The earth is not just some stagnant pool, it changes through the years in many ways. A major change that has come to our modern society's attention is the phenomenon of climate change. This is an idea that is very widely accepted among the scientific community, but the debate comes in when you examine the finer details of the issue. The questions that revolve around climate change are things like, "Are we causing it?", "What are the effects of it?", and things like what is the time scale of it. Like most arguments there are very polar sides on this debate and they usually really do not get along. Usually those on the far right think that it is not as big of an issue as it seems and think we should just continue as we are. This idea usually stems from the point of view that human life is more important than other forms of life so we should put our needs first. Their opponents on the far left on the other hand may go to extremes like an immediate shutdown of everything that is casing the pollution. They usually think that all life has equal value and man is nothing special. In this argument though, as I think in most arguments, the proper answer lies somewhere in the middle ground. An immediate shutdown of our way of life would destroy millions of jobs and families and realistically take us back to the Stone Age. On the other hand our current pollution rates are huge and we are doing real damage to the planet. Even if we were not harming the planet, fossil fuels are finite and will eventually be depleted and we will be back in the Stone Age anyways. I believe that the proper solution lies in ideas that promote sustainable development. This will allow us to keep our current standards of living while just doing it in a healthier way. Sustainable development ranges from just finding the most efficient way of doing something to completely changing how it is done. These ideas effect agriculture, building, transportation, energy production and usage. The biggest of these is energy production, which currently comes vastly from fossil fuels, but I think we can ween ourselves off of it. I believe we can harness the powerful ocean current to turn hydroelectric generators and therefore produce clean energy. 

The first step to solving a problem is to first recognize that there is one, and then to investigate the root causes of that problem. The problem of climate change that our modern society faces is recognized as a real threat by ninety-seven percent of scientists. In his own sarcastic way John Oliver said "The debate on climate change shouldn't be about whether it exists, it's what we should do about it."(Oliver) I think to truly understand the threat we have to go back in our history to figure out when it started. While this issue was not really recognized and studied until the later part of the twentieth century it can be traced back to the industrial revolution. By using air pockets trapped in ice, scientist can determine what the concentration of certain gases was in previous years before such things where kept track of by man. While studying these trapped air pockets they noticed that around the early eighteen hundreds that there was a major spike in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution which is really the start of the mass production that we see today. This increase was due to the large amount of coal that they began to use on literally an industrial scale. Coal, being a fossil fuel, releases carbon dioxide into the air when it is burned. Carbon dioxide is an extremely important greenhouse gas that makes it possible for the earth to retain the heat from the sun's rays and keep us all from freezing to death. The only problem is that the more of it there is the more heat is trapped, and with more heat trapped the temperature of the earth goes up. In his Article What Science Says, G.P. Wayne wrote "Through this process, CO2 and other greenhouse gases keep the Earth's surface 33 Celsius (59.4 F) warmer than it would be without them. We have added 42% more CO2, and temperatures have gone up." (Wayne) This rise in temperature just by itself is not harmful to man really at all. Most people prefer the warmer weather, but unfortunately the ice on our polar caps does not enjoy that rising temperature on our earth.  When that ice melts it goes into the ocean, and then the ocean has more water in it so it takes up space. This is what we call rising sea levels. Rising seas pose the greatest threat to mankind and our civilizations. In his article written in an Environmental Encyclopedia Shepard Krech stated, "Three-quarters of the world's mega-cities are by the sea and 80 % of people will live within 60 miles of the coast." (Krech). Knowing this could make you wonder what exactly the discussion is about. Why don't we just stop everything that is causing pollution and save ourselves? Unfortunately this situation is far more complicated than that. We as a people are so dependent on fossil fuels for survival that to just stop using them would cause a collapse of our economy, military, and society as a whole. This dependence is psychological, cultural and very physical. To transition ourselves to a more sustainable way of life we need to address all of these and find adequate solutions. 

