For the first time, I engage a class that seriously discusses about environmental issues. It is always shocking for me to see photos of world issues. Yet this is the first time that we, as students, are trying to figure out what kind of actions or solutions can be done. Issues, including human overpopulation, water scarcity, hydrology, land pollution, climate change, waste issues, and nuclear(energy) issues, are discussing in the class. It was fairly exciting to listen to Sean or Howard or Angela and all classmates to talk about their thoughts base on what they have read or have discussed in other classes (If you understand what I mean is.) I think what we can do next time is that we could discuss the most correlated topics at once, instead of jumping one topic to another so quickly. If we have several topics that are extremely related then it could be easier for us to prepare notes and discuss deeper. By the way, the atmosphere in the class is great.
The first photo above illustrates what the damage brought by climate change.
"Behold, he withhold the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the Earth." (World in 2050, pg.70)
It happened to Taiwan, especially in Nantou, my home town. Nantou is the only landlocked county in Taiwan. Disasters such as landslides or flood usually happened in the mountain, and the main cause is obviously deforestation. What I clearly feel in those years was that the weather is strange. Years ago, we had mild winter and cool summer. The spring was here earlier than ever and the winter did not really come. The number of typhoons was unusually big; the damage brought by typhoons was horrible. Taiwan has great amount of rivers and rains, but when our mountains are high and our flat lands are short, the quantity of collected water is limited. Mr. Laurence discusses about water scarcity, which we humans are running out of water resources. Melting of glaciers is a well known fact, and glaciers are the most effective way of storing the fresh water. Nonetheless the global warming is increasing the speed of melting of glaciers and other ice land.
The second photo above shows the problem of human overpopulation. Although it looks peaceful and united, picture the photos that were shown in the video 'Manufactured Landscape' about China's cities, which are dirty, crowded, and such huge mess. The living conditions are bad in developing countries, caused by high birth rates and industrialization. China is just one of the countries. There are much more developing countries in Asia and Africa.
"The sprawling city now extends far beyond its original lagoon setting to encompass a vast expanse of mostly low-rise developments including as many as 200 different slums....Over the past 20 years, the city has lost much of its street lighting, its dilapidated road system has become extremely congested, there are no longer regular refuse collections, violent crime has become a determining feature of everyday life and many symbols of civic culture such as libraries and cinemas have largely disappeared. The city's sewerage network is practically non-existent and at least two-thirds of childhood disease is attributable to inadequate access to safe drinking water. In heavy rains, over half of the city's dwellings suffer form routine flooding and a third of households must contend with knew-deep water within their homes." (World in 2050, pg.37-38)
It is unbelievable to see 'cities' are 'slums'. Though there are several movies did show that beside the cities are slums, I never thought that city can equal slum. Nonetheless, the photo has a great contrast between developed countries' urban area and developing countries' struggle of building cities.
The third photo is on TIME Magazine, The World's Most Dangerous Room. The effect of atomic radiation is related to our forever hoping, renewable resource, the nuclear power. 'In light of theses challenges, most experts agree that a hydrogen economy lies at least third to forty years in the future, at which point hydrogen fuel-cell cars might possibly be the new "next generation" technology that plug-in hybrids are today. Under the conservative ground rules of our thought experiment, we will assume the world will not convert to a hydrogen economy by the year 2050.' (World in 2050, pg.55)
As you see in the picture, which is actually the photo from Fukushima's disaster, there is a huge risk of producing nuclear power. Not that we should stop trying to sort out the renewable energy, but even with careful calculations, something could go wrong and ruin tons of people's lives.
I would like to mention that BBC news has a report on nuclear fusion that planned to use cheap hydrogen bonds to do some complex process that will produce us unlimited amount of energy just like sun. Click Here To Read On BBC (Personally suggest the magazine while it has a full explanation of how does the enormous machine works; it looks like science fiction.)