State of the World

State of the WORLD

Our mother earth is experiencing severe sickness; Sickness due to exploitation of resources to maintain very high levels of consumption to sustain the needs of humanity. Selfishness makes mankind the most dominating specie here on earth. We didn’t think of what will happen to the nature, we didn’t think that the destruction of nature will led to the destruction of humanity. Human activities put much strain on the natural functions of the earth, so future generations will experience worst disasters and natural calamities.

Consumerism is the root cause of this paradigm. Consumerism has now become a cultural norm. Nowadays, most people tend to work not to develop a meaningful philosophy in life but to gain higher income satisfy their fulfilment on material things. “Consumerism has become a cultural pattern that leads people to find meaning, acceptance, and contentment”. Goods that were once perceived as luxuries became necessities for high income worker.  Main culprits are the businessman who made the idea and mass produce these products, media who actively promote consumption of this products, the government who tolerate these people and of course us, the consumer who patronizes their products.

We must act NOW, we must shift this paradigm to find alternative sets of aspirations for consumers and reinforce this by our institutions. Government must regulate and monitor products available to the consumers. Transportation is one major cause of the destruction of our resources, not only it uses drastically our oil reserves but also contribute to pollution. Government must also impose strict rules to monitor the media to promote green technology and lessen the dependency on oil.  We must restore our ecology. “Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest” a practice that will have to stop. The shift to a culture of sustainability will not happen at an instant, I think in decades or in a century, but the important thing is, to start this change NOW within ourselves.

11th hour

We, consumers, didn’t see the picture lies ahead whenever we buy something new. We just buy, throw away the old ones and that’s all we do. We don’t settle in one thing, instead we buy more stuff to gain satisfaction, but are we really satisfied? I guess not, material things only give us happiness for a short time so when we get tired of this thing, we buy and consume new things. Consumption is not bad; it is that our consumption is out of balance.

We all know about the industrial revolution, and this led to several changes. One of its pros is the use of machines and development of it. I think this pros leads to the cons, because after this industrial revolution nature became our resource. Due to Industrial Revolution, exponential growth of population occurred because of the ease of production of goods and our resources. One of our resources is the oil. Oil has become the basis in which we sustain complexities. We enormously extract oil and use it to power our car, home and lights our city.  We are subsidized by oil. Corporations managed oil companies, and they tend to extract so much oil from the environment not thinking that these are non-renewable sources of energy.  Irresponsible Corporation dumps toxic materials everywhere like in besides a bay, river or even land areas. They only think about their wealth and they didn’t think of the health of our mother earth. With great power comes a great responsibility, I think that this must be the tag line of every corporation. We must take responsibilities of our actions; we must be responsible of the resources we take from our mother earth.

Too much use of our resources due to human activities leads to many catastrophic change like acid rain problem, climate change, greenhouse effect. The staggering destruction of our ecosystem will not only affect the animals, our environment but also us, who use and waste our resources. Human exploitation of the planet is approaching the critical limit and we must be concern about it. The problem is not about the global warming or other catastrophic change, these are just symptoms but the problem is the way we are thinking, our consumerism ideology. We don’t know the damage we are creating and in the end we will pay a price, the revenge our nature.

In every problem there is a solution, I believe that there is a great thing in this dilemma. This is a great time for engineers, scientist and other professionals to design a sustainable system. I, as a Mechanical Engineering student, will be a part of design engineers to re imagine and rebuild every single thing we did. Let us not be narrow-minded about what is already happening but open our eyes to see the big picture, to new possibilities and changes, a change that benefit our mother nature, us and future generations. There is a limited time for us and our planet earth, the only solution I see is to change our way of thinking and redirect our focus on what will help our future generation to see and experience the wonders of our resources, our natural resources. We must create a culture wherein there is mutual interaction of science and the world around us in a sustainable fashion. We must be in harmony with nature. It’s not the end of everything, nor is it’s not late to start a change, what matters most to act NOW and be part of a better change for the future.

story of stuff..

 We are all fascinated by new technologies release by corporations. We tend to buy these things so we are fit in our society. In our time, technology has a fast pace of production and we, consumers, also has a fast pace of changing our old technologies. If we look at the big picture, we can’t say that we are not in crisis but if we look closely to the things happened before the technology came to our hands we can say that we really are in crisis. Corporations and other people think that the natural resources are infinite, meaning they are renewable. Our government, who must watch out and restrict these corporations tends to tolerate them, because corporations have the money, and if you have more money you have more power to control over lesser ones.

We extract our natural resources without thinking that these are limited. We tend to use more than we share meaning there is no balance on what we extract from our environment and replace it with a new being, sample is planting a new plant to restore  what we pull out of the environment. People living in the urban areas tend to move to rural areas because they have no place to live, no sources of food and livelihood because people in the rural areas use the resources in the urban areas.

We are all blinded by term shop. We shop new items which please our eyes but we didn’t open our eyes to what happened or what will happen to our environment. Whenever we CONSUME new items, our environment gets polluted and destroyed and the people who manufactured it suffered most from toxic contaminated products. If we continue this habit, we will also suffer. We, consumers, are the one of the criminal in this issue, at the first place; corporation will not produce toxic technologies if we are not buying them. Corporations mass produce this technologies, because this gave them so much income, and think that they give satisfaction to the consumers. WE, consumers are easily get blinded and persuaded by their products.  I think, we, consumers, doesn’t have satisfaction in what we bought, we tend to buy the latest products and after we bought, we are happy at first, but after a while, after a new product is released. We urged to buy the new products. We forgot to spare our time to our friends and family who really give us happiness and satisfaction.

Disposal is one issue that must be fixed. In our times, when are items get obsolete, we throw it as a trash. These trashes are not just stomp in a landfill, but in an incinerator as well. These stuff creates climate change pollutes the land and pollutes more the air, creating dioxins, which is the most toxic substance. In effect, we are suffering from it; we inhale the same air we polluted.

CONSUMERISM is really a big problem. We made this happen and I think this problem will not be solved at one big solution. We must account for it, we must unite and make realizations about what is happening in our environment. We must see the unity that lies behind the process extraction to consumption; we must eliminate the disposal process and think of possible ways to have a cycle, from extraction of our resources to consuming, and after consuming, the products get back to the environment like there is no waste, and doesn’t involve health risk of the people, might as well as new inventions like green technology, renewable resources of energy, zero waste to make our environments sustainable. A line from the song of Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror” , “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change”, we must change our old habits instead think of new habits that will benefit us and our future generation.