The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“What is the most important environmental issue you are concerned with today, aside from global warming?”
Check out the array of answers below:
Ted Redmond, environmentalist, social entrepreneur and architect:
There are a few that concern me. I don’t have them prioritized, though, this is just off the top of my head:
E-waste - in the US alone, we produce 22 billion pounds of electronics - most of that ends up in land fills within 4 years
http://www.bluedotregister.org/c...
Water: it is the most precious resource we have and we continue to squander it, pollute it, and devalue it. We damn rivers, drown ecosystems, and then pour massive amounts of it on deserts to make them into golf courses that look like Connecticut. We toxify it and pump it deep into the ground in order to extract the dregs of fossil fuels. We have not felt the pinch yet but the indications are that we will be starved for clean water if we don’t knock off this absurd waste of the most important natural resource we have.
(as an aside, I’ve had a great conversation with a person who owns a company serving fracking wells. This was a real conversation I had this past summer. What he does is to ‘clean the water’. I became excited and said “that’s awesome!, are you able to clean to back to pure water?” He replied “oh, no. We aren’t trying to do that at all. All we do is take the large particulate out because the oil companies can reuse that in the well.” So I said, “er, so what happens with the water, does it get reused in the oil well sort of like a closed loop?”. His reply was “no, the oil companies don’t reuse the water, they pump fresh water in to send down the oil well. We take the dirty water and pump it back down abandoned wells. Yeah, it’s not exactly environmentally friendly, but it pays well!” To me - that is just messed up.)
Sulfide mining: in some places, this may not be too bad. But true to our money focused mentality, as I type, there are companies practicing sulfide mining in sensitive water rich ecosystems. The result is to put at risk some of the most important biodiversity areas at risk in order to extract copper. It is a completely foolish practice that can result in killing lakes all just to acquire one of the most common elements on the planet (and see above related to e-waste). It is pretty literally like pissing in your own drinking water. We do not locate mines like this where they make the most sense for us collectively, but instead where it is most expedient for the owners of the mining companies. https://www.savetheboundarywater...
Plastic. It ends up in our waters and oceans and does not go away. That biodegradable plastic? It only biodegrades through processing that requires high heat - problem with that is only 19% of all plastic gets recycled. So the “biodegradable” plastic is just as likely to end up floating in the ocean for 500 years as the other stuff.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/w...
Resource depletion: we are consuming resources faster than the planet can sustain long term. It will get worse as other emerging economies graduate into the fat and happy category of consumption. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/...
Air pollution. I like air. Seems important. Globally we are still plumbing tons of crap into it. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-2...
Land use management - I think humans still have a mentality that we occupy a little bit of the Earth and the rest is wilderness. Maybe that was true sometime in the not so distant past but it is no longer true. We have increased global crop land by 190% since the 1960’s and can assume more pressure with another couple billion people. The amount of true wilderness is shrinking fast. Some of us think that is a loss in and of itself, but even the hardest human centric amongst us should be concerned - we are an integrated part of a delicately balanced ecosystem. Loss of just a single species could have devastating effects - take bees for example, they are threatened and if we lost them we would have immediate impacts to our food chain that relies on them as pollinators.
We once had to struggle to remain alive. We now wield enough technology and population to effect the entire planet in numerous ways. This adds up to mean we need a rapid change in our mentality from one of being in need of taming the wild to one of being stewards of the planet.
http://www.unep.org/resourcepane...
http://www.nature.org/science-in...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/...
The economy - Perhaps the number one issue is our global linear consumption-driven capitalism. The system has been great to help create wealth (some may argue a range of issues with capitalism). The issue, though, is that our current economic structure pushes, encourages, and literally requires individuals to consume. Meanwhile the same system incentivizes short term myopic decision making by our largest companies which swing the most global impact. There are tons of good people who lead business sectors who make decisions based mostly on how it will impact the companies stock value. Because of this system, we make a lot of decisions that are completely illogical for the long term health of the planet on which we rely 100%.
Imagine an economic system where individuals have a high standard of living, but where ‘high standard’ means great food, great education, continuous personal development, spiritual development, solid time with families and friends, ability to experience and appreciate the world around us - without the need for mindless keep-up-with-the-Kardashians consumption. Imagine an economic system where companies can make more money repairing and caring for the ecosystem rather than ripping it apart. One where companies would naturally make decisions based on a balanced long-term view assuring a systems longevity rather than the short term stuff it in my pocket as quickly as possible mentality. That’s the economy we should be building - and the amazing thing is we can do it easily by just shifting our collective definition of what is important.
Mike Barnard, energy expert:
Pretty much everything related to coal.
There isn’t a part of the extraction, transportation or burning of coal which doesn’t destroy habitat, pollute air and water and sicken or kill people. It’s making the air in India and China in the major cities so filthy that people who can afford to are leaving, and well off people who live there are erecting bubbles over schools for their children so that they can have a semblance of playing outside. The air there is as bad as the killing smog of 1952 in London, which caused the premature deaths of 12,000 and made 100,000 others sick. What we see in China and India today was common in what we think of as the developed world 60 to 70 years ago; this is not a problem that is unique in history.
