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Blog 10 - Working as an Agent for Change

“Bringing about large-scale change may start small, but eventually it always involves mov-ing beyond individual actions to acting collectively. The key is a positive vision: we need to know not so much what we are against as what it is we are for, the future we truly desire even while telling the truth about the current reality (Senge et al. 2010, 44, 52)”

It takes 66 days to build a habit. As humans we can only do so much in one day, these changes may be minuscule but over a lifetime they are limitless along with other’s efforts for change. Instilling these good habits will make change with respect to time, participating in bigger opportunities such as clean ups and campaigns can make a bigger impact that one can creep up to. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and make a connection with your fellow man and nature for a better and more sustainable Earth. Learn to take pride in these habits with positive reinforcement that you are doing what’s right, you are making a change no matter how big or small it does matter!

“Working together is where the messy work of trying to find sustainable solutions takes shape. Effective groups are microcosms of healthy ecosystems, in which diversity and mul-tiple connections promote resilience and can lead to the emergence of novel properties. The participation of different people with diverse perspectives may result in conflict and dissent, but when committed stakeholders acknowledge this conflict explicitly and work through it with debate, dialog, and negotiation, the result can be information richness, resilience in the face of crises, and the emergence of new perspectives that may point in sustainable direc-tions (Leach 2013, 237). An African proverb says, “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together.” I love this quote, it’s so true! When I was picking up trash at Rail head Scrub Preservation I had about seven people in total helping me clean the preservation and together in about four hours alone we already had 1,200 pounds of trash! It can seem like a chore to tackle a task by yourself but with help it’s dismal. What the clean up taught me was that everything is easier with the help of peers working towards that same goal. I cannot stress enough that if we want to save this planet we must band together to work towards that goal, the closest person to doing it on their own is Elon Musk and he has an entire fleet of people helping him!  

“The twenty-first century will be a time of transition. Humans have gone through several major transitions in their history: the discovery of fire, the development of language, the development of agriculture and settlements, and the Industrial Revolution. We live at the threshold of another major turning at the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, as humanity moves away from an industrial age built upon fossil fuel and economic growth and toward what could turn out to be a steady-state economy within a regenerative, sustainable society (Heinberg and Lerch 2010, 284). A great deal of the effort of sustainability practitioners is aimed toward equipping humanity for this transition.”

I am a firm believer that with every generation we are taking steps to be more environmentally inept and closer to a solution for the crisis. Overshooting our resources, overpopulation, global warming, there’s tons of problems with questions that we don’t know the answer to. Maybe our offspring will solve those problems, it’s our duty to hand off what knowledge we’ve collected in our lifetime and bestow these teachings to the next generation and to hope for a better future. We fight for our planet in the meantime by spreading awareness and showing the rest of our community that the need to act is overdue. We will transition into a more sustainable and environmentally friendly system but that will take legislation and years of work.

Sources for quotes:  Robertson, M. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Pictures:

Changes- https://strive2move.com/small-changes-big-results/

Teamwork-https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj40Yi3_cHjAhUKr1kKHfO6DHMQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.securens.in%2Fsecurens_blog%2Fhow-to-be-a-better-your-teamwork-and-collaboration-skills%2F&psig=AOvVaw3cLWisH37I-h3CBrkU2Ghc&ust=1563659961280280

Transitioning-https://www.thecastlegrp.com/8-tips-successfully-transition-intern-employee/

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Blog #9 Working in an Organization and Education

“Early childhood, with its concrete, sensory approach to the world, is the best time to begin place-based education outdoors. Schools can move away from thinking of outdoor areas as playgrounds where children go for recess in between periods when they are learn-ing. Instead, outdoor areas can be integral parts of the learning environment where students learn about the world first-hand. Research on childhood learning shows that children learn best when multiple senses are engaged, when the setting is part of daily life, and when they are actively involved and not just passively listening. Multisensory experiences, which are a feature of natural learning environments, promote healthy intellectual development as chil-dren integrate informal play with formal learning (Moore and Marcus 2008, 159)”

I agree that teaching children the importance of the environment early is better. Showing them they’re in control of this place we call earth and that it’s preservation is dependent on their actions. From an earlier age children can form a consensus of their own opinions for the environment and what should be done to keep it in order. Once they reach adulthood they can willfully make a solution to save the environment with like-minded children raised with the same thought process. Their understanding of the environment would be so much greater with the right guidance and exposure to what the current solutions are and how they can make long lasting impacts throughout the rest of their lives!

