This beautiful earth that is shared by 8.3 billion Who Leads? By Julie Peller Ph.D.

Green Junction

Everything that people consume, use, and create comes from the earth’s resources. In the sustainability course I teach, we often reflect on human technological advancements over the past 100 years and the strain on the earth’s resources. For example, less than 20% of homes in rural America had indoor plumbing in 1920, according to the US Census records. The 1920s were the decade when car ownership increased, and by 1929, 60% of families owned cars. All technological advances require lots of materials.

By the 1970s, scholars realized our knowledge and capacity to mine resources and make stuff had likely overshot humanity’s attention to the consequences. A group of experts from 10 countries studied the prospects of resource depletion, industrial output, population growth, agricultural requirements/practices, and pollution generation. They concluded that humans are mining resources and operating beyond Earth’s capacity to support future generations. The work was published as a book called “The Limits to Growth.”

The analysis found that “only a small fraction of the world’s population is actively concerned with understanding these problems or seeking their solutions.” The first diagram (figure) in the book is called Human Perspectives and shows that most people’s time horizon for concern falls in the realm of next week or the next few years, rather than their lifetime or their children’s lifetime. Most people’s context of concern is family or neighborhood, and fewer see their space of concern as the nation or the world.

This beautiful earth that is shared by 8.3 billion people depends on leaders and people clued into sustainable lifestyles, those that do honor natural resources, limit pollution – show care for the earth. “Decisions are being made every day, in every part of the world, that will affect the physical, economic, and social conditions of the world system for decades to come.”

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Julie Peller, Ph.D., is an environmental chemist (Professor of Chemistry at Valparaiso University). She has written a weekly column, The Green Junction, for the past few years and is helping move the call of Laudato Si to action. Her research interests include advanced oxidation in aqueous solutions, water quality analyses, emerging contaminants, air quality analyses, challenges along the Lake Michigan shoreline (including Cladophora, water, and sediment contaminants), and student and citizen participation in environmental work.