Page in Progress…

More and more when the word environment is thrown around, it seems as though it refers to something external—a place where only wild things are, when in fact it is all-encompassing and thus something we are all a part of and live within. The environment is as much the forests and the ocean as it is the cities in which we live. Perhaps this is part of why we haven’t been as proactive as we should in developing in an environmentally sustainable way to date, but there are also other reasons. For one, our prosperity and ingenuity have led us to increase our population exponentially from a mere five million people when agriculture was first developed around 8000 BC to more than six billion people today. As a result, we need more food and more land to live on, and because we need more land to live on, transportation has also become critical to our livelihoods. However, the technologies we have developed have not only led to prosperity, but also to pollution, environmental destruction and climate change.

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“Some politicians make a big deal about he fact that we don’t know for certain that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is producing the global warming. But I think they’ve got the wrong handle on where the burden of proof should be. If we’re doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere within a century, that is such a tremendous impact on the balance of energy within the oceans and the atmosphere, that I think the burden of proof should be on the people who think that that’s nothing to worry about to prove it rather than on the people who think it is something to worry about.” – Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in Physics (in Nobelity)