Environmental Problems (Mooney, Linda, Knox, David, and Schacht)

Over the past 50 years, humans have altered ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period of time in history (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). As a result, humans have created environmental problems, including depletion of natural resources; air, land and water pollution; global warming and climate change; environmental illness; threats to biodiversity; and light pollution. Because many of these environmental problems are related to the ways that humans produce and consume energy, we will begin with global energy use.

When Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast United States in 2012, 8.5 million people from Indiana to Maine experienced power outage. Until we experience a prolonged power outage, most of us take the availability of electricity for granted, and don’t think about how dependent we are on energy. Being mindful of environmental problems means seeing the connections between energy use and our daily lives:

Everything we consume or use-our homes, their contents, our cars and the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat- requires energy to produce and package, to distribute to shops or front doors, to operate, and then to get rid of. We rarely consider where this energy comes from or how much of it we use-or how much we truly need. (Sawin 2004, p. 25).

Humans have used more of the earth’s natural resources since 1950 than in the million years preceding 1950 (Lamm, 2006). In 1961, humanity used only about two-thirds of earth’s natural resources; in the early 1970s, human demand for resources began exceeding what the planet could renewably produce (Global Footprint Network 2013). Currently, the environmental footprint exceeds the earth’s biocapacity-the area of land and oceans available to produce renewable resources and absorb CO2 emissions-by more than 50 percent, meaning we currently use 1.5 planet earths to support our consumption. Rich countries that consume more goods and produce more carbon dioxide have much larger environmental footprint than poor countries. If every person in the world lived like an average resident of the United States, a total of four earths would be required to support humanity’s annual demand on nature. If the current global patterns of consumption continue, we would need the equivalent of 2.9 planet earths to support us by 2050 (WWF 2012).

Every year the Global Footprint Network identifies Earth Overshoot Day- the approximate date on which humanity’s annual demand on the planet’s resources exceeds what our planet can renew in a year. In 2013, Earth Overshoot Day was August 20, meaning that in less than eight months, we used as much natural resources as our planet can renew in a year (Global Footprint Network 2013).

Population growth and consumption patterns are depleting natural resources such as forests, water, minerals, and fossil fuels. About 1.2 billion people- nearly one-fifth of the world’s population-live in areas of physical water scarcity, which occurs when there is not enough water to meet demand (Kumar 2013). Water supplies around the world are dwindling, while the demand for water continues to increase because of population growth, industrialization, rising living standards, and changing diets that include more food products that require larger amounts of water to produce: milk, eggs, chicken, and beef. With 70 percent of freshwater use going to agriculture, water shortages threaten food production and supply.

The world’s forests are also being depleted due to the expansion of agricultural land, human settlements, wood harvesting, and road building. The result is deforestation-the conversion of forestland to non-forestland. Global forest cover has been reduced by half of what it was 8,000 years ago (Gardner 2005). Between 2000 and 2010, the world’s forests shrank by an area roughly the size of France (Normander 2011). Deforestation displaces people and wild species from their habitats; soil erosion caused by deforestation can cause severe flooding as well as contribute to global warming (fewer trees=less oxygen in the atmosphere/more CO2). Deforestation also contributes to desertification or the degradation of semiarid land, which results in the expansion of desert land that is unusable for agriculture. As more land turns to desert, populations can no longer sustain a livelihood on the land, and so they migrate to urban areas or other countries, contributing to social and political instability.

Sources

Mooney, Linda, Knox, David, and Schacht, Caroline 2015. Understanding Social Problems. Cengage Learning: Boston, MA.

Sawin, Janet. 2004. “Making Better Energy Choices.” In State of the World 2004. Linda Starke, ed. (pp. 24-43). New York: W.W. Norton.

Lamm, Richard. 2006. “The Culture of Growth and the Culture of Limits.” Conservation Biology 20(2): 269-271.

WWF (World Wildlife Federation). 2012. Living Planet Report, 9^th ed. World Wildlife Fund, Zoological Society of London. Global Footprint Network, and the European Space Agency. Available at www.panda.org

Global Footprint Network, 2013. “August 20^th is Earth Overshoot Day.” Press release Available at www.footprintnetwork.org

Kumar, Supriya. 2013 (March 13). “The Looming Threat of Water Scarcity.” Vital Signs World Watch Institute. Available at vitalsigns.worldwatch.org

Normander, Bo. 2011 (February 23). “World’s Forests Continue to Shrink.” Vital Signs. World Watch Institute. Available at vitalsigns.worldwatch.org