Human interaction with the Environment

We humans have been on this planet for a very small time, compared to this earth. For instance, if the world was built 24 hours ago, then we humans have been around for only a few seconds. And the shocking thing is, that we humans have created much destruction to the environment that it will take a lot of time to repair and replenish itself.

Any organism that lives on this planet, uses its resources. Be it minuscule microorganisms or massive multicellular organisms. The only difference is that those organisms that are bigger, utilize more resources and those organisms which are smaller, use lesser resources. We humans are one of those top resource utilizers of this planet, which means that we utilize more resources than any other organism that lives on this planet.

We need resources to thrive, which is true. Any and every organism needs resources to survive on this planet like food, shelter. But we humans have hundreds or even thousands of demands. We need infrastructure, we need management, we need power plants, and we need food-processing plants, everything that we need to survive. Also we need industries, which manufacture goods, like computers, mobiles, printing books, and other things that we take as secondary resources other than the primary resources of food, shelter and clothing.

Because we have such high demands, nature is now struggling to keep up with us. We are literally ‘pulling out’ resources from our planet to make goods that are so called marks of ‘development’.

Development is not us destroying something which is existing and instead inserting something else created by us that we think would serve the purpose. No, development is not about that. Development is taking what exists and implying it to create something more productive. You don’t need to destroy what exists to create something new, as most people think development is.

We humans have made the environment more like something that we take just to satisfy OUR needs. We forget that if this is OUR planet, it is necessary that WE take care of it more than anyone else living on this planet does. “With great power comes great responsibility” is the correct phrase to suit here.

Our interactions have positive as well as negative outcomes on nature. Positive in the sense that we have invented many things that will help us to do better at things that we already do. As an example, we can take electric vehicles like electric cars and motorcycles, which run on electricity without consuming any fuel like petrol, just like an iron that we use to press our clothes does.