We, the environment
The influence of social behavior on the bigger picture
It is common to believe, that there are us, the humans, and then, somewhere outside the human sphere, the environment.
So, you can walk around in the city, talk to people, eat an ice cream, and whatever – and it will have nothing to do with the environment.
Well, that’s not true!
First of all, most of what we do will have indirect effects on the environment, no matter how we define it: the city has pushed aside something that would otherwise have been wildlife and nature, the shoes you walk in, the clothes you wear, the pavement or asphalt you walk on, and virtually anything you see and touch on the way has been created by taking elements out of their natural contexts, often from many places around the globe, and then reshaping them into what you now use and see.
Second, the city and all of its activities both consumes energy, water, and, in a sense, air, that is taken from the environment. Of course, a human being needs to breathe and drink water, but these things are used for more purposes that are not automatically needed for existing – they are additional to the needs, and therefore influencing the environment in an overstated way.
Water is used for cleaning everything from clothes tho buildings, and it is often pumped up from the ground, thereby lowering the groundwater level, which both has geotechnical consequences (the earth sinking) and leads to lack of water elsewhere.
Energy, well, it’s extreme! Light everywhere, produced by electricity that again is made out of burning oil, black coal, or something else, or by nuclear power or hydropower, which both change the landscapes and have many and large effects on the surroundings. Windmills and solar panels may contribute, and also these technologies have consequences, with such as mining for the materials they are made of, and the disposal of their remainings, once they are used up. Looking around in the landscape around a city reveals electricity wires hanging in long lines through the areas that would otherwise be visually dominated by such as trees and birds.
Air is not consumed in the same way as electricity, and, actually, neither is water. Both continue to exist after being used, just in a worse condition than they were in before use. Air and water are both polluted, and quite a lot. Cars are very visible polluters, taking in air, using it for burning fuel, and then smoking it out again. A lot of materials are giving off chemicals to the air, and in a cityscape, this means that air is being ruined. It still looks the same, so we don’t always notice the problem, but it’s there. And the dirty water runs into the rivers, lakes, and oceans, in some cases with everlasting consequences – since the water is now containing elements that weren’t there before and will never go away again.
Even when the consequences of the city on the environment at times are of a temporary nature, they continue to be done – so, each addition of nutrition to the water from washing clothes, for instance, may get cleaned again by nature, in that plants will take up the nutrition and use it for their growth. But since we never stop washing our clothes, and doing other things with a similar effect on the water, the nutrition accumulates and nature can’t handle it all as fast as we keep adding it. And the way of handling it is, by nature, not balanced: algae grows too much, which prevents other natural mechanisms from functioning, and we see how the water areas around us – even very far from us, actually - die out.
Well, all that is between us and our things, us and our actions toward the things, and between the things and nature. But we also interact as humans.
We do that in many ways, and if we imagine how two people could, potentially, sit on a rock and talk to each other, we’ll have marked one end of the scale of damage, our interaction dies to the environment.
The damage in this case isn’t big, perhaps hardly noticeable. It boils down to some sounds that may be considered disturbing to other people or to wildlife, and to occupying a space that would otherwise be used by, say, a couple of breeding birds.
As people also need to be somewhere, and there will be such consequences no matter where they are, it cannot be said to be unreasonably damaging, except for some extreme cases where they take zero considerations to their surroundings.
As another extreme, one of many, is then a rock concert or a festival, where the noise and pollution, the consumption of resources, and the energy consumption, plus all the transportation and other structural consumptions and wastes, such as the use of roads and other infrastructure, which needs to be established first, and medical care, etc. – all taken to the extreme by the event – will have a huge impact on that local area, spreading out into a quite wide area, when considering car rides, air rides, etc., plus all the production and transportation of both energy and goods used at the event.
In between, is all of our normal life. When two people drink a cup of coffee together on a café, there must first have been some people involved with producing, transporting, roasting, and cooking the coffee, and every other element in the café will have gone through a similar process. Chairs, tables, cups, and the coffee machine, but think about how many things exist in even such a simple place like a café, including also the music that is played on the radio, and the radio station, antennas, etc., and the sewer, water supply, electricity connection ad production, etc., etc.
The impact on the environment, around the globe, for making this possible, is quite huge.
And we do such things alone and with each other just about 24 hours a day. There is rarely a moment, even the shortest, where we aren’t contributing to burdening the environment.
It is great that some people will do an effort to make you recycle the Coca-Cola can, but that is really just a drop in the ocean. If we should do a significant effort, we should do much more than that.
Just remember, that this shouldn’t make us give up – if the cans are being recycled, it may mean a fraction of a percentage less energy consumption, mining, and pollution, but that fraction, together with many other fractions of a similar nature, will sum up and extend time we have on Earth until all resources are used up, all is polluted, and the planet made uninhabitable.
In some cases, we can do something with a direct impact, that is much bigger. Consider such as cleaning all waste water from cities, for instance, which within a few years get a visible effect on the life in the water areas around the cities. Many such heavy-impact areas exist, but the small-impact areas are, on the other hand, so many, that we through bundling them – or simply doing many of them individually – still can get to a good effect, all in all.
The main impact we have, together, all of us humans, is the easiest to improve – and at the same time the most difficult: Our common decisions on how to develop our societies. Together we are strong, but, unfortunately, we can be both positively strong and negatively strong, and by too much disagreement, the negative side tends to win.
And this way, we can, together, do a lot of harm to our environment.