  “ People especially need to hear about the positive results of their efforts expressed in ways that are easily understood. For example, reporting that the amount of material recy-cled in two years would fill the local high school football stadium to the top bleachers is more meaningful to many people than simply expressing the same idea in tons of material diverted from the landfill.”

The more positive things people hear about their efforts to contribute to saving the environment the more they feel encouraged to keep up with their contribution, this in itself is sustainable as it’s a cycle of reassurance that feeds itself to keep going. As people see results they tend to share on social media platforms encouraging their friends and family to also initiate their own efforts to help out, this is an infectious effort similar to FGCU’s Effect! You can use ego to nature’s benefit, people love to flex that they’re doing better things than other and by taking advantage of that we can let them compete over who has the bigger impact on the environment with sharing tools on social media! This creates a win for the flexers and the environment.

“ProcessPlanning is the essential foundation of sustainability work. Its importance cannot be over-stated. Planning begins with a vision of where the team wants to be, then works backwards to milestones along the process. In contrast to forecasting or predicting the future, this approach to planning for a desired future is sometimes known as backcasting (Sachs 2015, 493). Careful planners construct a detailed map of how to get from the vision to reality, and they set up regular tracking systems with prioritized lists of tasks, people responsible, and timelines.”

Planning is everything, without a plan the execution is sloppy and when it comes to the environment we can’t afford anymore screw ups. The BP oil spill was an example of poor planning, no safety systems were in place to capture a spill and the result was a disaster. We can take time before putting things in motion. Engineers have an entire planning process involving gantt charts to have objectives ready to be completed on certain dates. They also take costs into account and materials that will be needed for their endeavors. The typical plan should have the cradle grave plan where the builders consider what the lifespan of the project will be and how to safely replace it if need be. Safety is another overlooked aspect of planning that engineers and buyers need to consider.

Pictures-

 Recess: https://charliehoehn.com/2016/01/04/science-says-kids-learn-better-after-recess/

Plan:https://atlantachallenge.com/event-planning-tips/

Sharing:https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-social-media-plugins/

Source of Qoutes: Robertson, M. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1486898&site=ehost-live

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Post #8 Products, Waste and Recycling

“A core concept in industrial ecology is the life cycle of products. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for measuring a product’s impact on the environment throughout its entire life cycle, from “cradle to grave.” The LCA methodology was first developed in the early 1990s by the Society for Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology (SETAC) (Fiksel 2009, 5). Guidelines and standards for LCA are described in ISO 14040, Life Cycle Assessment Principles and Framework, and ISO 14044, Life Cycle Assessment Requirements and Guidelines.”

I believe a end plan is essential when creating a building, software, or machine. Most engineers in the past failed to ask these questions about upgrades and upkeep of structures leading to faulty infrastructure in our current time. This would lead to government involvement such as the ‘New Deal’ where jobs were created to upgrade sidewalks and bridges. Now engineers are more conscious about what they’re building and its lasting impact on the environment, this will tell how sustainable an idea really is and if it should be built. The engineering life cycle is a prime example of how to go about creation. Following this protocol is a must for today’s time.

“Incineration can be thought of as a method of reducing the volume of landfill waste. Burning MSW reduces its volume, but the waste does not completely disappear (Pepper et al. Waste and Recycling2792006, 140); about 25 percent of the waste by weight remains as ash, which must then be land-filled (Connett 2013, 67). Ash left from incineration contains heavy metals, dioxins, and other toxic pollutants, which become concentrated.”

Incinerators are terrible for towns, tourism, and the environment. You’re essentially breathing in trash, this isn’t sustainable as it will lead to long term implications that can’t be reversed. Health issues are just the starts, plenty of respiratory issues will come with the burning of the chloride. Tourism will be affected also as no one wants to see a huge cloud of smoke nonetheless smell the burning of emissions in the morning. There’s a better way for sure, such as waste energy’s case where they’ve found a way to safely destroy the trash and convert it to energy we need to power homes. The main issue is funding for these cleaner alternatives and politics. We have the means yet not the funds to save our planet.

