modern environmental problems essay

Environmental Concerns in the Modern World Essay

There are many environmental concerns faced by human race. These concerns are defined as the environmental problems that directly or indirectly affect human beings. There is need therefore to work on these environmental problems with an aim of reducing their impacts. Climate change is one of the major concern facing human beings globally.

Ozone layer depletion and loss of biodiversity have also negatively affected human race thus calling for strategies to combat these environmental issues. Other environmental concerns are in reverence to land degradation, pollution among others. The following discussion is inclusive of the first three concerns.

Ozone layer depletion occurring at the stratosphere which contains the ozone gas, has led to direct ultra-violet rays reaching the earth surface. Oxygen molecules present in the stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet waves which are harmful.

The depletion of ozone layer occurs when the gas is broken down by increased chlorine compounds in the atmosphere which are man-made and also the bromine compounds. The direct reach of ultraviolet (UV) rays to human beings has increased diseases such skin cancer and eye problems.

There has also been an increase in infectious diseases. Ultra violet rays also causes drying up plants which are the major primary source of food to humans (Díez & Dwivedi, 2008). UV rays affect the aquatic life such as fish which are also source of food to human beings.

Climate change is the change in temperatures either by increase or decrease. The increase of temperature which has led to global warming is the major concern facing human beings on climate change.

Anthropogenic activities are however the major cause of climate change on global warming out of increased deforestation by the increasing population, increased release of fossil fuel and the green house gases such as chlorofluorocarbons which increases green house effect.

The further implications to human beings is the increase in sea levels which causes flooding thus loss of human lives, displacements and loss of properties. There is also decrease in water resources due to changes in evaporation thus lowering the agricultural output. Human beings are then faced by food shortages leading to hunger, nutritional diseases, and deaths.

Loss of biodiversity which is the decrease of species in ecosystems is also among the major concern faced by human race. Human beings are the major cause of loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction such as clearing of forest cover, burning of bush which kills the active micro organisms in the soil, and dumping of wastes in water resources which endanger aquatic life.

Biodiversity promotes better lives to human beings such as: ecosystem services through climate stability a role played by trees, soil formation by micro-organisms.

Loss of biodiversity is also inclusive of decrease of biological resources to human like plants which are source of food and medicines. Sociological benefits are also lost as the biodiversity is used by humans for education, recreation, and cultural values (Díez & Dwivedi, 2008).

In conclusion, human beings are the major contributors of the environmental issues which have raised the concerns. There is however natural factors which have lead to environmental concerns but their impact is too minimal compared to those caused by human beings. Human race is therefore faced with the challenge of reducing the environmental issues.

On climate change, there is need to practice reforestation, use electric, solar and wind energy to replace the fossil fuels thus reducing the green house effect. On ozone layer depletion just like climate change, there is need to reduce the release of carbons such as chlorofluorocarbons.

It is also important for humans to protect the existing species like reducing the dumping of untreated waste in water resources and clearing of forest at the same time opting for better farming methods other than burning (Rourke, 2008).

Díez, J., & Dwivedi, P. (2008). Global Environmental Challenges: Perspectives from the South. New York: Broadview Press.

Rourke, J. T. (2008). International Politics on the World Stage. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

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Efforts to Alleviate Ozone Depletion
Stratospheric Ozone Depletion
Ozone Depletion
Ozone Hole, Greenhouse Effect and Montreal Protocol
Ozone Depletion: A Case of Humans Fixing What They Broke
The Effect of the Ozone Layer on the earth
Physical Science Explorations: Ozone
Chemistry and Physics of Stratospheric Ozone
What we can do to protect Ozone layer
Ozone Holes, Their Causes, Effects and Reduction
Water Quality Issues in Developing Countries
Comparison of Secondary and Tertiary Waste Water Management
A Discussion of Air Pollution & Related Health Implications on the Community
Effects of the Columbia River Dams on Salmon Population
The Effects of the US Army Corp Engineers Lock and Dam System on Recreation

Environmental Issues Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on environmental issues.

The environment plays a significant role to support life on earth. But there are some issues that are causing damages to life and the ecosystem of the earth. It is related to the not only environment but with everyone that lives on the planet. Besides, its main source is pollution , global warming, greenhouse gas , and many others. The everyday activities of human are constantly degrading the quality of the environment which ultimately results in the loss of survival condition from the earth.

Source of Environment Issue

There are hundreds of issue that causing damage to the environment. But in this, we are going to discuss the main causes of environmental issues because they are very dangerous to life and the ecosystem.

