Innovation and Sustainability

Innovation & Sustainability

We are dependent on environmental resources for survival so we must have production and consumption. We as humans have a tendency to go overboard when it comes to consumption. We always want bigger and better than then next person, even when that means sacrificing some of the world's natural resources. We devour farmland and forest for commercial or residential use. Developing these lands destroys the natural beauty of our landscapes and pollutes the water and air.

This urban sprawl is widespread and also means the increased usage of personal vehicles which increases the amount of energy used and adds to the emission of greenhouse gases. In the past 200 years population growth has escalated from 100 billion people to an estimated total of almost seven billion. Some of the rationale for this population explosion is the result of better nutrition, the advancement of health care and improved sanitation practices (Turk & Bensel, 2011).

Converting farmland and forest to homes, airport runways and parking lots for shopping centers involves paving with tar which produces toxic and carcinogenic fumes making it a potential threat. According to Professor Reid Ewing, "lands most suitable for growing crops also tend to be most suitable for 'growing houses."(Turk and Bensel, 2011).

When you compare different countries and different cultures you can see many differences, but the one thing that is universal is our need to eat to sustain our lives. Without food, we cannot exist. Farmland provides an area to grow food and raise livestock for consumption purposes, yet the amount of farms across our country gets smaller every year. Hundreds of thousands of acres across the globe have disappeared due to erosion, urban development, and overuse over the last century. The American Farmland Trust estimates that farmland is disappearing at a rate of 2 acres per minute.(Colvin, 2011)

Lack of rainfall for crops, and soil degradation are factors that contribute to the physical hardships and famines around the world. We see these types of situations through the mass media and are concerned there are so many people with little or nothing to eat. But what we fail to realize is that by allowing our cities to grow without interruption, we are literally and rapidly starving ourselves. Urbanization is threatening food supplies all across the planet.

"For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing" (Turk, and Bensel, 2011).

For many decades we have been addressing the ecological impacts of consumptions and production therefore air quality has improved, waste and industrial pollution has been controlled more and products are more proficient with more informed consumers to boot. As we know these are steps in the right path, however more must be done to manage