  “Recycling is a disposal method that provides some improvement over landfilling and incin-eration. It extracts materials from the waste stream and processes them so that they can be reused in some way. Reprocessing materials and returning them to the supply chain in some form uses less energy and generates less additional waste than would be needed to produce the same materials from ore or virgin sources (Worrell and Reuter 2014, 5). However, recy-cling always requires energy inputs and machinery, losses occur at every stage, and materials can never be recycled 100 percent (ibid., 22).” 

Recycling is by far the most popular way of reusing our materials in order to sustain the planet. If we can find a way to make something a 100 percent recyclable we would have an infinite resource. I believe its important to educate the young people of our generation the importance of recycling in order to see continued use in our materials. There’s a total of seven different materials we use to recycle, the Waste Management sorts through and puts them in their respective stockpile, yet trash still makes its way in the recycling bin. The main problem is the contamination in recycling, once the contamination rate reaches too high the pile is sent to a landfill. If people are more conscious of keeping trash out of these bins we’ll have a much cleaner planet.

Sources for quotes: Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. Pictures:

Incinerator-https://www.euractiv.com/section/circular-economy/opinion/waste-incineration-is-waste-incineration-no-matter-the-classification/

recycle-https://www.plushbeds.com/blog/mattress/where-to-recycle-your-mattress/

life cycle-https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Software_Engineering/Process/Life_Cycle

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Post #6

“One of the features of green design is that its solutions address many goals simultane-ously. Designs strive to reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, reduce energy use, minimize or eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, reduce water use, reduce waste, avoid pollution, protect natural resources, preserve or restore local ecosystems, provide places that are comfortable and healthy for people, and build community. Designers integrate multiple strategies for meeting these goals.” Green buildings have made a significant impact on campuses, businesses, and overall public perception of the environment. At FGCU we have a certified LEED building, Seidler Hall that meets all the requirements to be a safe economical and environmentally sound building to support the ecosystems around us. It’ obvious that if we build more LEED certified buildings we’d be increasing the sustainability and justifying the other construction of buildings. I’m very proud of my campus for setting an example most universities can’t!

“About one-third of the electricity in most buildings is used for lighting. Many green build-ings use daylight instead of electric lighting. Daylighting is the use of natural sunlight or daylight for illumination in order to reduce or eliminate electric lighting. Not only does it lower a building’s energy consumption, it can be part of a passive solar heating design so that less heating is required in winter; and because daylight is cooler than electric lighting, it means less mechanical cooling is required in summer. A daylit building supports the human need for connection with the natural world and thus lowers stress, improves productivity, and improves students’ ability to learn; this is why building codes in Europe require that workers have access to views and natural daylight (Lechner 2008, 386).”

Electricity being a huge utility bill could be saved on if houses were green, that money over time could be enough to send someone to college or to buy an expensive item. The best placement would be on top of some sort of hill to you could catch the rising and setting of the day until its about 8:30. Even if that weren’t enough light you’d still be saving money on your overall expenses leaving room in your budget for other stuff. You’ll also find that not using so many light sources may actually cool off your home instead of warming it up which would be a god send for most floridians. 

“In fact, green buildings must be attractive if they are to be sustainable. Buildings that endure can be reused. In these durable buildings, new resources are not being consumed in construction, and demolition waste is not being sent to a landfill. Buildings will endure if we care for them, and we tend to care for buildings we think are beautiful. Consider historic stone buildings built with care in Europe, some of them nearly 1,000 years old, still loved and still standing. Even functional brick warehouses and factories designed and built with care in the nineteenth century have become popular for renovation into urban offices and high-end residential lofts. It is not likely that modern low-cost warehouses will live as long. The old brick warehouses are examples of how a building constructed for long life and durability can be sustainable.”

Looks are definitely a must when purchasing a home, same goes for a car most of the time. The green home designers have an edge on the market because its already an attractive benefit to save on electricity and be eco-friendly. They could also follow the Elon Musk business model where they have attractive looks and function such as a smart house. The government could cut a deal with the public in order to go green like the tesla does and give them tax cuts to save money over time and promote saving the earth and money. This would encourage public support for people to go green with housing as well and conserve the looks and function for all to enjoy. If the aesthetic was desirable then so will the house!

