Realize Our Planet has Limited Resources

In a finite world what does prosperity look like? Does it require ecological destruction and social injustice or are these just the repercussions that our fundamentally broken society has brought about? We need to flourish as human beings within the limits of our planet and to do this we must first achieve a credible vision of prosperity. To accomplish such a vision we must first recognise our limits as a planet to grasp the environmental impacts of economic activity. At the rate the human race is functioning we’re entering an era of the end of cheap oil prices, increasing human population, degradation of air, water and soil, conflicts over the use of land resources, forestry and fishing rights, steadily rising commodity prices and the problem of stabilising our global climate.

But to what extent is economic growth an adequate measure of development? Surely regularly eroding the basic of our well-being for tomorrow today isn’t development. Our failure as a society to live within our limits has led to a rapidly growing human population, excessive resource consumption and depletion and pollution on a local, regional and global scale. As population growth increases so does the need for food, shelter, water, clothes and other services and to meet these demands we rely on the Earth’s already depleting natural resources. Thus, the rapidly expanding population results in an increase in pollution and a decrease in the standard of living. A study carried out by a research group in Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970’s found that the human population would exceed the Earth’s ability to provide resources and assimilate our waste within a century if exponential growth continued. This study brought to light the unsust...

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...to solve world hunger, population control, pollution, resource depletion or the rising prices of commodities it’s a difficult task and it’s one which every individual on the planet must take responsibility for. We live in a world where consumer demands are growing and technology is improving and not every single person is going to cut back on their lavish lifestyles and give up their smart phones and fancy cars in order to improve the environment. Realistically what we need to do is to continue to farm, mine, improve technology and so on but do it in a responsible manner with respect to the environment and the Earth’s capacity. It won’t be an easy task but many projects have been set up to help improve the sustainability of our planet and that’s a start. As Mahatma Gandhi once said “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed”