The Decline of Our World -- Blog Action Day

Oct. 15th has been dubbed Blog Action Day, which means that bloggers worldwide are supposed to unite and take action by blogging about the environment today. No prob…

We’re all aware, I think, of our changing Earth. But it continually alarms me to here how much and how fast things have been changing lately. Here’re a few things I’ve recently read:

• Melting Ice Caps — In the last thirty years, the Northern Ice Cap spanned from Canada to Finland. Today that has declined by 20%. Scientists predict extinction of the polar bear due to loss of habitat.
• Rising Sea Levels — With the decline of the polar ice caps (north and south), oceans are raising at an ever faster rate. Coastal areas like Florida, New York City, Denmark and others would be reclaimed by the sea.

• Ozone Holes — The increase in greenhouse gas production continually eats away at the Earth’s ozone layer letting in harmful UV light. This exacerbates the problem and results in yet fully determined negative side effects.
• De-forestation — The Amazon continues to be raped and pillaged. Cattle and scrub brush more important to the civilization in South America than potential disease cures and the countless species still undiscovered that go extinct before we’re even aware of their presence.
• Over Fishing — From inland lakes to our oceans, 20 of the major “food fishes” have all but disappeared. Over 70% of fish sold as “Red Snapper” are really another species. Advances in fishing technology allow us to over-consume this resource much faster than it’s able to replenish.
• Coral Reef Decline — The constant influx of fertilizer into our rivers empties into the oceans and poisons them. Coral reefs are being exterminated within years. These are reefs that are thousands of years old and take hundreds of years to grow back. Almost all of the oceans immense biodiversity is in the coral reef habitat.
• Plastic — it’s a fossil fuel bi-product, takes millions of years to biodegrade, and is our largest contributer of waste. Did you know there’s a floating island of plastic in the Pacific the size of Texas? This mass won’t go away and only grows bigger each day.

And these are just a handful of the problems we face. These issues feed on each other and are not fixable by themselves. We must take a proactive stance against all of them at once. This primarily means weaning ourselves from the consumption of fossil fuels. This step is what must be realized in order to stop our Earth’s decline.

The problem as I see it, is we are a common society of instant gratification. Planning for the future is secondary to planning for today. Until we form the mindset that our future generations are more important than ourselves, I fear there’s little hope.

Come on people — prove me wrong.