Notes - Living Planet Report Review

After 9/3’s lecture, I felt like human activity is doing a lot of harm to the planet, and the government could do a lot more to create a sustainable environment.

According to Living Planet report, it would take 1.5 Earths to produce the resources necessary to support humanity’s current ecological footprint. This global overshoot means, for example, that we are cutting timber more quickly than trees regrow and releasing CO2 faster than nature can sequester it. The United States is one of the ten countries with the largest ecological footprint. Humans have been depleting natural resources and polluting the environment, since the industrial revolution and urbanization. According to the lecture on 9/3, we caused eutrophication to one of our five freshwater lakes by allowing agricultural runoffs to flow into it. Due to urbanization, many natural areas have been destroyed to expand cities and town. This sudden exponential growth in population has led to the increase pressure to have more food crops, commercial crops and animal husbandry with the help of more modern agricultural practices. Despite knowing how much damage any human activity can cause, the government still has not done much to lessen the damage done. The government should give some sort of honor to the researchers and scientists who can replicate alternative materials that mimics the organic material. If the government gave financial support, more innovators will rise and share their ideas. It might also be effective to introduce a special tax on luxurious items such as powerful sport cars or elaborate furniture made of rare kinds of trees.

Furthermore, the government could also allocate and invest a substantial amount of money into researching and developing new sources of energy. The results may not be impressive at first, but the government could speed up the process of developing these sources of energy by asking for extensive cooperation with scientists in all developed countries.

As it can be seen, the government could do a lot to lessen the damage caused by human activity. We can let the future generations live a better life with no worries through implementation of certain laws and regulation.