Humanity's Last Chance: Planet Earth Calls for Urgent Change - Essay Sample

Introduction

The human being is the only being capable of rationally determining his destiny. Planet earth calls for help. The energy and natural resources crisis, especially water resources, is already a reality. Behavior change in pursuit of sustainability is not a choice but a matter of survival. Insufficient preservation, poor conservation and exponential degradation of the environment, combined with the predatory exploitation of natural resources, are factors that have put humanity before a unique period in history: risk to the maintenance of life due to the collapse of the bio-capacity of the planet (El Fellah & Behnassi, 2017). Such self-destructive behavior occurs because civilization has in its essence incorporated capitalist habits by proposing development from unlimited growth in a world of scarce resources.

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Individualism, inequality, the accumulation of wealth, the struggle for power, the ideological domain, the anthropic activities, are some of the elements that must undergo drastic changes that will conform to the paradigm-breaking of the very behavior of humanity. In this regard, sustainable development must be adopted as a model that strives for the use of natural resources in an appropriate and environmentally responsible manner, practicing management methods and changing habits to conserve what is available in the environment.

Understanding Human Behavior

Human behavior is considered the major cause of environmental deterioration. Unregulated use of the environment as a resource over the centuries, aggravated by population growth, has sown and borne fruit of the contemporary environmental crisis, which is not an environmental crisis but a people-in-environment crisis (Lundgren & McMakin, 2018). Moreover, human overpopulation increasingly demands resources for their survival.

At present, human behavior with the environment is understood from an anthropocentric perspective, which is a serious problem that threatens ecosystems. In this sense, several authors agree that such behavior would be the main cause of the environmental problems facing the planet, whose effects have resulted in a global environmental crisis (Smith, 2015).

The prevailing economic system has promoted a message of environmental crisis through which it creates false needs based on the capitalization and commodification of everything that exists, including the environment itself, thus ensuring the sustainability of the economic model (Oertwig, Wintrich & Jochem, 2015). As the authors point out, from this anthropocentric position, economic growth is privileged over the care and respect of the environment, which directly influences the relations between the human being and this, leading man to conceive himself as an agent external to the ecosystem and forgetting its relationship in interdependence with the rest of the organisms. From an ecological perspective, the human being feels that he is a constituent and interacting part of the ecosystem and, therefore, his "ecological behavior" is an understanding of the functional relationships of the global ecosystem which responds to a natural predation model that includes the factors of competence and collaboration (Fischer & Eastwood, 2016). In this regard, however disastrous the behavior may seem, it is part of the necessary relations of the organism in the ecosystem and, therefore, would not be a problem, but a natural process.

Ecological Behavior and Human Being

Human behavior has been shown to have a significant impact on the environment. Evidence of this is the degradation and environmental pollution that affects the planet today, constituting one of the main global concerns. Throughout the globe, the background confirms the existence of a problem. Freshwater pollution, especially in rivers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, has worsened to the point that about one-third of the biodiversity of its ecosystems has already been lost (Gosling & Arnell, 2016). On the other hand, the overexploitation of species has led to the extinction of 58% of the fish and the loss of 38% of terrestrial biodiversity since the 1970s at an average rate of 1.1%. Air pollutant concentrations in large cities around the world exceed the limits declared safe by the World Health Organization and it is projected that the number of deaths from exposure to suspended particles by 2050 will reach 3.6 million people per year in the world (McOwen, Scott & Shin, 2017).

The ozone layer destruction, greenhouse effect, global warming, melting polar ice caps, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, extinction of animal species, diminishing water and energy resources are examples of the disruptions that human behavior has caused in the world (McOwen et al., 2017). Air pollution in urban areas is permanently high, the scarce water available is contaminated and habitat is being lost; greenhouse gas emissions have increased by alarming rates causing thousands of deaths per year due to cardiopulmonary diseases associated with exposure to particulate matter. Human economic activities such as the expansion of agricultural land, air pollution from industries and vehicles in urban areas and irresponsible management of solid waste have also significantly aggravated environmental pollution.

