Human: We are destroying our planet
What is the human’s role in environmental issues? Why should we enact changes? This article will explore the negative human interaction on our planet that is causing serious environmental issues, which brings detrimental impacts on our ecosystem and on human health. Respond now, or it is too late.
Earth is home to millions of species. However, humans are the one who dominates it. Our cleverness, adaptability, and innovativeness have allowed us to exist for more than 200,000 years. Humans have managed to survive the harsh conditions — by utilizing our unique ability to organize and cooperate in large groups — when all of our closest relatives and rivals have been wiped out entirely from the planet. Humans quickly spread to practically every corner of the globe, start to reproduce at an unprecedented rate — in a single century, the human population doubled again and again. According to the United Nations, by 2050, our children, or our children’s children, will live on a planet with at least 9.7 billion other people. By 2100, the human population could even peak to nearly 11 billion, which exceeds the earth’s maximum carrying capacity at around 10 billion species. But, the population explosion is not the main problem. While we undergo several civilizations such as the scientific and the industrial revolution to improve the overall quality of human life, we are also creating contamination and pollution to the environment. As the human population rapidly increases in recent decades, we exploit more land and produce debris to meet our growing demands, which subsequently makes our planet under load. Due to continuous human extraction to the planet, to a certain point, our earth will no longer support us and our fast-growing population and demands. Indeed, Human activity in the past few decades can directly link to the cause of hundreds of wildlife and plant extinctions. Our negative interactions with nature are the driving factors of the global environmental issues that we face. Climate change, soil degradation, and water pollution are just a few from the list. We only seek to extract from the environment but never return the good, which eventually results in the danger of “backfiring” — creates harm to ourselves. In recent decades, we have started to consider the consequences of harming the environment and began to make some changes, but there is still a long journey to go until we can completely solve the ongoing global issues. This is why we all have to enact changes immediately.
This article will assist to build up your environmental awareness by addressing two important environmental global issues that have been outlined in the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals, which are climate change and water pollution. Understanding how these problems relate to you as an individual will be crucial in recognizing your responsibility of protecting the ecosystem and the planet. It is our moral obligation to preserve nature and its features because we are the main cause of these problems. It is our responsibility to take care of the earth and to make our planet a better place.
Climate Change
Nowadays, everyone is familiar with the term “climate change” or “global warming”. But, not a lot of people know what these terms actually mean. The word “Climate” is not the same as weather. It is one of the Earth’s most fundamental life support systems, it interacts with Earth’s five spheres: the atmosphere (the air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth’s upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things). These five components work to amplify or mitigate changes to the climate. So, it could be said with certainty that all life on earth depends on, influences by, and affects climate. We, as humans, are able to live on this planet because of the suitable climate that the earth provides, which is created through the presence of natural factors, such as the sun and volcanic eruptions, resulting in a planet like the earth that sustains liquid water and life. Conversely, Human activity on earth has changed our climate, speeding up the process of global warming through our interaction with the five spheres. First, our skyrocketing emissions of CO2 and fossil fuel modifies the earth’s atmosphere and cryosphere, and our increase in water use modifies the hydrosphere. The amount of pollution that we produce due to industrial, agriculture, and everyday life use modifies the biosphere.
Melting glaciers, loss of sea ice, intense heat waves, expediting sea-level rise, and an increase in temperature rate are just a few observed effects of climate change on the environment. Our climate is changing around us faster than ever predicted. Global warming is causing more frequent natural disasters such as wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in extreme tropical storms. These disasters can easily destroy the environment, our homes, and take away lives. Moreover, it can alter changes in biodiversity and our ecosystem, which results in millions of animal migration and plummeting the diversity of life on earth: more and more animals such as polar bears die each year due to malnutrition, an increase in the number of species going into extinction, plant and animal shifting its ranges, and trees flowering sooner. So, what are the factors that cause this global phenomenon of climate transformation? Through centuries of carefully analyzed graphs and statistics, recent human activity of releasing greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and methane are by far the biggest cause of climate change. Besides this, the amount of carbon dioxide emissions are dependent upon human development. As shown in figure 2, the blue trendline which indicates the amount of Carbon dioxide emissions in billions of tons started to increase around the year 1970 and rapidly increased exponentially in the year 1960. This is the period when most of the countries became developing countries and when the baby boom event occurred.
