What hope do we have for the future?

It’s scary to think that we could totally deplete our resources and pollute our lands and waters until the earth can simply not replenish itself. We can’t expect that this earth is going to sustain itself if we keep destroying it. For us to have a future that is just as good as what we have in the present, we have to follow all the sustainable practice discusses in this blog series. There are so many books and magazines on how to be green and more sustainable practices that I’m sure we could all improve upon.

It starts with the involvement of the whole community. We have to be realistic with what we can achieve and work towards continuous improvement. If we started to diligently do all the small things in our homes to be more sustainable such as turning down the heat, installing low flow shower heads and faucets, weather guarding your windows and doors, consuming less water and materials and producing less waste. There are many things we can do, that are so easy and simple we should have been diligently doing them already.

As mentioned before about the Earthships, we need to start incorporating more recycled products into our production now and building design. The hope for becoming ‘off-grid’ seems that of a distant dream that will never be reached, and maybe it is. But we can start incorporating some of the ideas and concepts for saving energy from the Earthship into our homes and buildings. Incorporate recyclables into our homes, and find better uses for them instead of having to be reprocessed into something else, or tossed into a landfill.

With a growing population, the need for smart design has never been more important. We can all live more meaningful and sustainable lives by reducing our dependency on vehicles. We can start by doing little things like carpooling, or taking the bus more often. Even better ways would be biking or moving closer to work and completely reducing the need for a single occupant vehicle. The ideas of new urbanism can help us get away from he problems we face in our communities today.

Future production and design will need to utilize ideologies of biomimicry to reduce out waste and energy inputs. It is going to take a total shift in our way of production from extraction and reducing the materials we use to make endless amount of ‘stuff’, all the way through to disposal.

If we don’t start changing our wasteful ways we can be certain that this earth is going to reach its carrying capacity. This would surly be a miserable time to be alive. We will use everything up and leave nothing for the generations to come. In this weeks class, we watched the short film by Dr Seuss, The Lorax. I had never heard of it before, being the Dr Seuss fan that I am, and I was surprised that he had already written a book that seems to tell a grim portrayal of the future we are destined for if we keep on using all our resources. In this film, a greedy Once-ler moves into a beautiful town and uses up all the Truffula trees to make ‘things’ out of them. He uses up all the trees and leaves nothing for the animals and fish that inhabit the land. The Lorax pleads to the Once-ler to stop using all the trees and stop polluting the land for the animals but the Once-ler does not listen. The Once-ler’s face is never shown, and so it resembles the figure we have of the big faceless corporations. At the end of the film, the town has been destroyed and there aren’t even any trees left to make anymore ‘things’. All the animals and fish have to evacuate the land since there is nothing left and it has been so polluted that they couldn’t even survive in it. Unless people start caring about the earth and begin taking care of it, instead of just taking from it, we don’t have a future.

Its pretty revolutionary for Dr Seuss and I think all children should start reading this book so they can understand that we only have 1 earth, and if we destroy it, we don’t have a backup, and we are going to be left with nothing.

The information used to write this blog was taken from various classes in Sustainable Development taught by Dr Ling.