Sources for quotes: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017.

Pictures:

Seidler hall-https://www.fgcu.edu/cas/seidler/

house 1- https://www.energymyway.co.uk/news/stylish-solar-power/

house 2- https://www.sunrun.com/

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Post #5

“As land-based oil fields have become depleted, petroleum producers have turned to marine deposits, where extraction is known as offshore drilling, and to nonconventional sources of oil: oil shales and tar sands. Extraction processes for these sources are more expensive and difficult and carry even higher environmental risks than conventional drilling, with a lower net energy yield. The difference between the energy used to produce a fuel and the energy contained in the final product is the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). The EROEI for crude oil is an average of 15:1; the EROEI for tar sands is from 5:1 to 3:1 (Wijkman and Rockström 2012, 70).” Sadly this is very true, due to lack of oil in the earth deposits many have gone to the ocean to drill from oil. This has sparked major controversy as we can’t safely extract this oil, many companies claim to have the best practices but we can’t say that if its such a new institute. On April 20th, 2010 the world would see the most enormous spill after the BP Oil spill would go down once a drilling rig exploded. This killed 11 workers of the Gulf of Mexico endangering marine wildlife and throwing local ecosystems out of balance! This call for action of over 47,000 people which is so minuscule when you really think about all the life and habitats destroyed by this catastrophic event. We can’t keep drilling for oil if its going to endanger our planet.

“One alternative strategy, known as combined heat and power, treats “waste” heat as a resource rather than as a waste. Another approach uses alternative energy sources in place of petroleum to power vehicles; options include electricity, biofuels, and hydrogen fuel cell technology. Most alternative energy strategies use energy from renewable resources to gen-erate electricity. These sources include sunlight, wind, waves, geothermal heat, and biomass. Using renewable energy offers multiple benefits: improved energy security with independ-ence from fossil fuels, few or no greenhouse gas emissions, reduced air pollution, better worker safety during production, and local employment opportunities (IPCC 2014c, 7).” I’ve been privileged enough to learn about these alternative ways to make renewable energy through kinetics. Wind turbines, solar panels, and canals all used to produce renewable energy and that green has always been the way to go. Special efforts by many network groups such as Disney World pushing the idea of renewable energy towards the younger audiences and First Lady like Michelle Obama. This would spur a green revolution such as Disney’s largest solar farm at 270 acres and twice the size of the Magic Kingdom. 

“A primary advantage of hydroelectric power is that it produces no greenhouse gas emis-sions. However, construction of dams destroys ecosystems, blocks fish migration, raises the temperature of river water, and changes hydrological function (Brown 2015, 121). It also displaces people and obliterates cultural and archaeological sites”

Debatable yet the best renewable energy come from hydroelectric systems like dams. The only real destruction is the initial construction of the dam(ironically). You’re essentially tearing apart an already established habitat in order to produce energy that can renew itself indefinitely. You’re trading ammo for unlimited ammo except the unlimited ammo isn’t so pretty. I believe if we could tear down the factories and excess heat sources on land and mount dams in bodies of water we could restore the world to a much more beautiful equilibrium and controlled environment without so much heat waste. 

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Robertson, M. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Pictures:

Bp oil spill-https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/14/the-gulf-war

Solar farm-https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/travel/story/walt-disney-world-greener-solar-farm-larger-magic-62513202

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Post #4 Ecosystems and Pollution

“ Each organism has evolved over time to be adapted to a particular kind of habitat. Habitat destruction is the most significant driver of ecosystem damage, biodiversity loss, and species extinction and comes about because of a variety of human activities.” I agree with this quote tremendously. The current rate of deforestation is 160,000 square kilometers per year, or about 99,419 miles. That’s absolutely nuts! When you think of how many creatures thrived there and are dependent on that habitat as humans we interject their lives for our wants. This needs to be stopped before we completely lose out on these natural treasures and regret it. The lingering effects are as follows, loss of habitat, increased greenhouse gases, water in the atmosphere. We’ve caused so many animals to go instinct with the deforestation and have deeply damaged some ecosystems around the planet. It would take centuries to restore this damage as trees do not just grow over night nor do animals adapt in a day to the changing ecosystem. We can only minimize the damage from here on out!

