Nicole Loy Assignment 16

You look around you- no birds are chirping. In fact, there are no animals in sight. Then you notice the absence of trees. You think to yourself, “what is going on?” And then you remember. Global warming was real, and it did destroy environments and made animals, such as polar bears, go extinct. The fears of deforestation should have been taken seriously. The extinction of species was possible, and subsequently occurred. While that may have been a fake scenario, the outcomes are not. The environment is being severely threatened by human practices, such as oil drilling and fracking, the use of CO₂ emitting technology, deforestation, and more. In order to save our planet from the fate aforementioned, we must take charge and make change. We must allocate more of the federal budget towards implementing solutions to our environmental crisis, both nationally and globally.

         What is the environmental crisis and how does it affect me? Ever since the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, humans have become increasingly dependent on technologies and practices that harm our environment and those living in it. The fossil fuel industry is especially detrimental. It’s not just the use of fossil fuels that can create tremendous damage, but the process of extracting such resources. Pipelines that carry oil often break or explode, causing spills that ruin the surrounding ecosystem and kill many of its inhabitants. Such an incident occurred in 2010 with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. This devastated the surrounding environment, which extended over a large portion of the Gulf of Mexico. Not only was the plant life majorly harmed, but the animals of the region also took a tremendous loss. The cleanup effort took years and animals were drowning in oil in the mean time. Fracking, tar sands, and mountain top removal are equally harmful ways of extracting fossil fuels from the Earth. Mountain top removal is especially harmful to the people living in the areas where this is done. It produces a large amount of pollution at those sites. The health of the residents is poor, as the companies destroy the surrounding groundwater. Even worse, the companies often leave these sites as they are once they have extracted all they can from them. They make little attempts to return the environment to a state in which it was previously in, leaving an environmental wasteland for the residents of the region. The burning of the oh-so-desired fossil fuels has had negative effects on our planet, such as dramatically increasing the average global temperature. Prominent climate scientist James Hansen discusses how the increase in the average global temperature could detrimentally cause ice sheets to become unstable in an interview with Yale Environment 360. Hansen argues that “If ice sheets become unstable, it would cause continually rising sea levels with economic implications that are incalculable,”  as well as “If we keep burning fossil fuels business-as-usual, then the climate zones shift fast enough and far enough that it will, in combination with the other stresses on species, cause extermination of a significant fraction of species on the planet.”  These dramatic climate zone shifts is clearly evident in the melting of glaciers. The image of The Lewis Glacier on Mt. Kenya depicts a line of fire, representing where the beginning of the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya used to be in 1987 before it started to disappear. This is clear evidence of how our burning of fossil fuels is effecting the environment. The melting of glaciers should be a serious concern, even making us wonder “what next?” What will disappear next? Will it be another species? A natural landmark? The selfishness of humans when it comes to the environment must end.

Along with our devastating abuse of fossil fuels, we participate in the global trading of animals, removing them from their natural environment. By removing animals from their environment, you are exposing the new environment and the previous environment to problems with the food chain. The old environment will be devoid of an important link in the food chain, possibly making other animals who depend on them go extinct. In the new food chain, the animal might become an additional predator for another species, again possibly driving a species to extinction. Matthew Luskin, an ESPM Ph.D. candidate at The University of California, Berkeley discusses the bird trade in Sumatra, stating, “The capture of Sumatra’s birds for this purpose has become unsustainable, to the point where some forests are nearly devoid of the playful avian noises that are a trademark of most rainforests.” The rainforests around the world are becoming increasingly devoid of life. Efforts to curtail deforestation have been challenging. Companies often will destroy parts of a rainforest to either sell the wood, or to use the area as a plantation. Luskin discusses this epidemic in Sumatra. He explains how even though there are small parts of the forests that are preserved, the companies still find a way to destroy it. Luskin claims, “The current haze crisis is driven by fires in plantations that often burn through small remaining forests, such as HCV forests and riparian forests.” These illegal slash-and-burn practices have destroyed the few forests that remain, making forests increasingly rare and threatening the species within these forests. While this is a global concern, we have even more domestic environmental concerns.

The United State’s poultry industry has devastated the environment of many cities in the US. As shown in A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms, companies such as Tyson, Cal-Maine Foods, Cargill, George’s Farms, etc. have spread waste from fertilizers into many rivers beside their farms, causing harm to the local ecosystems. The documentary points out that, at times, in 70% of the water of these rivers and lakes, fish can’t live. Companies such as this must be stopped if we don't want certain species to go extinct. Our rivers cannot remain polluted. The next time you watch your children playing in a stream, think about how fertilizer waste often ends up in streams such as that. Your child could be standing in polluted water full of toxic fertilizer. Action must be taken to prevent more streams from ending up like this.

Money makes the world go ‘round. And in this case, that is just what is needed. Out of the $3.8 trillion federal budget in 2015, only $39 billion is dedicated to energy and the environment. This puts it in second to last place in the discretionary spending category. The first place spot goes to military, with a whopping $598 billion. Why is there such a gap between these two categories? The United States is not currently at war. Would it not be wise to allocate more of the federal budget towards the environment rather than defense? After all, there will be nothing left to defend if we don’t defend the environment first.

The environment is in a dismal place. At the rate we’re going, we will surely see several animals go extinct in our lifetime. Glaciers are melting, creating concern for our coastal areas due to the rising sea level and for the animals that exist in the arctic ecosystem. We are even depleting fossil fuels at an alarming and unsustainable rate. In order to save ourselves from a frightening future, we must allocate more federal funds to the environment. This money can be used to find renewable sources of energy and spread their implementation. This would serve as an alternative to fossil fuel burning. We can also set up programs to protect endangered species and prevent deforestation. The money used for the environment can have endless possibilities. And for those who claim it will always be too expensive to fix the environment, James Hansen claims otherwise. Hansen states, “There have been economic studies that show if you add a gradually rising fee to fossil fuels, by collecting a fee on fossil fuel companies at the source, the domestic mine, or port of entry, and if you distribute the money to the public, an equal amount to all legal residents, it would actually spur the economy. It would increase the gross domestic product and add millions of jobs.”

Some may claim that the environment is too late to save and the economy should take precedence, but neither of those are true. There is still time to save it, but we must take action now. As for the economy, there will not be an economy to be worried about if we do not devote time to take care of our planet. Global warming is real and it’s coming for us all. We cannot continue to add on to its effect and destroy our planet. Increasing funds for the environment in the federal budget is one step in the right direction.

         Our planet is all we’ve got. While many of us may try to destroy it through our greediness, there is still hope. As dismal as it is right now, we can allocate more money from the federal budget towards the environment, thereby helping to implement programs and technologies that will allow us to fix our mess. We may never regain the species that have already gone extinct as a result of our wrongdoings, but we can prevent many more species from sharing the same fate. That fake scenario does not have to come true. We can change our environment for the better.

                                                                                   Bibliography

A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms. Dir. Don McCorkell. Perf. Don McCorkell. Cinema Libre Studio, 2009. DVD.

"Federal Spending: Where Does the Money Go." National Priorities Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2016.

Hansen, James. “For James Hansen, the Science Demands Activism on Climate” by Katherine Bagley. Yale Environment 360. Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 12 Apr. 2016. Web. 16 June 2016.

Luskin, Matthew. “Palm Oil Expansion Triggers Ecological Cascade” by Rhett A. Butler. Our Environment at Berkeley. University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, 4 Dec. 2015. Web. 21 June 2016.

Norfolk, Simon. The Lewis Glacier, Mt. Kenya, 1987. 2014. Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica. galleryluisotti. Web. 16 June 2016.