Pollution – It is one of the main causes of an environmental issue because it poisons the air , water , soil , and noise. As we know that in the past few decades the numbers of industries have rapidly increased. Moreover, these industries discharge their untreated waste into the water bodies, on soil, and in air. Most of these wastes contain harmful and poisonous materials that spread very easily because of the movement of water bodies and wind.

Greenhouse Gases – These are the gases which are responsible for the increase in the temperature of the earth surface. This gases directly relates to air pollution because of the pollution produced by the vehicle and factories which contains a toxic chemical that harms the life and environment of earth.

Climate Changes – Due to environmental issue the climate is changing rapidly and things like smog, acid rains are getting common. Also, the number of natural calamities is also increasing and almost every year there is flood, famine, drought , landslides, earthquakes, and many more calamities are increasing.

Above all, human being and their greed for more is the ultimate cause of all the environmental issue.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Minimize Environment Issue?

Now we know the major issues which are causing damage to the environment. So, now we can discuss the ways by which we can save our environment. For doing so we have to take some measures that will help us in fighting environmental issues .

Moreover, these issues will not only save the environment but also save the life and ecosystem of the planet. Some of the ways of minimizing environmental threat are discussed below:

Reforestation – It will not only help in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem but also help in restoring the natural cycles that work with it. Also, it will help in recharge of groundwater, maintaining the monsoon cycle , decreasing the number of carbons from the air, and many more.

The 3 R’s principle – For contributing to the environment one should have to use the 3 R’s principle that is Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Moreover, it helps the environment in a lot of ways.

To conclude, we can say that humans are a major source of environmental issues. Likewise, our activities are the major reason that the level of harmful gases and pollutants have increased in the environment. But now the humans have taken this problem seriously and now working to eradicate it. Above all, if all humans contribute equally to the environment then this issue can be fight backed. The natural balance can once again be restored.

FAQs about Environmental Issue

Q.1 Name the major environmental issues. A.1 The major environmental issues are pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change. Besides, there are several other environmental issues that also need attention.

Q.2 What is the cause of environmental change? A.2 Human activities are the main cause of environmental change. Moreover, due to our activities, the amount of greenhouse gases has rapidly increased over the past few decades.

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How the Environment Has Changed Since the First Earth Day

When the first Earth Day was held in 1970, pesticides were killing bald eagles, and soot was darkening the sky. Now, habitat loss and climate change are imperiling the planet.

When Earth Day was first created in 1970, it rode the coattails of a decade filled with social activism. Voting rights were strengthened, civil rights were outlined, and women were demanding equal treatment.

But there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act , or Clean Water Act .

Fast forward 48 years and what started as a grassroots movement has exploded into an international day of attention and activism dedicated to preserving the environment. Officially, the United Nations recognizes this upcoming April 22 as International Mother Earth Day .

Across the globe, millions of people take part in Earth Day. According to the Earth Day Network , one of the largest activist bodies organizing Earth Day events, people celebrate by holding marches, planting trees, meeting with local representatives, and cleaning up their local environments.

In the Beginning

A series of critical environmental issues helped birth the modern environmental movement. Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring published in 1962. It brought to light the dangerous use of a pesticide called DDT that was polluting rivers and destroying the eggs of birds of prey like bald eagles.

When the modern environmental movement was at its genesis, pollution was in plain sight. White birds turned black from soot . Smog was thick. Recycling was nascent.

Then, in 1969, a large oil spill struck the coast of Santa Barbara , California. It moved then-Senator Gaylord Nelson from Wisconsin to put Earth Day on the national stage. More than 20 million people turned out.

It spurred a movement that pushed then-President Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency. In the 48 years since the first Earth Day, there have been more than 48 major environmental wins . Protections have been put in place on everything from clean water to endangered species.

The EPA also works to protect human health. For example, lead and asbestos, once common in homes and offices, have been largely phased out of many common products.

The theme of 2018's Earth Day celebration is plastics —specifically how to decrease their unwanted impacts on our environment. What was perhaps set in place in the mid-20th century when plastic was manufactured on a large scale has come back to haunt us.

Plastic refuse is everywhere. It's bigger than Texas in the Pacific garbage patch , and it's as small as the micro plastics getting eaten by fish and churned out on our dinner plates .

Some environmental groups are leading grassroots movements to cut back on the use of common plastics like straws ; the U.K. even recently proposed passing a law to ban them . It's one incremental way to cut back on the whopping 91 percent of plastic that isn't recycled .

a red sunset reflecting on the water with stark white ice chunks floating

And it's not just plastic imperiling the Earth. Today's worst environmental issues are seemingly a culmination of all the groundwork laid over the past two hundred years.

“The two most pressing issues we face today are habitat loss and climate change, and these issues are interrelated,” says Jonathan Baillie , chief scientist of the National Geographic Society .

