Climate Change and the Un-sustainability of our Modern World

26 Dec

26Dec

Now I’m not going to go into the details, the specific sciences, and data of climate change. You can do that for yourself. But I'm going to tell you why people like yourself, (yes, you) should be worried.

Climate change is the slow but steady change in world temperature. By this, we mean the general climate of our planet earth. The effects of climate change include rises in ocean levels, increases in natural disasters, and the gradual extinction of many species on earth. Of course, the damage climate change will cause is huge, and not limited to those examples. We’ve been hearing about climate change for a long time now, on the news, the internet, and from other people. The gradual heating of the planet isn’t new for us. But what we don't realize is how severe it will affect us.

I’ve grown up wearing cheap clothes made from fast fashion, eating meat and produce provided by criminal food corporations. I’ve been surrounded by phones, computers, and televisions for years. This has always been my regular life, and these things have been unnoticed, insignificant parts of modern society. I was born in 2001, and never experienced a world without iPhones, cheap junk food, and factories. But these are new things in our world. We are still studying the effects of devices on the human mind and body, we’re still learning how to deal with the medical and social effects of food related issues like diabetes, and the negative results of pollution are still being discovered. These aren’t normal pieces of the human or natural world.

Almost every aspect of my modern life is new. The cars, devices, clothes, food, and medicine, are all new. The modern society that I’ve grown up in, that seems normal to me and millions of others, is not normal. It’s not sustainable. Humans existed for thousands of years, and our cultures rarely changed. There were time periods of peace and times of turmoil, each lasting for hundreds of years. Our technology and population changed slowly, and our society largely stayed the same. What we fail to see today is that human population and technological growth has shot up in the last 300 years. The massive increase in population, in economics, in manufacturing, and other things, isn’t normal. We existed at a state of sustainability for thousands of years, we fit our ecosystem, but today we’ve pushed ourselves outside of that safe zone, and climate change is going to show us how badly we messed up.

Here’s an interesting fact about fish. Some fish can start out tiny, but grow to be huge. If you put one of these fish into a small tank, it will not grow. Then move it to a bigger tank, and provide it with more food, and it will grow. Place it into a huge tank with plenty of food, and that fish will get even bigger. But if you place is back into its first tank, that fish will die. There isn’t enough space, food, or water for him to survive. Humans have, through the raping of the earth, it’s resources, it’s sky, and it’s ocean, managed to grow too big for our tank.

Our modern culture has grown accustomed to luxuries like iPhones, cheap clothes, and cheap food. But these aren’t regular things, these aren’t normal. They’re the result of pollution, the destruction of farmland, oceans, and our air. There is no way that we can keep consuming at current levels if we want to survive climate change. Our world today is drastically different from 100 years ago, and if you go back just 300 years, the earth and human life made up an altogether different world.

Climate change has drastically increased in recent years, spurred on by effects of our modern economies and culture. Climate change will be the biggest proof of the unsustainability of our society. If we do not realize that our economy is unsustainable we will face an extinction level crisis. Fast fashion provides the clothes almost everyone reading this is wearing. Fast fashion also contributes hugely to pollution, and the requirements of this industry cannot be sustained by our planet. That means that even your regular clothes are largely contributing to climate change. Our modern food system created monocrop farming, pushed the use of chemicals and pesticides, and has treated farm animals inhumanely. Every aspect of our farming system contributes to climate change and the destruction of valuable farmland and oceans. The minerals used to make every iPhone, TV, and computer work are illegally mined in Africa, and have caused large levels of cancer and birth defects in miners and their families.

All these things point to factories and corporations being the causes of climate change in human culture. But these industries aren’t just criminal and working against efforts to stop climate changes because of greed, they aren’t sustainable. The amount of food, clothing, and products our culture demands cannot be sustained by our planet, and our population is still growing. People seeking the “American Dream” don’t realize that we can’t afford an American Dream. Our culture has grown to the point where we need to kill the environment to sustain our economic demands, be with climate change and a dying environment we won't be able to sustain ourselves for long. And someday our short half century of iPhones, cheap food, and clothing will come to an abrupt end.

If you want to help fight climate change, you can learn how through many organizations. Look up groups near you to work with other people in your local areas. Here are some wonderful organizations and movements to visit:

The Sunrise Movement - https://www.sunrisemovement.org

Bloomberg Philanthropies - https://www.bloomberg.org/program/environment/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA6ozhBRC8ARIsAIh_VC3OsMdpRt7cNcS5WHBiLMeRfoOciSiSjxAT5Qld3SmYn8pQP_wLy7saAgukEALw_wcB#intro

The ClimateWorks Foundation - https://www.climateworks.org