issue/749/food-and-agriculture-issues

Alex Ruth

1-10-12

Island Civilization Blog

            In Robert Nash’s essay-island civilization: a vision for human occupancy of Earth- he talks about how society tends to progress immaturely and does not seem to understand the world’s true value. Nash goes on talking about how society doesn’t respect wildlife and nature, and how society seems to put its needs in front of the environment. In this essay, Nash gives society a negative connotation that I believe it deserves. When I look at society it seems as though it doesn’t seem to care about the aftermath of its products as long as it gets the results it’s looking for. After all selfish is human nature so what are we to expect of ourselves? Can we change the animal that we are? With the American mind that society has today I’m not sure if we can.

As Human Beings, we hold the most power on Earth over any other species- we can build skyscrapers, fly to the moon, build nuclear bombs, and even create virtual universes. With this power I believe we owe a great deal of responsibility to our world and the ecosystems within it. As Humans, we often forget our power and lose the ability to control it, which is why we are beginning to face serious problems in our world today. In Robert Nash’s essay island civilization: a vision for human occupancy of Earth, Robert raises a great point about how we should really think about if we are progressing for the better or worse as a civilization. As I look at the world today and see all the environmental and ethical issues our society faces I believe that we are in trouble.

Factory farming, deforestation, pesticides, global warming, pollution, and overpopulation are just a few of the environmental issues that take place in our world. Everyday these issues continue but yet we decide to do nothing about them. As we live our lives these problems affect us every day whether we realize it or not. The foods we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe are all being contaminated because of the terrible decisions we choose to make. It’s sad but most of the general population is not even aware of the chemicals that are put in the common tap water. In tap water contaminants such as chlorine, mercury, fluoride, copper, and Barium are part of our everyday drinking water-if you don’t believe me you can go to water.epa.gov. All though these chemicals are found in trace amounts they are still not meant to be digested in any way.

 In today’s world it’s nearly impossible to come by anything we digest that doesn’t have any chemicals in it; for instance factory farming animals like chickens are given drugs to increase their growth rate so they can be killed quicker for us to eat but what happens though is that the drugs they eat go into our system causing us to become sick. The rate in which our population is growing is just terrifying. It is going to create even more problems for our world; such as food shortage, less jobs, higher poverty rate, higher taxes, and less land per person. In Nash’s essay he goes on to say similar issues that would occur with a high population growth rate, “Accelerated human-caused decline in biodiversity amounts in the opinion of many biologists to a Sixth Great Extinction. More humans than existed since the start of the species occupied the planet in 1950 and population surged upward at the rate of a billion every fifteen years. Sprawling into open space at the rate in the United States alone of six thousand acres each day…” Earth is only so big, as any other environment in our world it too has a carrying capacity.

Preservation and conservation are positive steps to action for fighting the issues concerning our wildlife. In Nash’s essay he mentions a few of the nation’s wildlife protection acts: The Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) and The Endangered Species Act (1973). These acts are an important step to preserving our wildlife and wilderness; however we must do more. Deforestation is a dreadful topic of concern happening in our world. Without our forests our Carbon Dioxide levels stay high, due to a loss in plant cellular respiration. What’s so special about plants’ cellular respiration is that they take in Carbon Dioxide and excrete oxygen, and with less and less plants to do this our world becomes a world with higher Carbon Dioxide emissions, and a world with higher Carbon dioxide emissions means severe global warming.

Global warming is a severe epidemic that is destroying our world. It is causing our polar ice caps to deplete, our animals to become extinct or near extinction, and creating a world of unbearably hot temperatures. With the emissions we are giving off we are soon to turn our world into a toxic wasteland. The emissions factories give off are just outrageous! The chemicals today that factories emit cause many health issues, cancer being the predominate one.  This problem can be attacked with simple every day decisions; ride your bike instead of driving your car, buy energy efficient appliances, or limit the emissions your heating and cooling system gives off. We have control over our world and I believe it should be kept that way.

Towards the end of Robert Nash’s essay, he talks about his solution to our intrusive progression towards self-destruction, called island civilization. His idea basically states how there should be a border nature and civilization, which to me sounds absurd. I feel that this idea is absurd due to the fact we already do this. We already have national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, if you suggest that society should have more of these then I would agree, but I’m not sure I can agree that you came up with an idea that is already in existence. Nash feels that since we are so good with technology we can create a simulation of our world to get our needs, but I don’t believe this to be true. I feel like we have come a long ways since the creation of the wheel, but I feel as though we still have a long way to go. Civilization is at disasters footsteps in the years to come and I feel as though the idea of island civilization does not solve our problems.