Sustainability is one of the keys to further creating major setbacks on planet Earth. Prior to this class I believed that sustainability mainly meant to use what we had in terms of recycling products and creating them into something else that was useful, although this may be a slight definition of what sustainability can be but not the whole picture. My personal understanding of sustainability now is the ability to limit the usage of natural nonrenewable resources while still obtaining a comfortable lifestyle and preventing further environmental problems for the future. It surprises me very much never having learned about how important it is to try to live a sustainable lifestyle in a classroom environment whenever it is one of the major problems that is currently harming our planet and will/ is harming humans. The problem of not living a sustainable lifestyle was portrayed in the 11th Hour with the very vivid image of exactly how much damage has been caused by humans to our planet purely out of living what we thought was a more efficient life. One of the issues spoken about in the 11th Hour is the inability for humans to see themselves as one with nature. Humans living in advanced societies seem to believe they are above nature and therefore causes the problem of having the mindset of our impacts on the environment will not impact us. However the fault of global warming is not on Earth’s natural progression but rather the cause of humans releasing gases into the atmosphere that our environment does not know how to positively respond to. While watching this film the question occurred to me of why hasn’t anything been done sooner if this has been an issue since the Industrial Revolution began? The amount of damage done since then has increased significantly and will be impossible to repair, therefore major action needs to be taken now.
Many of the same issues discussed in the 11th Hour that are still impacting us today were foreshadowed in the history of Easter Island. Easter Island was incredibly advanced for their time in terms of the technological advances they had. However Easter Island should be taken as a lesson to prevent the fall they had. One of the main parallels seen between Easter Island and our world today is overpopulation. Easter Island at its peak had a population of about 7,000 on the island and not having the food supply to feed everyone and resulting in cannibalism. Although our planet has not resulted to cannibalism it is incredibly overpopulated, instead of cannibalism much of our food is genetically modified containing chemicals instead of eating all natural because there would not be enough to sustain the 7 billion people on this Earth.
The causation of minimal action being taken of protecting our environment could be stemmed from the fact that global warming is a wicked problem. A wicked problem is a problem that has multiple components and is impossible to solve and may not be agreeable to everyone. Whereas a tame problem can be solved by following certain steps, a wicked problem is too vague to solve. From what I personally learned in activity 1 was that it is difficult to decide on which topics are actual wicked problems because everyone’s answers are going to be different based on what events they believe are more important. The partial reasoning why drastic action has not been taken to make our planet more sustainable is because sustainability is a wicked problem and not everyone may think it is something that needs to be solved immediately.