Human beings develop in continuous interrelation with others and their environment, evidencing a certain behavior, which, from the anthropocentric view, is presented as a problem that threatens ecosystems, generating the paradigm of environmental crisis (Gosling et al., 2016). In this regard, in recent years there have been discussions about the responsibility of the human being to act in the face of the existing crisis. On the one hand, the authors affirm that we do not need to save endangered species since it is part of evolution. On the other hand, the reality demonstrates, we must protect biodiversity because the current scale of extinction is unprecedented. From an ecological perspective, the human being, like every organism, constitutes an integral part of the ecosystem and, therefore, its "ecological behavior" is due to its natural functioning in a network of interrelations, depending on the environment and its resources to survive and prosper (Washington, Taylor, Kopnina, Cryer, & Piccolo, 2017).

According to their needs and moved to act in favor of their survival, the human being demands from the environment resources and energy; the organism behaves as a competitor and predator to obtain food, fuel, fibers, shelter, reproduction, water, air, soil, and others that it considers necessary. These are used, transformed and returned as wastes that impact the environment but contribute to the flow of matter and energy in the ecosystem. In this sense, "ecological behavior", however harmful it may seem, is a natural part of the ecosystem (Washington et al., 2017).

The human being, by his thinking condition, presents necessities that go from the physiological ones, indispensable for the subsistence, until those of social recognition and self-realization; unlike other organisms, it is a "needy animal" that, except in a short period of time, never reaches a state of complete satisfaction; his needs as a social being have no limit and, when satisfying any of them, a new and superior one emerges instead, needing a high valuation of himself, the esteem of others, prestige, status, fame, and glory. It is precisely these needs, highly self-centered, that distinguish man from other organisms, leading him to compete not only for resources but for identity and social prestige (Washington et al., 2017). On the other hand, the permanent dissatisfaction of the human being has led him to the search for new ways of relating to the environment, promoting modifications in the productive and economic system based on the domination and utilitarian management of nature (El Fellah et al., 2017).

Conclusions

Great emphasis has been given to the various problems caused by human behavior with detriment to the environment. The reflection on the current understanding of the ecological behavior of the human being and the environmental crisis presents an understanding regarding our relations of interdependence with nature. In the short period of human life on this planet, man has been able to consume much of the earth's energy and mineral potential, a factor that reveals the alarming certainty that humans need to quickly adapt their needs from another consumption perspective, otherwise they will be doomed to an unsustainable energy crisis, which is already evident today. If on the one hand man is solely responsible for environmental degradation, on the other, he is the only one capable, in the face of the power of knowledge, to create an ecological awareness and mechanisms capable of mitigating the damage sustained and maintain life on Earth.

References

El Fellah, R., & Behnassi, M. (2017). Global Environmental Change and the Crisis of Dominant Development Models: A Human Security-Centered Analysis. In Environmental Change and Human Security in Africa and the Middle East (pp. 25-47). Springer, Cham. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45648-5_2

Fischer, A., & Eastwood, A. (2016). Coproduction of ecosystem services as human-nature interactions-An analytical framework. Land use policy, 52, 41-50.

Lundgren, R. E., & McMakin, A. H. (2018). Risk communication: A handbook for communicating environmental, safety, and health risks. John Wiley & Sons.

Oertwig, N., Wintrich, N., & Jochem, R. (2015). Model-based evaluation environment for sustainability. Procedia CIRP, 26, 641-645. Retrieved from doi: 10.1016/j.procir.2014.07.097

Smith, Z. A. (2015). The Environmental Policy Paradox (1-download). Routledge.

Washington, W., Taylor, B., Kopnina, H. N., Cryer, P., & Piccolo, J. J. (2017). Why ecocentrism is the key pathway to sustainability. Ecological Citizen, 1, 7.