Environmental Awareness

Environmental Awareness

1. After reading, I find myself to be a person of a couple different environmental ethics. One is that of a conservationist. People can, will, and should use the resources that are naturally available to us. However, I think that we have a responsibility to future generations to manage the use of these resources responsibly and to not take advantage of what they have to offer us.

The other side of me leans towards that of sustainability. The Earth provides all sorts of natural resources that we cannot survive without. However, overuse of these resources can lead to their depletion. We need to live in a way that will maintain these resources so that they will still be available in the future.

Last summer my family planted a vegetable garden. Rather than pulling out the hose and using the city water supply we decided it would be much more economical and beneficial to the environment to reuse the rain water. So we collected it in a large drum and used it successfully to water our garden and not one time did we have to tap into the city water.

I think that in general the world has made great efforts to sustain and preserve the natural resources. But, I do think that there is huge room for improvement. There are still too many organizations, such as the logging industry, that sustain resources for their own benefit and not that of the environment. An article that explains this, Sustainable Forest or Sustainable Profits can be read at http://www.globalissues.org/article/171/loss-of-biodiversity-and-extinctions.

2. Ecosystems can be small or as large as the Earth. They consist of both living and nonliving things that interact with each other.

Habitats are where living things that are the same, live in the same place at the same time. They all interact and form a community. These communities interact with nonliving things around them and for an ecosystem.

In my biome, Michigan, the wetlands habitat has been in danger for...