In the essay, “Island
Civilization: a Vision for human occupancy of Earth”, the author, Roderick
Frazier Nash, writes of the “perfect” solution to end all environmental issues
in the world. Nash describes a world far less populated and more eco-friendly.
People would live in clumps separated by nature. This idea would require
technology that the human race only dreams about today; technology that would b
able to help all kinds of species live in places that are normally
uninhabitable.
While Nash’s idea is extreme, the concept
of Island Civilization would help to solve the major issue of pollution and
waste management. In today’s world, few of nature’s boundaries remain to help
keep the environment balanced. Humans have slowly forced the earth to evolve,
dealing with the increasing population growth and all things that come with
high population numbers. With all of the people in the world, waste management
is a major environmental crisis. The materialistic society of today has an
obsession with rapid consumption of goods and even more rapid disposal of
goods. The capitalistic goals of society’s leaders have taken precedence over
the precious state of the Earth and its environment. Humans have
single-handedly created their problem that they now have to fix.
In the small nation of Belize, located in
Central America, solid and liquid waste management is a major crisis that is
looming over the nation and its people. The tourism-based economy has created a
dilemma for the people of Belize as their current waste management plan is
centered around the needs of tourists. The local residents, depending on their
social class and where they live, face major problems that have sprouted as
result of the waste management issue. People in poverty are living among trash
mounds in slums, risking their health and the little economic opportunity that
they have. The working class is losing money due to the lack of a proper plan
in place. Not only is the waste management and pollution creating problems for
the people but the marine ecosystems are also being affected.
Nash’s idea of Island Civilization would
require for the population to majorly decrease in size, which would help to
lower the amount of waste created by mass proportions. In addition, the clump
style of societal living would help make people more aware of what resources
they use and what they discard as waste. Tourism would not be as easily
accomplished, which would help nations like Belize to place more focus on their
environmental foot print and not on their economic status. It would be imperative
for the Island Civilization plan to have a well-thought out waste management
plan in place as some civilizations would be in places where the normal
decomposing processes cannot happen naturally. The long term benefits of
implementing the Island civilization plan would allow for places like Belize to
no longer be mounds of trash; the waste management would be on a new level
where humans could live their lives and not impact the environment in negative
ways.
In Shelby's post, we both write about a problem with the same cause; Putting economy before environment. She says how the trash management was created to make it the most appealing to tourists. In the Mediterranean, they are raping the ocean of their fish to ship to consumers far away. In both cases, they are sacrificing their home land to earn money. They are valuing profit over place.
ReplyDelete