Humanity and the Natural Environment

One of the topics I have hardly written about is the topic of the environment. More specifically the natural environment called “nature” which all humans inhabit on the planet “we”, humanity call earth. My reason has been very simple, basically everything has been stated, said and written by all kinds of people.

Yet I miss something in the ever-increasing attention environmental issues receive. If you ask me: “what do you mean?” Well I mean that I have read enough about fossil-fuels, energy, mined resources, plant and crop resources and the polluting by-products of all of these combined. I have read about how in the long-term economic and efficient use of the remaining fuel, energy and resources will be an obligation to maintain an acceptable standard of living.

More precisely I tend to largely agree with those people and organisations that say that we need to mind our environment for the future generations. Yes the fossil-fuel, energy and resource exploitation companies cannot simply stop their operations overnight, I understand their perspective too. Over time, say five to ten years at least some changes can be made.

In the midst between the “protect the environment” groups and the “exploit the environment” groups there should be a third group, namely the group of researchers and scientists. This group is often ignored and given less attention by the media because their message is often not “headline” or “sound-bite” attention grabbing enough.

There is so much to learn from history, old agricultural traditions and methods, traces of regional climate change and regional traces of geographical change. Even in the Bible’s Old Testament there are descriptions of how to avoid exhausting agricultural land for instance. I should also mention the Indus Valley civilisation, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the American Indian civilisations.

In the media and debates there is often a lack of context which hurts the mutual understanding which can be made possible between both parties. Leave out the over-abused -isms like capitalism and socialism. What is relevant is the earth each of us lives on. In the coming decades solutions for how to avoid over-exploitation of the earth and its resources are vital for everybody who wants to live.

We only have one earth…