Chapter 6: Managing Our Changing Environment

Hi guys, today in class I talked about how we humans have been changing BOTH the physical and human environments to meet our needs. I also reminded us that as we take the resources out of the Earth with a unprecedented rate, we are in a danger zone of having the Earth's natural resources running low for our future generations (your future children) and also when we take from the Earth, we are also damaging the Earth through the processes and the by-products that we generate to create the goods and produce that we consume.

Below are the videos I showed in class today, look through them again as a re-cap about the kind and amount of waste we throw and how some cannot even be broke down, remember glass? In Singapore, being an affluent society, we are a "throw-away society/country" and the amount of unwarranted waste is great, so do think about what as an individual, can you do to play a part in conserving our Earth....recycling is not the convenient green solution that we should head towards. Instead, we should really be reducing our own consumption of goods and products that are not really needed by us to live, but are only wants.

GARBAGE CRISIS

CASE STUDY: NAPLES (ITALY) GARBAGE PROBLEMS

The video below is about Naples of Italy and how the huge amount of garbage have caused trouble to not only the locals (poisoning of vegetable produce,poisoned water supply due to the leakages in landfills, foul smells of rubbish thrown on the streets) but is also as a result of a regional effect (the mafia bringing in rubbish from outside Naples and illegally dumping it in Naples) and even international (of the processed food, mozzarella cheese which they export out)

So in studying this chapter and the following chapters, we need to not only think about the inter-relationships between humans and the environment (where we are actually inter-dependent, what happens at the far end of the Earth can eventually affect us), we need to think about the impacts of our human actions in the three spatial scale: local, national/regional and global/international.

The video below is about the fast fashion that is happening around the world especially in developed countries such as the USA or UK where high end fashion design threads are made readily available to the mass market and made affordable now, thus feeding to the growing problem of a Throw-away society. With fashion made to be easily accessed and disposed, the amount of waste generated by it is an on high. The video below shows the ways in curbing the waste created by fashion. So the next time you buy your Chinese New Year clothes, negotiate with your mother to not buy clothes in red which you will not get to wear so often but in tradition with Chinese New Year, buy clothes that will last you throughout the year and something that you will wear.

The link here shows you a video on how to handle e-waste, another big contributor to waste where electronic appliances phase out at a very fast rate, resulting in the massive e-waste created.

Click here!