BY ANDREW BENNEY
Warm weather and sunny skies are often considered a great forecast for summer. But with record high temperatures set around the world, including at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, which had its hottest day in 78 years, it has become too much of a good thing.
This past season saw people scrambling to find an air-conditioned sanctuary or a pool during the seemingly endless heat waves. It saw farmers struggling to grow crops during a vicious drought and towns across southern Ontario forced to place regulations on water usage due to residents needing to care for their lawns so much. This intense dry spell and so much more can be directly attributed to climate change, which human’s greenhouse gases are responsible for.
”It’s never looked uglier in some parts because the grass is pretty well dead and the trees are suffering from a lack of moisture,” Dave Phillips, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist, said in a CBC news article. Meanwhile, as if to emphasize the unnatural order of things, on much of Canada’s west coast, where dryness is often the norm, torrential rains and a higher number of tornadoes were recorded. Phillips called it, “too much weather.”
It’s not pure chance that these ecological problems have begun to affect the world. The massive obsession with materialistic things that grips people has caused them to forget how mankind is part of a larger whole.
People have to learn how to coexist with all other living things and how to properly prepare the world for future generations of humans. As of now all they’ll be receiving is a planet in shambles.
To fix this, societies around the globe would have to fully denounce industrial culture. It would have to be demanded of international governing bodies that a sustainable use of natural resources, regardless of public demand for product, should be put in place.
Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) is the date each year when humanity’s yearly consumption of resources outweighs its ability to reproduce those resources within the same year. This year that date fell on Aug. 8, the earliest ever. This means that during a time when preserving raw materials should take precedence, humans will be using resources that are impossible to replace for 145 days.
Doug Tompkins, cofounder of brands The North Face and Esprit, said in a 2013 article in The Guardian that, “The computer is a mechanism for acceleration. It accelerates economic activity and this is eating up the world. It’s eating up resources, it’s processing, it’s manufacturing, it’s distributing, it’s consuming. That’s what the computer’s real work does and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop just to satisfy our own narrow needs.”
It is simply a fact that it is not possible to sustain this type of living for much longer. Drastic change in consumer mentality and a retraction of global support for products or companies that don’t care about their ecological footprint is required. Basically, humanity needs to rethink its priorities. After all, what is technology without a planet to use it on?
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