Sustainability and the World

Sustainability is the ability of the earth's various systems, including human cultural systems and economies, to survive and adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely. Natural capital, human activities, searching for solutions, and compromising are the four components of sustainability. Natural capital is the natural resources and natural services that keep us and other forms of life alive and support our economies. Humans should want to try to live on the natural capital provided by the earth. This main goal is better known as an environmentally sustainable society. An environmentally sustainable society is one that meets the current and future basic resource needs of its people in a just and equitable manner without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their basic needs. Human activities have a major impact on sustainability. Activities such as pollution, overpopulation, habitat destruction, and poverty can degrade natural capital by using normally renewable resources faster than nature can renew them. Environmental scientists are searching for solutions to solve the problem of living unseasonably and degrading the natural capital. But, their work is usually limited because the political solutions are left to the political processes. While searching for solutions, conflicts are often encountered. Dealing with conflicts often involves making compromises, or trade-offs. An example of this current issue is the lack of gasoline. To try to solve this problem scientists came up with the idea to use corn oil or electricity to power automobiles. Sure, this helps save gas. But, to convert the other substances into energy for the cars to use sends harmful fumes and gases into the environment and puts a strain on the world food supply. This just causes more pollution. That is just one of the many conflicts and compromises that scientists face and have to deal with everyday.

I feel that as a whole the world realizes that steps have to be taken to save and preserve the earth. But, because of poverty and other factors, some nations are not in any position to to take steps to live sustainably. They are just trying to obtain enough resources to survive through that day.

One major issue in the world today is poverty. Poverty occurs when people are unable to meet their basic needs for adequate food, water, shelter and education. According to the United Nations, it is estimated that 25,000 people die every day due to hunger as a result of poverty. There are some steps being taken to help solve the problem of poverty and hunger. "For adults there are "food for work" programs where the adults are paid with food to build schools, dig wells, and build roads, and so on. This both nourishes them and builds infrastructure to end poverty. For children, there are "food for education" programs where the children are provided with food when they attend school. Education will help them escape from hunger and global poverty" (www.poverty.com).

What bothers me about the whole poverty and hunger situation is that there are people dying every second because they can not find enough food, while there are people all around the world extremely obese who are wasting food and resources. I believe that we are going to have to do some things to help solve the problem. But, obviously when there are people living off two dollars a day and when there are and estimated 25,000 people dying every day we are still not doing enough. I think that if people spent more time trying to help others than just themselves, we would be able to come up with more money and resources to help others and in time be able to come up with a solution to poverty and hunger.