Coal is responsible for over 50% of mercury emissions, and mercury is nasty stuff. Mercury exposure at high levels can harm the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system of people of all ages, and its a bioaccumulator, so it ends up in the food we eat, especially further up the food chain.
Coal electrical energy is the single biggest source of greenhouse gases on the planet as well. Shutting down all coal generation would go a long way to helping meet the international warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius.
Remarkably, coal is the largest concentrator and distributor of radioactivity as well, much more so than the nuclear power industry which is quite limited in scope by comparison, and whose waste is much more heavily regulated and guarded.
Coal was a greater good a century or two ago when it fuelled the industrial revolution, brought electricity to the masses and lifted great portions of the world out of poverty. But renewables are now cheaper and better, and natural gas is much, much cleaner.
There are better alternatives to coal. Let’s put them in place as rapidly as possible and shut down coal mines and coal generation plants everywhere.
Sources:
- Center for Climate and Energy Solutions
- Electricity Sector Emissions
- Ocean Acidification
- Acid rain
- Mercury - Basic Information
- Environmental impacts of coal power: air pollution - page on Union of Concerned Scientists
- Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste
I don’t think it’s possible to determine the most important. But few people are aware of the harm their food plays. And it’s not just the cows.
Our industrial agricultural system is responsible for 1/3 of green house gas emissions. And that’s before it’s trucked & shipped around the world. And Ag runoff from synthetic fertilizers, pesticides& feed lot waste destroy lakes, rivers & oceans. And they destroy the soil and waste water. The midwest is becoming a dustbowl again and big ag turns to developing nations for land grabs & CAFO animal ‘husbandry’ where humane & environmental laws are even more lax. Pesticides kill & monucultures starve our pollinators. And CAFO animals result in superstrains of microorganisms that shouldn’t even be a problem. E-coli, for example.
And this is all to produce food that makes us all sick. Please, buy as little as possible from Big Food. Go local, go small, go real. Limit processed foods. And get a garden or community garden allotment. (Food, not Lawns!) Seriously, letting a few big corporations make and control the majority of our food is a bad idea.
Support local farmers, not just in purchasing but in local & federal laws. There’s been a number of bills up for consideration in Texas and fortunately we were successful at getting them passed. But the federal agencies are really good at proposing new regulations designed to benefit big Ag and harm small producers. Find local farmers that use sustainable methods & the local organizations. They’ll keep you informed and tell you who/when to contact your representatives. In Texas, subscribe to FARFA’s newsletter.
Proper permaculture techniques & land management that returns grazing animals to prairies & avoid bare soils would sequester so much carbon we could return to pre-industrial levels in the atmosphere in a very short time.
One area of concern to me is ocean acidification, which could kill off all life in the ocean, resulting in a chain reaction of CO2 and methane being released. I am not sure if you want to consider that a separate issue from global warming, since it is caused by the same CO2 that causes global warming.
One thing to consider is that almost all environmental issues are interconnected. Air pollution leads to water pollution as the air pollution washes out into the water. Water pollution causes marine life to die. Dying marine life causes algae blooms. Algae blooms result in air pollution. Deforestation results in species extinction. It also results in soil erosion and water pollution as rain water washes soil into the water. Extinction of some species, like bees, results in extinction of other species or overpopulation of others. You get the idea. The world’s ecosystem is a complex web, and damaging any one part ripples out into every other part in a chain reaction. Because of this, I would say you really cannot isolate one “most important environmental issue.”
Sergiusz Scheller, tech and eco lover:
The current food production system.
For starters it’s the livestock industry, which causes deforestation and therefore reduces the co2 absorption capabilities and deteriorates the soil. Our grain production currently serves mostly feeding livestock for which we’re cutting down more and more forests - from soy fields in the Amazon to palm oil plantations in the rainforests of Indochina. On top of that the current population of cows and other livestock grown for meat generates more and more methane which is much worse than co2 in its contribution to greenhouse effect.
Overfishing is another huge concern - almost 90% of fish species are currently overfished.
Another huge concern is the current fertilizer production industry, which absorbs more nitrogen than all of the living things on the planet. We spray huge amounts of fertilizers over the soil to grow crops. These fertilizers later make their way to rivers and finally to the seas and oceans, causing plankton and seaweed blooms, which in turn eliminate underwater flora and fauna in the area, by basically smothering them. The coast of Bretagne, which is home to many large industrial pig farms, have been littered with so many animal feces that it caused a similar effect- vast seaweed blooms and impoverishment of the local sea ecosystem.
Long story short - we destroy the environment to be able to eat meat everyday and with every meal. I’m not a vegetarian and I still think this is wrong on many levels, environmental, ethical and health-wise.