“Several laws protecting water quality were enacted in the US during the 1970s. The most current version, the US Clean Water Act, requires each state to establish and monitor Total Daily Maximum Loads (TDMLs) for pollutants. The federal Clean Water Act lists water pollutants under several categories: conventional pollutants, priority pollutants, and nonconventional pollutants.”

Water pollution is by far one of the worsts out there, we release so much exhaust in the water from boats and have no real way of cleaning it. In my engineering entrepreneurship class we are currently trying to remedy this problem with creating a buoy that will absorb the hydrocarbons with socks and filter the water back to its original non polluted state. If successful we present a much more eco-friendly outcome to exhaust in the water. There’s also about 8 metric tons of plastic in the water that birds swallow and die from and fish get tangled in. Going back to the oil in the water fish ingest it and die from sickness polluting the same fish we eat and making people sick.

“Pollution does not have to be inevitable. It is in fact a symptom of poor design (Van der Ryn and Cowan 2007, 135) and inefficiency (Meadows et al. 2004, 125). When dealing with pollution, sustainability professionals need some knowledge of the concepts covered in this chapter, both in order to understand conditions as they are and to provide a frame-work for mitigating existing problems. More importantly, practitioners need to go beyond current conditions to help envision how we might structure our ways of provisioning our-selves differently. “

I agree that pollution isn’t entirely inevitable, it’s the side effect of poor planning. Back in the early 1900s we as a nation we competing for output, always trying to outproduce the other nations with steel, cotton and coal being our best output. We weren’t entirely concerned about the effect of this because they weren’t present and everyone wasn’t as PC as they are today. It’s a matter of time before we find solutions to most but not all of the waste problems presented. There will always be someone too lazy to throw that plastic bottle in the recycling bin its a no brainer, however even the slightest revolutionary way to save on waste can produce a substantial change and diminish the effects of pollution over enough time!

Quote Sources:

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. Pictures:

deforestation- https://sciencing.com/deforestation-affect-air-10632.html

water pollution- https://www.history.com/topics/natural-disasters-and-environment/water-and-air-pollution

pollution prevention- https://www.boffinaccess.com/journals/pollution-prevention-and-control/ppc

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Post #3 Climate & Water

“Earth’s average surface temperature is about 59°F. If Earth had no atmosphere, light would quickly be reflected out as infrared radiation and the average surface temperature would be around 0°F (Wolfson 2008, 362). Earth does have an atmosphere, and gases in the atmosphere absorb some of the infrared radiation coming from the surface. Less radiation can escape to space, and as a result the planet is warmer than it would otherwise be. These gases are called greenhouse gases. The more greenhouse gas there is, the warmer the surface.” As a Florida resident I can vouch that the state has gotten hotter every year. With carbon emissions and the deforestation of woods for malls we swap our fresh air for smoke. Being a major tourist site for entertainment and partying the whole country can’t help but visit every once in a while. We are also a prime target fro the ‘snow birds’ or people that just want to be able to wear a tank top in the winter. Florida is a magnet for people and more people means more vehicles and their exhaust surrounding the area. 

“Transportation accounts for a significant share of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, so many organizations develop a transportation plan. Reducing single-occupancy vehicle travel is a primary goal of such a plan."

Every year there’s a new model of the same cars we’ve seen since the 1980′s. We can’t help but want to purchase the next big thing with all these commercials and influences around us telling us to. No one stops to think about this, how the old cars are scrapped for parts but it’s not all going to use, junkyards are filled with trash that pollute our health. Fuel emission aren’t as bad as they were in the roaring 20s when factories were being dished out like candy in order to fuel more production for global trade. They only began to get worse as Ford and GM introduced cars later on. Yet we’ve gone another way recently due to our savior Elon Musk who’s cut down on some of this pollutant. 

“The world’s largest known aquifer, the Ogallala Aquifer, has helped to turn the US Great Plains into one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. The Ogallala is what is known as a fossil aquifer; its water was deposited millions of years ago and it will take thou-sands of years to recharge (Kostigen 2010, 125). The Ogallala is for all practical purposes a nonrenewable resource, and it is disappearing. About 11 percent of the aquifer’s volume has been lost since pumping began in the 1950s (Sandford 2009, 190). In some parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, the water table has dropped more than 100 feet (Brown 2009, 40) and wells have gone dry on thousands of farms. As water tables fall, the energy required to pump the remaining water increases. The gap between rich and poor increases as farmers must drill deeper wells, buy larger pumps, and consume more electricity to run the pumps. Farmers who cannot afford the additional expense may lose their farms.”

