Vision for a sustainable world

Environment   Oct 3, 2016 by HHS Joren

There really are two questions here: 

1. What is my vision for a sustainable world; and 2. what do I plan to do to make this vision a reality.

This is a really tricky question to answer. For there are so many aspects that need to be looked in very very closely and expertly to answer this question with a reasonable answer.  However, due to a lack of time available to me, I will have to keep my following answer brief.

When I think of the word sustainable I immediately think of resources. I feel as if this is an important topic to cover. It's no big secret that our world is quickly and periodically declining in our quantities of various resources. As much as I would like to fix or at least help in the activities that could potentially fix various parts of this issue, there's only so much a sixteen year old kid from Alaska can do. One aspect of this issue that concerns me deeply is our lack of trees. I did a quick bit of research, and I found that the total global tree count since the 1950's has decreased by 50%. I also looked up the total human population increase. What I found out was the following:

The population of the Earth in the 1950's was around 2.5 billion. In 2016, that number is at around 7.7 billion.

The total population of various tree species in the 1950's was an entire 150% compared to what we have today. What does this say?

At an immediate glance I can conclude that the total count of trees is drastically decreasing whilst the total population of humans is drastically increasing at a periodic rate. I've also taken into account the fact that trees supply the majority of the Earth's oxygen in the air. 

This worries me; if the total global count of trees is decreasing whilst the human population is increasing, there may be a point in time where the total oxygen consumption levels by humans far outstretches over the threshold of produced oxygen by trees.

There's a few ways we can try to fix this problem. No matter how subtle the solution, it may work.

The first obvious solution: plant more trees. This can be anywhere from personally digging holes, planting seeds, and watering them, to cigarette companies incorporating seeds in their smoke filters so when people little these cigarettes, they're also slightly helping the environment.

I personally just plan to spread out these seeds at various locations when I have the time. However, there's only so much that I can do as I said before. I believe that the main solution is to bring this problem to global attention, and get everybody's say and their own solutions to this problem.

How about you? What do you think?

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