The psychological problem is something that stems from the way of thinking that people had when we first entered into this domain of unprecedented production, and just the way man's brain is. You have to realize that when man first entered into the industrial revolution he had spent the last few thousand years poor and starving. There were of course some who were not poor but the human species as a whole had to struggle very hard to survive. When the industrial revolution came along it brought with it the agricultural revolution, and for the first time there were plenty of commodities and food for everyone. As Richard White said "The focus shifted to infrastructure, expansion, ...  and industrialized agriculture." (White 184). This is completely understandable for back then because if you think about it, if you had to sow your own clothes and could only eat what you grew you would say heck yea to the industrial revolution too. The only problem is that we who now have so much are still in this frame of mind. We tear down forest to build malls and ravage nature for all of her bounty. We still have it in our minds that we need more, more, and even more of everything. For some reason we didn't stop when our needs had been met or even when there was plenty. We have become massive consumers of anything that can be made and we still want more. We need to realize that we have plenty, so maybe we should tap the brakes a little bit on production and consumption. The hurtle to this though was my second point of the way that our brains are. Our minds are centered on immediate threats to ourselves. It is so difficult to get a single person, much less an entire nation, to change their entire way of life for something that could happen in a hundred years to their grandchildren. How many science classes has today's youth sat through telling them all of the things that I am saying in this paper? Many, would probably be a conservative answer, but has it really had an effect on their day to day life. They can agree that we are polluting too much, but then they turn right around and drive twenty miles in their SUV to the nearest mall and shop till they drop. As long as there is money to be made people will continue to produce at any cost to nature. It is so hard for people to hear a number like one- hundred years and it actually mean something to them. They hear that millions of tons of carbon are being released into the atmosphere, but our mind really can't get around numbers that big. Unfortunately for many people, they take no action until they absolutely have to. The scary thing though is that by the time the ocean is in their front yard it will be too late. 

Fortunately for mankind there are those that are recognizing the problems that we face in the future and are taking steps to prevent them. While, as I said before, we cannot just stop our production and consumption of energy because of the pure economic impact it would have on our society, we can look for cleaner and more efficient ways of doing things. These solutions go by the name of sustainable development. According to the UN, "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."(Barlund) This was to goal of the Green Building project that has taken hold in Singapore and that we could learn a thing or two from. They recognized that our buildings and the construction of them were both major consumers of energy. In the article Green Building Project Management is says, "Both commercial and residential buildings together are responsible for between 20 and 40% of the world's energy consumption and these values are rising steadily every year." (Hwang/Tan) To help combat this scientist and engineers have come up with several solution to help reduce the environmental impact that building have. The first thing that they came up with is prefabrication of materials that are used for the construction. This means that the components of a structure would be assembled in a factory and then transported to the location that it belongs. This sounds like kind of a pain but it proves to be more efficient than just building on site. This is partly due to the added control that workers have in a factory as opposed to some job cite.  Other very doable techniques are using daylighting, solar energy, and trying to minimize waste by conserving water and using recycled materials for the construction project. Many of these seem like they would just be common sense but you would be surprised at how inefficient many construction projects are. In conjunction they use more environmentally friendly technology than traditional buildings. Green buildings are designed and built to use less energy, water, and resources that their predecessors. This helps improve the local, regional and even global ecosystem. If every major country were to simply use these techniques when building in the future, and also do some modification to existing buildings then we could really cut into that forty percent energy consumption that comes from buildings. 

Another huge consumer of the world's energy and resources is the agricultural sector of our society. The vast majority of the foods we eat are produced by large companies that use techniques that bring them the most money instead of what is healthiest for their consumers and the earth. In his online article, Sustainable Agriculture- the Basics, White said "During the mid-1900s, US agriculture began to industrialize, becoming increasingly mechanized and reliant upon resource-intensive inputs like synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides.  Over time, farms became larger, more specialized, and centralized, creating a process of extreme consolidation that drove many small farms out of business, and ultimately resulted in market control by a handful of powerful corporations." (White). This has given our society a huge quantity of food at extremely low prices, but at what cost. In the United States alone this industrial agriculture is responsible for up to thirty-percent of our carbon foot print. This is unsustainable for people, and inhumane to many of the animals that are caught up in this process. Like energy we need food to survive, so the solution to this is sustainability as well. This method cuts back on the pesticides, fertilizers, genetically modified seeds and any other current methods that degrade water and soil quality. In their place they use techniques that produce our needed foods in a way that is healthier for consumers and the environment. Crop- rotation takes the place of fertilizers because it makes is so the natural elements in the ground necessary for plant growth are never depleted. This happens because different crops pull different things from the ground they are in, so if you are constantly changing the crops, no one resource is constantly being drained and eventually depleted. As far as animals go sustainable agriculture would use pasture-based livestock husbandry in place of the hormones that we inject animals with and the dark confined spaces they are forced to live in until they are butchered. This technique allows the animals to roam freely in green fields and eat grass and other foods that their bodies are actually adapted to digest. This also eliminates the conditions that exist in current methods that are basically animal factories, which produce harmful bacteria and diseases, instead of farms. What we put into our food is what we get back out, so it makes since to treat our agriculture well. 

