Environment & Religion

            I do not believe that religion should be based around the environment. Many older religions are based around the environment, where a group of people believe in something like a Sun god. In modern religions I do not believe they should be based around the environment. Most modern religions believe in some sort of greater being which dominates over the universe. Personally, being a Christian, I do not believe that the environment has anything to do with religion other than the fact that God gave us nature to use. Religion is a faith between yourself and God and nothing else has an effect on that.

God created humans in his image, not animals. God appointed humans to subdue and rule over all animals and the approval to use animals for food. The Bible does say that humans have a moral obligation to treat animals humanly. Also, according to the Bible, God commanded humans to have dominion over all of nature, subduing it and ruling over it. However, this does not mean abusing it. We have the approval to use nature for our own needs and purposes, such as for food. Since nature was created by God and pleases God we should manage the damage we cause to nature. 

Response to "Towards Eco-Pedgogy"

Ryan Shumate

Dr. Taylor

English 101

February 6^th 2012

Response to Towards Eco-Pedgogy

            Richard Kahn beings his article by giving incredible statistics about how humans have destroyed the Earth. One of his examples tells the exact number of animals that Americans kill each year for food and on top of those numbers, people hunt the animals for sport. According to Kahn’s source, “eight billion chickens are slaughtered annually in America.” Kahn continues his discussion by going into the global economic situation. According to Kahn, “1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than $2 per day.” That means about 43% of the world’s population is living off of $2 a day. Just to survive these people enter into slave-labor and global sex trade.

After many more examples of how humans are destroying the Earth, Kahn talks about promoting environmental education. For humans to continue to survive on Earth, they must learn to be “aware of the effects that pollution and toxic ricks associated with industrialized civilization.” Since the 1990’s, environmental education programs are mandatory in the public education system. However, as Kahn continues, he gives examples of just how the current environmental education program has failed. For example, “45 million Americans think the ocean is a fresh source of water.” One of the first things one learns when they go to the ocean is not to drink the water because it is salty, yet there are still millions of Americans who think it is a fresh source of water. Kahn digs further into the problem to reveal that teacher-training in the environmental education subject area us often limited and are not focused on like math or reading skills. Kahn supports that as a whole, humans need be better educated in environmental issues and more sustainable.

Sustainability and sustainable development has also come up in many political debates. One of the main issues is the use of non-renewable resources such as oil, coal, and natural gas. These issues are typically a clear dividing line between political parties. The use of almost all non-renewable resources pollutes the air and can contaminate the ground when it is retrieve. Another problem that rises is the economic control of resources which can cause even more pollution by higher demands for the fuel.

Overall, Kahn’s issue is with educating the public about the environment. A better education about the environment is the only way people are going to learn how to help stop pollution and to stop destroying the environment. If we continue to destroy the environment like we are, mankind will start to die out. Our current lifestyle is not sustainable and we need to prevent future generations from not having enough food or water to survive. This all starts with a better plan for educating people about the environment. Once people learn about all the issues regarding the environment they will think twice before polluting. 

Water & Google Alerts

     After our discussion on water, the many issues surrounding fresh water are very evident. As American’s we are very wasteful people. We waste thousands of gallons of water each day while some child over in Africa has to walk an hour just to get a gallon of water that is not even safe to drink. Although we have access to a lot of the world’s fresh water, it is not right for us to continue to waste it. Not only is wasting water an issue, but using so much of it that it causes environmental issues. When we tap into tributaries to divert water from rivers to cities, it destroys the river’s natural flow. In the end it can kill fish and vegetation. We cause these issues by building dams and diverting water. We need to start thinking about the consequences to the environment before we continue to destroy it all.

            One of my Google Alerts issues is “Nuclear Environmental Issues.” Lately I have read quite a few articles about the Fukushima disaster in Japan. One of the articles talked about the use of Nuclear power as being an economical decision due to the jobs it would produce. They did not think of any environmental issues that the use of Nuclear power would cause. They are now currently looking into more environmentally safe power producers such as wind mills and solar energy to produce Japan’s power. 

The Colorado River

End of a River, by Jonathan Waterman, discusses how the Colorado River is drying up and what is causing the problem. Waterman takes a journey along the Colorado River investigating the issues and finds horrible water conditions, to there being no water at all. After reading Waterman’s article I found the following YouTube Video:

The video by TroutUnlimitedNatl goes further into the discussion about the Colorado River. One of the largest issues that the video brings up is the fact that many of the tributaries to the Colorado River are being diverted to large cities, such as Denver, to sustain the population growth. By diverting these tributaries the Colorado River losses water that it normally would have received, thus lowering the water level. Diverting tributaries has occurred so many times that where white waters once were, now the water slowly crawls by trickling over rocks.  When the water levels reach such a point, fish can no longer survive and die out.  Waterman said, “The Colorado River has been engineered to death,” and this can been seen through the diverting of tributaries and building of dams all along the river. 

Sustainability

     I set up Google Alerts to notify me every day about Sustainability. Google Alerts is an interesting idea, because instead of going out and searching for information about something, you can tell Google what you want to know about and it will continue to notify you of updates in a certain field each day for as long as you want. Sustainability, according to Wikipedia, is the capacity to endure. Sustainability for humans is basically everything that we need for survival depends on our environment and for us to sustain life we need to protect our environment. Looking through the different articles I realized how much we depend on the environment and that we need to protect it and do more to prevent destruction to our environment. With Google Alerts notifying me about sustainability, I will learn more and more about sustainability over time. 

Environmental Issue

     One of the great environmental issues that we face today is the use of nuclear technology. Radioactive byproducts from the use of nuclear technology cause many environmental issues. From the mining process of nuclear fuel to the waste, all of it is damaging to the Earth. Every time we mine for Uranium we contaminate ground water making it radioactive. After the Uranium is spent it is still radioactive and is buried underground.  Radioactivity is damaging to the environment and all living things. By using Nash’s idea of Island Civilization we can eliminate the use of nuclear technology or at least not damage the Earth nearly as much by not needing as much power. Lower populations would not require as much energy to survive, so the use of nuclear power plants would not be needed to support smaller civilizations. Not needing nuclear power would reduce the amount of Uranium need and thus reduce the amount of groundwater and land contamination.

Source: http://www.beyondnuclear.org/