What does the word environment mean to you? According to Oxford Dictionaries, environment means the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates. With that being said, what do we want for our environment in the far future? The environment is beautiful place to so many, so why are some people not helping to preserve it? All of these questions make one think about what the environment will be like for future generations.
I believe that the future of the environment depends solely on how we treat it today. With all the new construction and waste our society produces each day, it is no wonder that our environment is still producing all of the elements needed to survive. Killing our environment is like killing ourselves because we, as humans, need animals and plants to survive. We as a society seem to believe that our environment will always be here for whatever we need. This shows how much we value our environment if we do not take care of it.
We need a healthy and prosperous ecosystem to keep the circle of life continuing. The human activities that we act on in our society today affect Earth’s climate and ecosystem that we leave for our children and grandchildren. Our human population has been growing rapidly over the centuries and we need to build more properties to accommodate this population. We are killing off our natural fisheries, forests to make paper and houses, and we are polluting our environment with factories, automobiles, etc. Our society is money hungry and seems not to take into consideration what the environment is dwindling to.
Our ocean and land animals are becoming endangered not to mention the amount of water and Co2 we have depleted already. We, as a society, seem to forget this because what is important is the more money we have in our pockets, the happier one becomes, or so they say. It is like our society is saying we have to live life now because who knows what the future brings. Living life and using all of our resources now makes us happy rather than taking care of it now and having it last for centuries to come. Is this too much to ask?
Are we that naïve that we think the Earth is indestructible? Haas Jonas said it best when he said that all this new technology we have today will impair our future fate of our ecosystem in an irreversible way. Can our ecosystem be pushed to a limit by altering it or does our influence even matter? By pushing our luck with the environment, we are in turn saying that we do not care about nature. If we keep going as we are now, then the environment will be pushed to the edge and Earth as we know it will not exist.
Look at how many catastrophes there has been over the last decade or two. We have been faced with severe and increased flooding and earthquakes, even a tsunami. It is going to ten to thousands of years to reverse what we have already done to our environment. Why destruct it anymore? When our ozone layer gets too bad for us to even go in the sun or when the pollution gets to a point where cannot breathe, will this satisfy all the people who thought our planet would be around forever.
Our land as we know it is deteriorating right before our eyes and we are allowing it to happen. The generations after us are in trouble because of what we are doing today and that is not fair to them. If we keep going this way we will be mirroring the past as we know it with the oceans drying up which means no more aquatic life, plants dying, which kills many animals that other animals eat for food and in turn we eat them for food. It is a vicious cycle and no one wins. It may take hundreds or even thousands of years from now, but it will happen eventually.
Since we know this is what our future holds, why are we not trying to save it? There is so many things that we can do to make life, not only for us, but for generations to come a healthy environment. Having a healthy environment benefits the entire ecosystem because we would be taking care of our plants, oceans, animals, forests, and so much more. Would living things exist in our society today or in future generations? What can we do to save our environment?
For starters, we can begin to put waste where it belongs and not spread out through the environment that we live in. Recycling is a perfect way to reduce many of the things we use in our everyday lives and it cleans up our streets and lands. Then begin working until every house in our country recycles, not only at home, but at work, in the community, and anywhere else one can dump trash. Some of it is a renewable resource that will not deplete the Earth, but much of it is still wasteful garbage that can be prevented by using proper recycling. It is all about educating our society about how to utilize the resources we have available to us today.
Educating society about a healthy way of living has been going on for ages, but if we start in the classroom generations after us will have a much better chance of saving the ecosystem. Many schools across the United States have gardens, whether big or small, either on the school property or some other type of growing space. Some educators even have small windowsill plants and vegetables. This makes the students knowledgeable about the different vegetation living around us and in different parts of the world. It gives them a responsibility to preserve their own community and even bigger, the country.
Education must be passed on from generation to generation, but if it skips a generation it can cause a domino effect. I would like to see our society care more about our environment so we can all get healthier, but also to preserve our planet. There are so many questions, but all in all if we do not at least try to save our planet, we will never know what could have been. Everyone can do their part by recycling and protecting all the living things around us.
Works Cited
Press, O. U. (2016, February 10). Environment. Retrieved from Oxford Dictionary Language Matters: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/environment