Climate change has been called a threat to biodiversity and national security. Studies have linked it to the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef and abnormal weather .

Unlike the first Earth Day, 2018's celebration exists in a world with a more robust regulatory framework to enact environmental policy and regulate our impact.

Whether that framework will stay intact is now a matter of debate. ( See a running list of how the Trump administration is changing the environment .)

Baillie noted that addressing these issues requires fundamental changes.

“First, we need to place greater value on the natural world,” he says.

Then, we need to commit to protecting regions like the Amazon and Congo that house critical environments. Lastly, he notes, we need to innovate more rapidly. Producing protein for consumption more efficiently and cultivating renewable energy resources will help reduce the impacts of what he sees as the Earth's greatest threats.

“One of our biggest obstacles is our mindset: we need people to emotionally connect to the natural world, understand how it works and our dependence on it,” Baillie says. “Fundamentally, if we care about the natural world, we will value and protect it and make decisions that ensure the future of species and ecosystems.”

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The biggest threats to our natural world

The five biggest threats to our natural world … and how we can stop them

From destructive land use to invasive species, scientists have identified the main drivers of biodiversity loss – so that countries can collectively act to tackle them

Read more on the Cop15 talks to negotiate new UN targets to protect biodiversity in the coming decade
1 Changes in land and sea use
2 Direct exploitation of natural resources
3 The climate crisis
4 Pollution
5 Invasive species

T he world’s wildlife populations have plummeted by more than two-thirds since 1970 – and there are no signs that this downward trend is slowing. The first phase of Cop15 talks in Kunming this week will lay the groundwork for governments to draw up a global agreement next year to halt the loss of nature. If they are to succeed, they will need to tackle what the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) has identified as the five key drivers of biodiversity loss: changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of natural resources; climate change; pollution; and invasion of alien species.

Changes in land and sea use

Clearing the US prairies: ‘On a par with tropical deforestation’

“It’s hidden destruction. We’re still losing grasslands in the US at a rate of half a million acres a year or more.”

Tyler Lark, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows what he is talking about. Lark and a team of researchers used satellite data to map the expansion and abandonment of land across the US and discovered that 4m hectares (10m acres) had been destroyed between 2008 and 2016.

Large swathes of the United States’ great prairies continue to be converted into cropland, according to the research, to make way for soya bean, corn and wheat farming.

Changes in land and sea use has been identified as the main driver of “unprecedented” biodiversity and ecosystem change over the past 50 years. Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions.

North America’s grasslands – often referred to as prairies – are a case in point. In the US, about half have been converted since European settlement , and the most fertile land is already being used for agriculture. Areas converted more recently are sub-prime agricultural land, with 70% of yields lower than the national average, which means a lot of biodiversity is being lost for diminishing returns.

“Our findings demonstrate a pervasive pattern of encroachment into areas that are increasingly marginal for production but highly significant for wildlife,” Lark and his team wrote in the paper , published in Nature Communications.

Boggier areas of land, or those with uneven terrain, were traditionally left as grassland, but in the past few decades, this marginal land has also been converted. In the US, 88% of cropland expansion takes place on grassland, and much of this is happening in the Great Plains – known as America’s breadbasket – which used to be the most extensive grassland in the world.

What are the five biggest threats to biodiversity?

According to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity there are five main threats to biodiversity. In descending order these are: changes in land and sea use; direct exploitation of natural resources; climate change; pollution and invasive species.

1. For terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, land-use change has had the largest relative negative impact on nature since 1970. More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production. Alongside a doubling of urban area since 1992, things such as wetlands, scrubland and woodlands – which wildlife relies on – are ironed out from the landscape.

2. The direct exploitation of organisms and non-living materials, including logging, hunting and fishing and the extraction of soils and water are all negatively affecting ecosystems . In marine environments, overfishing is considered to be the most serious driver of biodiversity loss. One quarter of the world’s commercial fisheries are overexploited, according to a 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment .

3. The climate crisis is dismantling ecosystems at every level. Extreme weather events such as tropical storms and flooding are destroying habitats. Warmer temperatures are also changing the timing of natural events – such as the availability of insects and when birds hatch their eggs in spring. The distribution of species and their range is also changing.

4. Many types of pollution are increasing. In marine environments, pollution from agricultural runoff (mainly nitrogen and phosphorus) do huge damage to ecosystems. Agricultural runoff causes toxic algal blooms and even "dead zones" in the worst affected areas. Marine plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, affecting at least 267 species.

5. Since the 17th century, invasive species have contributed to 40% of all known animal extinctions. Nearly one fifth of the Earth’s surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions. Invasive species change the composition of ecosystems by outcompeting native species.

