Why Environment is Important

The environment is everything around us. Why Environment is Important? Just try to imagine your life with nothing around you.

The environment is very complicated and interdependent; for example, no oxygen in the air, no living things as we know it — no water… etc.

No trees, no carbon dioxide, no food for animals. No animals, no food for humans. No habitats, no shelter for animals and plants. No bees, no pollination for plants, and so on.

All living things are intricately connected and intertwined, affecting each other in ways that aren’t always apparent. The environment is very precious and delicate—any changes can create a ripple effect that can have a huge impact on the balance of the Earth’s systems.

Our environment includes natural basic systems and everything we make and build — one impacting the other. For example, a dam on a river will impact almost everything on that river. On the other hand, the river can overflow, ruin the anchor of the dam, which could fail. It can go as far as nature reacts to the modified environment.

The big problem with the environment is that awareness is a “new” thing. The first environmental protection act started in England in 1863 to curb the emission of muriatic acid gas – it had to do with the bad smell and not the environmental impact. Several grassroots efforts since the 6^th century BC in India were mainly focussed on the protection of life by nonviolence.

Most of the efforts were toward annoyance from smoke, water disappearance, and other very local issues. Nothing was looking forward to protecting the world we live in.

Why Environment is Important?

The environment works by natural selection – the strongest survive, adapt, and make it those who don’t, extinct. Easy 🙂 The big problem is that we disturb those natural ways by injecting human-made events – deforestation, and plastic waste. PCB, which is prone to destroy Killer Whales! PCB is banned since the late 70s, yet, still produced and used in China, and Eastern Europe…

The environment is the support of our lives, not only physical but also emotional. Our world has changed considerably since the last decades – imagine yourself with no TV, no car, no running water, no electricity, no daily shower, no new clothes every so often…

My grandparents lived until their 100s and had a very natural life. They grew their own veggies (no artificial fertilizers, no pesticides…), they raised their own chicken for eggs and meat, and their three cows for milk and meat. They had no TV, no car, no daily shower, no everyday clean clothes, no air conditioning…

They heated the house with a wood stove and kept the lights on with oil lamps. They lived off the land, spending time gardening and caring for the animals. They were self-sufficient and led a simple life. Life wasn’t always easy, but they made it work for them. They had a strong work ethic, determination and joy in the successes of everyday life. From them, we learned the value of hard work and contentment in the small things.

Their carbon footprint was zero or close to zero. My Grandma would repair clothes until they fall apart – during WWII, my Grandpa was a leader resistant and received orders through parachuting of pigeons to send back information and acknowledgments.

The orders were to destroy the cages and parachutes – sure 🙂 My Grandma reused the silk fabric to make shirts for my Grandpa, my uncle, and baby clothes for my dad. Cages were recycled to make egg-laying nests.

Are we ready to return to this kind of life? 

Why Environment is Important? Because we need it daily.

Environmentalists and Greta Thunberg

I agree with what Greta says, but I feel very weird about her.

I raised an adopted daughter with Asperger syndrome, which by the way, is since 2013, no longer part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Individuals with these symptoms are included in the autism spectrum disorder.

According to Wikipedia:

Symptoms include verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal, or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm.

Like my daughter, Greta also has OCD, Selective Mutism, and certainly some level of ADHD.

One thing I am sure of is that her focus on the environmental topic is real  – my daughter went on “saving the animals” at about the same age. It lasted for two years and, like Greta with very outcrying ideas.

One thing I am sure as well is that Greta’s speeches cannot be written by Greta – NO WAY. School strikes, oh ya, mine did that, going to extremes without measuring the consequences of their acts. Mine at 16 went to the supermarket tearing, calling people buying meat mass murderers… I had to pick her up at the police station 🙂 she received a big hug from Daddy and a cute discussion about talking to me before going to yell at people 🙂

I think that Greta is being used by some unscrupulous environmentalists and the media who handle the teenager as a vector for their ideas like sailing instead of flying – a fun fact though is that many crew members had to fly to sail the boat back… I hope that Greta didn’t know about it 🙂

If I am right and even if the message is honorable, it’s child abuse, nothing else.

Why Environment is Important? Because we all need it daily, and there are solutions.

Your family living like my Grandparents is useless your impact on the world’s carbon emissions would be close to 0 – the world emits about 36,000,000,000 tons of carbon, an average family 55 tons per year.

Let’s look at offenders 🙂

Country	Emission / million of tons	Population in millions	Emission per capita
China	11,000	1,500	7,33
USA	5,172	330	15.72
Canada	550	37	14.90

Rich countries with high consumption habits like the USA, Canada have a much higher carbon footprint per capita than highly populated and highly emitting countries.

Now it’s where the stuff hits the fan 🙁 to reduce your carbon footprint you need to consume much less right? Guess what happens to the jobs that make what you consume? Gone… what do you do for a living? The problem is way more complicated than what Greta’s handlers tell us.

By the way 🙂 Do you know how much money environmentalist groups raised since Greta? An undisclosed obscene amount… I, too, gave 🙂

Carbon emission is the tip of the iceberg – lead, heavy metal, persistent organic pollutants, water pollution, etc. are more critical and dangerous than carbon emissions. Read the Wikipedia article about China’s pollution. Always remember the pollution generated by the manufactured products you buy, go from your backyard to the country where it is made, knowing that if that outsourcing country (China, India…) has weak environmental laws, you make the problem much worse.