The largest contributor to greenhouse gas emission, carbon dioxide, and methane are from fossil fuel combustion for transportation, electricity and heat, buildings, manufacturing, and construction. According to NASA, the activity of “burning fossil fuels like coal and oil has increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)”. This causes an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the coal and oil burning process combine carbon with oxygen in the air to make CO2. In addition, human activities of burning fossil fuels have altered the natural greenhouse effects on Earth, which is a natural process that warms the Earth’s surface. Natural greenhouse gases occur in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and nitrous oxide can effectively warm up the earth. Therefore, Greenhouse gases are essential for human survival. Without it, the world would be a frozen, uninhabitable place, like Mars. However, in recent decades, there are too many man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which act as a huge “blanket” that traps the sun’s heat and causes the global temperature to rise. In total, humans collectively emit around “50 billion tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents, the measurement for greenhouse gases) each year”, and about 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2019. In addition, the graph in figure 3 demonstrates the longer-term changes due to climate change. The graph identifies all the human and natural factors that contribute to climate change between 1850 to 2017. As shown in the graph, the red trendline has the steepest slope, so it is clear for us to see that greenhouse gas is most responsible for global warming.
There are now more than 7 billion of us on Earth. As the human population continues to grow, we continue to increase our ecological carbon footprint, which is a measurement of human demands such as our need for water, food, transport, and energy in natural capital. At our current rate of consumption, we’re absorbing “157% of the natural resources on the planet”, meaning that we would need one earth and a half to maintain our ecological footprint. Since we don’t have an extra half of the earth, we are then extracting at an accelerating rate. As a result, leading to a fast change in our climate. According to the US fourth national climate assessment, “between 93% to 123% of observed 1951 to 2010 warming was due to human activities”. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which includes more than 1,300 scientists from the United States and other countries, forecasts a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. This significant increase in temperature will speed up the process of global warming, and result in the more frequent occurrence of natural disasters.
In order to protect future generations and ourselves, we need to take responsibility and try our best to reduce climate change by lowering our carbon footprints in energy and transportation. By changing our main energy sources to clean and renewable energy such as solar, wind, and biomass, we can help to mitigate the amount of carbon dioxide emissions. This is because renewable energy is energy collected from renewable resources, it produces no greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Second, we can consider choosing sustainable transportation such as the eco-friendly car that uses energy instead of fossil fuel or to choose to ride the bike if we are traveling within 5 km. This way, it helps to reduce our carbon footprint since it provides a low emissions alternative to driving or other public transportations.
Water Pollution
Water is an essential natural resource for all forms of life on Earth. As humans, we use water for drinking and other developmental purposes in our lives, such as clothing, producing food, moving our waste stream, and helping to retain a healthy environment. Thus, water is the most important resource for us to survive. But today, freshwater only makes up a very small portion of all the water on the planet. According to National Geographic, there is only about 3 percent of freshwater on Earth and out of that percentage, about 1.2 percent is drinkable for humans and the rest is locked up in glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost. Although the amount of fresh water on the planet remains constant over decades through the process called the water cycle — continuously recycling the water through the atmosphere and back into our cups — Through the constant human activity, the availability of clean drinkable water for us on Earth decreases dramatically and we begin to face a pressing issue, the water crisis. Due to the amount of generated waste by humans into the water — ranging from heavy metals, acidic atmospheric deposition, plastic debris, and agriculture runoff to city sewage and industrial waste discharge and concentrated radioactive wastes — we affect the primary water quality and causes serious “water pollution” issues.
