Articles on Sustainability
Sustainability is Putting Back as much as you Take Away. That way the Earth will sustain us indefinitely. If we keep taking without putting something back, the Earth's resources will eventually be so depleted that life will be unsustainable.
One of the worst "inventions" of the Twentieth Century was the idea of "Planned Obsolescence". Big Business found out long ago that they couldn't sell people more goods if the goods they sold lasted a long time, so Big Business, in typical profitmongering fashion, engineered into their products a shorter lifespan. This becomes more and more of a problem in an age of dwindling resources, and a crisis point will eventually be reached unless we all say no (as much as is possible) to planned obsolescence and other backwards and outmoded market thinking.
Big Agribusiness, founded on multibillion dollar farm subsidies and economies of scale, has warped the economics of food not just in the US, but also in other countries. If it costs a Mexican farmer more to grow crops than what those same US crops are sold for in Mexico, the Mexican farmer ends up losing his land and seeking work elsewhere (maybe illegally in the US) , which changes the very basis of the Mexican way of life, splitting up families, and substituting an urban lifestyle for a rural one. The food sold in the center aisles of any US supermarket are an amazingly toxic and health shattering blend of farm subsidy cash crops, and end up to be cheaper than their more natural counterparts, ensuring that poor people's health will be affected, with diabetes and heart disease becoming epidemic. The produce that is sold in US supermarkets has been shipped hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to a packaging plant, then shipped back out hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles back out to grocery chains. The irony of this is that sometimes those farms where the food is grown is right in our own backyards. And everything is packaged in plastic made from petroleum. The problems with e coli in spinach and eggs and meat is also caused by those same economies of scale and farm subsidies. Cattle and Chickens are no longer allowed to graze freely, but are instead stuffed in barns and feedlotted-- fed foods such as corn and soybeans (farm subsidy crops) that change the ph within their systems and create an environment more amenable to the e coli bacteria, and create a manure that is a pollutant, rather than a fertilizer. And the Big Agribusiness way of dealing with that is not to put things back the way they were, but to create new technology and drugs to deal with the problem, which causes our food supply to be irradiated and full of antibiotics, and some of it to be genetically engineered against this, which could cause unimaginable problems in the future.
Then there's energy. Unless we harness renewable sources of energy to sustain us, our planet's climate will continue to deteriorate right up until the oil runs out. And one can only imagine the wars and deprivation that will result when that happens if we haven't turned this situation around.
Living a sustainable lifestyle has the power to reverse these negative changes that the economies of scale and Big Business have wrought.
Articles that focus on Sustainability