While buildings and agriculture are both major energy consumers and could be modified to be more efficient, they are not the main culprit behind carbon dioxide emissions. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "In 2015 alone, emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States were 1,925 million metric tons."(E.I.A.) This is because 71% of our power comes from the burning of coal with the rest being natural gas. Both of these emit carbon dioxide when burned and both are finite resources that will eventually run out. If we are to maintain our standard of living for future generations we have to find a source of renewable and clean energy that can meet our needs. This is already being done by using solar panels to turn sunlight into energy and wind turbines to do the same with wind. The best answer however, I think lies in the field of hydroelectricity. For example, the Hoover Dam currently generates about 4.5 billion kilowatts of energy a year and serves the annual needs of about 1.3 million people in Arizona and Nevada. It does this by being capable of moving 1.5 million gallons per second through its seventeen main turbines. These turbines are spun by the kinetic energy of the water and they in turn spin generators, thus producing electricity. Hydroelectric power is clean, renewable, and 90% efficient. To do this on a massive scale however would require a massive amount of water, and moving water at that, but I think I know just the spot. At the bottom of the world there is a current called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current or ACC. This current moves between the bottom of the continents of South America, Africa, Australia, and the top of Antarctica. It moves 353, 990,547,000 gallons of water a second, unimpeded, across the entire globe. If we were able to build some kind of mega turbines to harness this energy, and use the same efficiency of the Hoover Dam, then this would generate 1,064,248,508,198,304 kilowatts of energy every year. If we were able to harness that entire amount of power then that could power the entire globe. I do know however that to build a massive dam to do this is pretty much impossible, but what I'm trying to say is that we could draw massive amounts of power out of our ocean currents. We already know that we are capable of building things across the bottom of the ocean because of the Euro Tunnel that connects England and France. This is a project that really would just take somebody willing to invest, but I think that it is worth the investment. 

As with any idea there are always those that disagree. Sustainable development is not immune to this. The main people that usually stand in the way are politicians. The funny thing is though that they do not argue with facts or reason, all they do really is say 'nah-ah' and plug their ears and do what they want to do. The quick answer as to why they do this is most likely because they are being paid to do so, but if forced the might say that they are Anthropocentrists. According to the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, "Anthropocentrism is the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet." (Krech). Even if you this is true man cannot live here without the environment. The only reasonable argument I have been able to find is one that argues from the perspective of less developed countries. In this argument Heilig said "The desire for fresh air and green forests among European intellectuals is not shared by impoverished campessinos who fight for survival on a day-to-day basis in the squatter settlements of Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro. Their immediate concern is to find paid work and food, even if it means laboring in the dust and smog of- old-fashioned industries". (Heilig 4). His argument is that if more developed countries stop using fossil fuels, then that will destroy what little economy the countries that they get it from have. If Saudi Arabia could not sell oil, then their entire country would be poverty stricken, and basically the same thing for countries like Venezuela, who sells a great amount to the U.S. He also says that they would be unable to develop their own green technologies and would be left even further behind in the world. My argument to this is that it is the large countries like the U.S. that need to be more sustainable. These smaller countries should be able to use fossil fuels until their economies develop and they can maintain themselves. If the polluters like the U.S. and China do not slow down then there may not be any countries left to worry about. I also would like to think that the more developed countries of the world would not just leave them behind. The U.S. donates about 300 billion to charity each year. I also think that if these technologies were developed then the more advanced countries would be willing to give it to those that needed it. His argument assumes that life is a cut throat race and each country is only for itself. I think that we are all in this together, and that humanity as a whole will be willing to care for each other. 

When viewing all of the problems that our world faces it is very possible to become downtrodden and try to ignore it. We have spent so long focused on ourselves that we may just destroy our own home, but I think that it is foolish to give up. The problems that we face are multifaceted, so that just means that our solution has to be multifaceted too. We can do all kinds of things to make a difference like building and growing more efficiently. Using hydroelectric power generated by the oceans would make a huge difference in the health of our planet. The health of our planet matters so much, because we are only as healthy as it is. If we even care about ourselves we have to take care of this place that we call home. 