Water is polluted by both natural and human-made activities. But, the most direct causes of water pollution to the different sources of water are agricultural runoff and industrial waste. Wastewater from manufacturing or chemical processing in industries is directly pumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans. It contains harmful chemicals, waste, and dyes that can kill marine animals and wildlife who consume the wastewater, and harms the overall ecosystem. In addition, it is leaving plant and animal species endangered. For agricultural runoff, through the process of rain, it washes off toxic substances like pesticides, fertilizers from farms, and towns into waterways. Since these substances contain high amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen, which encourage the growth of algal blooms (figure 5). These toxic green algae can produce toxins that kill fish, seabirds, and marine mammals, as well as harming humans. Furthermore, pesticides and fertilizer can also leak into our groundwater through cracks, polluting the aquifer. Since ridding groundwater of contaminants is very costly to do and difficult to almost impossible, once an aquifer gets polluted, it may be unusable for decades or even thousands of years. Most importantly, contaminated aquifers have a significant impact on humans, especially on Americans, as 40% of Americans rely on groundwater for drinking water. Having a polluted groundwater source is leaving us with less safe water sources.
The degradation of water quality can have negative effects on its residents living in that polluted area. Bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases like typhoid, cholera, encephalitis, poliomyelitis, hepatitis, skin infection, and gastrointestinal are just a few diseases that are spread through polluted water. Millions of people are dying each year more than war due to the use of unsafe water sources. According to the World Health Organization, 80% of the diseases are waterborne, and 3.1% of deaths occur due to poor and unhygienic water qualities.
In order to retain our freshwater resources and have safe drinking water, we have to make realistic changes. We can start by making small changes in our household. First, we can start by eliminating the use of toxic pesticides, fertilizers, insecticides, and also start purchasing cosmetic products that do not contain microplastics — tiny plastic particles (smaller than 5mm) that are intentionally added to cosmetics and personal care products. This small change will bring a big impact on our environment, preventing more nitrogen and phosphorus from being discharged into our water sources. Since the chemical pollution created already requires a long period of time to be decomposed or to be removed, mitigating the amount of pollution we are dumping into our waterways can make it a lot easier for people to clean the remaining pollution. Second, we have to alert countries to be responsible for the amount of pollution that they are creating. It is proven that many countries have not been using water responsibly. For example, Japan dumped tons of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean without notifying other countries. This could create a huge side effect on the marine ecosystem and on human health. If we consume fish that are contaminated by radioactive wastewater, in severe cases, we could get cancer. Lastly, we have to start using water in a more efficient way. According to National Geographic, by 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will be living in areas afflicted by water scarcity. Personally, I found myself an inefficient water user when I was young. But as I start to change my living habit — by taking shorter showers, turning off the faucet when brushing my teeth, and washing my hand— I have made changes to reduce the amount of water that I use every day. My personal actions might seem insignificant, but if we all start taking responsibility to effectively use water, we will make a big difference.
Prospect for the future
After we have understood our relationship with the Earth, the seriousness of the global environmental issues, and the negative impacts that we are contributing to our environment, and how these effects can directly create harm to us. The challenge we now face as we head into the future is how to effectively conserve, manage, and distribute the resources that we have. In fact, scientists around the world have been working to solve this problem for decades. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor often referred to as the ITER, is an expensive international science project that involves seven global country partners. One of ITER’s partners, China, has recently manufactured the technology called the “artificial sun”, which is a nuclear fusion reactor that extracts two ingredients, deuterium and tritium from the ocean water and lashed them up with extreme heat until they combine to form helium, where it unleashes tremendous energy. The Chinese scientists claimed that the construction of the nuclear fusion reactor “will take them on the mammoth pursuit of a virtually unlimited source of power”. The benefit of the “artificial sun” is that it does not produce any pollution, it is 100% green. This way, we can minimize the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that we generate every year due to fossil fuel combustion. Moreover, the ITER project is likely to become the final solution in the future when it comes to energy supply and also climate change.
It might take years for scientists to undergo experiments and testing to actually make the nuclear fusion reactor machine to be used globally. So, it is our responsibility to mitigate the impacts that these environmental issues create on our planet and to us before we find the final solution for these problems. Thinking about ways to conserve water, to distribute our waste correctly, and to reduce the amount of plastic, we can help to save our planet from the ever-changing climate and the water crisis.
Environmental issues are real, but not unsolvable. Since humans created these pollutants on our planet, I believe humans can definitely solve these environmental issues in the future if we cooperate together. There are lots of actionable steps that we have to enact to make the earth a better place for us and for our future generations.