I'm NOT Just an Object!

Two Sides of Life

Which Would You Choose?

In today's society we pollute our planet everyday through various ways. We are thoughtless, leaving the kitchen sink on, the engine of our cars, wasting gas driving aimlessly around. It's these actions that make up a country's ecological footprint, or the measure of human demand on an Earth's ecosystem. This can show how many planet Earth's it would take to support the world or one country's population. For example USA needs 5.3 planets to sustain itself while China only needs 0.9. As you can see through these statistics China is, at the moment, much more sustainable than the US. The image above portrays how if everyone polluted as much as the West it would take more planet Earth's than if everyone polluted as much as the East. Both sides have been blaming eachother for rising pollution as development grows but blaming others will not solve the problem at hand. Whoever is at the most fault, whoever is to blame, we still end up with the same issue, a dying world.

Ecological Debt Day

"Ecological Debt Day, also known as “Earth Overshoot Day”, is the calendar date in which the total resources consumed by humanity will exceed the capacity for the Earth to generate those resources that year." (Ecological Debt Day, Wikipedia) It's calculated by dividing the world's bicoapacity, the amount of natural resources produced by the Earth that year, by the world's ecological footprint and then multiplied by 365, the number of days in the calendar per year.

This is an example of the Ecological Debt Days from six different years. As you can see the Ecological Debt Day has gotten earlier and earlier each year. The authors of this day argue that this trend shows we as humans are falling deeper into ecological debt. The world is quite aware of this fact and still we do not do much to stop it, we continue living the lives that brought us to this state. "...why on earth would , say, would the UK export 20 tonnes of mineral water to Australia and then re-import 21 tonnes," said NEF director Andrew Simms. It is things like this that is destroying life as we know it. Countries not thinking straight, only doing what they see is best for them, not for the planet.

Reflection on Baraka

As time goes on our world develops and we get more advanced. We do things more efficiently so so we can develop faster, using cheap labor and sweatshops and factories. These factories let off toxic fumes to our atmosphere, polluting the planet and making living conditions worse for people facing destitution.

Many people in need rush to these types of jobs because there are no others left. Without a job in today's times a person will be left behind in extreme poverty. We are also cutting down trees to make way for the new buildings high in demand. This destroys the few places left that animals have to live in. We are losing what we held so much pride in, our culture, religion, unity; it is fading away, taken over by a modern era of "development." an era where we push and shove and try to stay ontop of the world. To be the person with the most money, power and land. We don't see how it affects others around us or even our own planet, we've turned greedy and I think it needs to stop, because one day there'll be nothing left to fight over.