Environment Issues

Our environment is an issue in many social groups of our society, as it should be. You can even go as far as saying it is a political issue. I feel people are realizing that this is a growing matter and we need to stop taking it lightly or we will have no more existence here on earth.

Alex Steffen: Inspired ideas for a sustainable future, is who I did my TED talk about. He is the founder of worldchanging.com, who offers his views of our world what it’s doing and where we are going.

A few random facts throughout his presentation that really got my attention:
*Our 1 plant uses enough resources to provide for at least 7-10 plants
*We are building a new city the size of Seattle every 7 days
*In the year 2025 there will be 8 billion people on our plant

I feel we should be ashamed of ourselves for taking advantage of our planet the way we do. I don’t know if people understand the magnitude of this situation. What will happen to us if we deplete all of our resources? Will there still be us?

I googled the population of Seattle and as of 2006 there is about 682,174 living in the city and an estimated metropolitan area population of approximately 4.3 million. Now just imagine that every 7 days we have a new city the size of Seattle that can house that kind of population. So what is that doing to our environment? Well for one I know it has to be taking up a lot of land to build a city that big. So there go the trees, and the poor animals that had a habitat, and our O-zone layer even more.

Our worldly population as of this year is estimated to be a little over 6.6 billion people. In the year 2025 we estimate our population to be 8 billion. That means from now to the year 2025 100 million people will be born every year. Now do the math here we are going to need a lot more Seattle’s to accompany that number. The problem is where are we going to find the space and resources to handle that growth if we are struggling at this moment to keep up with our environment now.

So obviously if we want to sustain life on this planet a few changes are needed in the immediate future!!!

Blog Action Day

This is a very interesting concept to me. I think it goes to show how effective blogging is as a mass communication media. My topic of interest for this was Medical Waste. It is hard to believe what we are doing with this toxic material. I did some research on the web and found out general information about medical waste.

Medical waste is an increasing issue that is troubling the world. Large urban hospitals can produce more than 2 million tons of medical waste each year. A big cause in this issue is clinics and hospitals throwing there medical waste in regular trash, which can cause contamination and spreading of diseases. Others burn their waste in open fields or in small incinerators without pollution control, exposing communities downwind to toxic byproducts such as dioxins and mercury, and generating potentially hazardous ash.

Over the years the world has learned that incineration is a leading source of highly toxic dioxin, mercury, lead and other dangerous air pollutants that threaten human health and the environment.

HCWH (Health Care Without Harm) is an organization that was formed to help decrease the amount of toxicity generated by the health fields medical waste. There purpose is to ensure proper management and disposal of medical waste and to decrease the dangerous practice of incineration by promoting and implementing alternatives.

Plans to reduce this issue are being implemented around the world, some of these alternatives include:

Waste minimization, segregation
Alternative technologies
Alternative technologiy suppliers
The GEF Project.
Immunization Waste



noharm.org
medical waste picture

Get in touch with you inner tortoise

My TED talk was on Carl Honore:Slowing down in a world built for speed. He is a journalist in London who wrote a book about slowing down.

Our society has the worst reputation of "road runner" attitude. Where if we aren't doing something at every moment then we are wasting time. And what is time to a lot of us? Money!!!

So how did we get so deep into this issue. Over time our culture has put a taboo on the word slow. When someone is referred to as slow it is a negative label. We take on task after task without looking at the consequences it may cause. Weather it be short term and/or long term.

Now how do we fix this problem. We are going to have to reteach ourselves and our society that it is ok to stop and smell the roses. That taking a vacation really is needed.