Florida is lucky to be sitting on limestone, a natural aquifer that is responsible for filtering our bottled drinking water. As one of the grand challenges not everyone is able to drink from there water all over the world and disputes break out all the time over who is exactly entitled to the water and how much is to be given. Providing access to clean water is a grand challenge that is being undergone by the world’s top minds and we’re closer to that answer everyday. This will tie into sustainability for the people of earth and its creatures.

Quote Source: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. Pictures:

Cars- https://www.tiredearth.com/news/car-pollution-facts

Tesla-https://www.tesla.com/carbonimpact

limestone-https://halfordstoneandsoil.com/product/40mm-limestone/

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Post #2 BioSphere/HumanSphere

“The realization that Earth is a self-regulating system has had benefits and disadvantages. On one hand, understanding how systems work with as much accuracy as possible is critical to making good decisions. On the other hand, a cursory knowledge of the Earth system can make people feel complacent, believing that “the planet” has everything under control and will work it out, which may be true over time scales of tens of millions of years (Flannery 2010, 276). Unfortunately, the system’s correction may involve removing us and it is likely that before we went we would cause massive damage to Earth’s biodiversity and climate that would take millions of years to repair.” I agree about halfway with this quote, a auto-regulated earth is in itself self-sustainable and there are many different ways to makes this happen without removing humans from the equation. That is what the ‘Grand Challenges’ present the engineers with, a technology not yet discovered to sustain the planet so us humans may still coexist. It’s definitely not an easy task and may very well not be answered in our lifetime but it’s still a viable option that wouldn’t take as long as the millions of years stated in the text to undo the damage cause by our ecological footprint.

“Carrying capacity is a scientific term that defines the number of individuals an environment can support without degrading a population’s ecosystem. For humans, some environments have a larger carrying capacity than others depending on the patterns of consumption of the human culture that lives there. Ultimately, the planet as a whole is our support system and it has a carrying capacity. The planetary system is currently operating at 140 percent of its capacity (Gilding 2011, 50). If all humans on the planet lived with the same standard of living enjoyed by people in the United States and Canada, we would need 4.5 more planet Earths even if the population did not grow at all. Given that the quan-tities of resources are more or less fixed, the fewer people there are the more resources are available to divide equitably; as population rises, the same resources must be divided among more people and so the per capita quantity that can be consumed sustainably shrinks (Engelman 2013, 9).” I find this quote kind of funny because it reminds me of the marvel avenger movie that came out where essentially all the other planets face this problem that to sustain life the population must be controlled. It’s an uncomfortable fact but it is a problem, the standard of living won’t be the same for all of us with so many people being born, one solution would be to colonize other planets but we are years away from such a feature. At the same time we need an ethical solution not a holocaust, it’s very up in the air what scientists have proposed for such an answer to this problem since resources are limited and population will still be on the rise causing more sustainability. 

“As a country’s birth rate begins to decline, more resources can be devoted to provid-ing clean water, medical care including reproductive health, and support for the elderly. Improved medical care results in lowered disease rates and means that more children survive to adulthood. When parents have the expectation that their children will survive they choose to have fewer children. When they have access to family planning and can afford family planning services, they have the ability to choose their own family size. When some form of social security exists, parents no longer need so many children to support them when they are old and unable to work.” I also agree with this quote, if you were a parent it’d be easier to provide food, clothes, and a college educations for two kids than it would for five. You would need external resources to care for those kids such as government aid. Maybe this population crisis can be answered with different world governments supporting each other to provide for their people instead of taking the tasks on themselves. It’s also simple math when you think about how you’ll only allocate your resources in fewer areas for a stronger foundation. Long story short the pros outweigh the cons for having fewer people to care for, they will be better able to handle the environment they must live in that way and be better cared for. 

MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. APA (American Psychological Assoc.) Robertson, M. (2017). Sustainability Principles and Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. citations for quotes: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. Pictures: https://www.facebook.com/pg/sustainable.earth.foundation.TT/posts/

https://meme.xyz/meme/18951/thanos-the-universe-has-a-finite-amount-of-resources.html

https://www.allmusic.com/album/101-dalmatians-original-soundtrack-mw0000083970

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Sustainability

“Nature (IUCN) and the first international document to use the term (ibid. 141). It was made popular in the 1987 report Our Common Future,produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) and commonly known as the Brundtland report, which explicitly points at the connection between environment, economics, and equity. In the Brundtland report, “sustainable development” is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987, 43). Sustainable development recognizes the rights of all people, including future generations, to grow and flourish.” It is true that our ancestors had no plans on the future and were living on instinct when constructing houses, toilets and landfills. I’ve come to recently find out through my other course in engineering entrepreneurship that we actually use CLEAN FILTERED water to flush our poop, we flush no matter what yet we could be saving on waste and ensuring sustainability when millions are without such privileged. As human we don’t like to change tradition so to go door to door and fix these issues would take a tremendous amount of regulation and time. What we can do is be more cautious moving forward and learn from these mistakes, eliminating as much waste with new innovations so that we may preserve our world for the generations that will follow. As for past infrastructures such as building and toilets I believe scientists and engineers are still sorting a way to replace those in The Grand Challenges but hopefully a solution is found in our lifetime.

“In 1864 George Perkins Marsh, a US diplomat and historian, published Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, a description of the destructive impacts of human civilization on the environment. Marsh used scientific reasoning to show how the rise and fall of past civilizations were connected to overuse of resources. He sug-gested that stewardship of the planet was more than an economic issue, that it was an ethical issue (ibid.).” I agree with this statement, animals serve many purposes in civilizations from worship, clothing, food, and customs. The buffalo for example, when america completed the Transcontinental Railroad it cut the continent in half with it’s railways in turn cutting of Native American access to herds of buffalo which they often used for food and clothing. To top it off buffalo were actually almost hunted to extinction during a period called the Buffalo Harvest this not only had an ecological impact but cultural one for both the ecosystem and Native Americans. I believe its important for us to regulate hunting and certain uses of animals, each one plays a vital role in its own way and to eliminate it would bring us closer to an unsustainable environment. This is also why our government stepped in with institutions and regulations to limit the natural decay, with State Parks and other institutions. 

“Chaos theory and complexity theory, a branch of mathematics that developed in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced the study of ecology. In their 1985 book The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics, ecologists S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White described ecosystems as dynamic rather than the homogeneous stable systems of successional climax 12Contextcommunities. The idea of a stable balance of nature had implied that humans were capable of repairing degraded ecosystems, that it was in effect just a matter of getting the mechan-ics right. Complexity and chaos theory meant acknowledging that while nature does have patterns that can be recognized, nature is unpredictable; it is not only more complex than we know, it is more than we can know. We can work in partnership with nature but can never master it.”

I really like this quote because it ties the mathematical principle of sustainability in differential equations with our environment or in mathematical turn is an ‘application’. To sum it up differential equations in the rate of change, so this Chaos Theory is if we say produce less food than the rate of the growing human population (which would be two separate functions) our graph would hit zero meaning our population extinct. These are called autonomous equations where a system (food and population) over certain amount of time is described in a graph. I just really liked how the text intertwines with something I’ve mechanically worked with in another class, with mathematicians and scientist working together we can project what our future would be under certain ‘initial conditions’!

Sources: MLA (Modern Language Assoc.) Robertson, Margaret. Sustainability Principles and Practice. Routledge, 2017. pages: 4, 10, 12.

Pictures: https://dribbble.com/shots/2206113-Trash-World-Flyer

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118149190198127142/

https://www.s-cool.co.uk/a-level/geography/population/revise-it/population-models

Articles Referring to topics I touched up on:

Buffalo Harvest

https://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/five/buffalo.htm

Autonomous Equations

https://mathinsight.org/autonomous_differential_equation_introduction

Fresh Water for toilet/Grand Challenge of rebuilding infrastructure

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-03/documents/ws-facthseet-indoor-water-use-in-the-us.pdf

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/challenges/infrastructure.aspx