Hotspots for this expansion have included wildlife-rich grasslands in the “prairie pothole” region which stretches between Iowa, Dakota, Montana and southern Canada and is home to more than 50% of North American migratory waterfowl, as well as 96 species of songbird. This cropland expansion has wiped out about 138,000 nesting habitats for waterfowl, researchers estimate.

These grasslands are also a rich habitat for the monarch butterfly – a flagship species for pollinator conservation and a key indicator of overall insect biodiversity. More than 200m milkweed plants, the caterpillar’s only food source, were probably destroyed by cropland expansion, making it one of the leading causes for the monarch’s national decline .

The extent of conversion of grassland in the US makes it a larger emission source than the destruction of the Brazilian Cerrado , according to research from 2019 . About 90% of emissions from grassland conversion comes from carbon lost in the soil, which is released when the grassland is ploughed up.

“The rate of clearing that we’re seeing on these grasslands is on par with things like tropical deforestation, but it often receives far less attention,” says Lark.

Food crop production globally has increased by about 300% since 1970 , despite the negative environmental impacts.

Reducing food waste and eating less meat would help cut the amount of land needed for farming, while researchers say improved management of existing croplands and utilising what is already farmed as best as possible would reduce further expansion.

Lark concludes: “I think there’s a huge opportunity to re-envision our landscapes so that they’re not only providing incredible food production but also mitigating climate change and helping reduce the impacts of the biodiversity crisis by increasing habitats on agricultural land.” PW

Direct exploitation of natural resources

Groundwater extraction: ‘People don’t see it’

From hunting, fishing and logging to the extraction of oil, gas, coal and water, humanity’s insatiable appetite for the planet’s resources has devastated large parts of the natural world.

While the impacts of many of these actions can often be seen, unsustainable groundwater extraction could be driving a hidden crisis below our feet, experts have warned, wiping out freshwater biodiversity, threatening global food security and causing rivers to run dry.

Farmers and mining companies are pumping vast underground water stores at an unsustainable rate, according to ecologists and hydrologists. About half the world’s population relies on groundwater for drinking water and it helps sustain 40% of irrigation systems for crops .

The consequences for freshwater ecosystems – among the most degraded on the planet – are under-researched as studies have focused on the depletion of groundwater for agriculture.

But a growing body of research indicates that pumping the world’s most extracted resource – water – is causing significant damage to the planet’s ecosystems. A 2017 study of the Ogallala aquifer – an enormous water source underneath eight states in the US Great Plains – found that more than half a century of pumping has caused streams to run dry and a collapse in large fish populations. In 2019, another study estimated that by 2050 between 42% and 79% of watersheds that pump groundwater globally could pass ecological tipping points, without better management.

“The difficulty with groundwater is that people don’t see it and they don’t understand the fragility of it,” says James Dalton, director of the global water programme at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “Groundwater can be the largest – and sometimes the sole – source in certain types of terrestrial habitats.

“Uganda is luxuriantly green, even during the dry season, but that’s because a lot of it is irrigated with shallow groundwater for agriculture and the ecosystems are reliant on tapping into it.”

According to UPGro (Unlocking the Potential of Groundwater for the Poor), a research programme looking into the management of groundwater in sub-Saharan Africa, 73 of the 98 operational water supply systems in Uganda are dependent on water from below ground. The country shares two transboundary aquifers: the Nile and Lake Victoria basins. At least 592 aquifers are shared across borders around the world.

“Some of the groundwater reserves are huge, so there is time to fix this,” says Dalton. “It’s just there’s no attention to it.”

Inge de Graaf, a hydrologist at Wageningen University, who led the 2019 study into watershed levels, found between 15% to 21% had already passed ecological tipping points, adding that once the effects had become clear for rivers, it was often too late.

“Groundwater is slow because it has to flow through rocks. If you extract water today, it will impact the stream flow maybe in the next five years, in the next 10 years, or in the next decades,” she says. “I think the results of this research and related studies are pretty scary.”

In April, the largest ever assessment of global groundwater wells by researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara, found that up to one in five were at risk of running dry. Scott Jasechko, a hydrologist and lead author on the paper, says that the study focuses on the consequences for humans and more research is needed on biodiversity.

“Millions of wells around the world could run dry with even modest declines in groundwater levels. And that, of course, has cascading implications for livelihoods and access to reliable and convenient water for individuals and ecosystems,” he says. PG

The climate crisis

Climate and biodiversity: ‘Solve both or solve neither’

In 2019, the European heatwave brought 43C heat to Montpellier in France. Great tit chicks in 30 nest boxes starved to death, probably because it was too hot for their parents to catch the food they needed, according to one researcher . Two years later, and 2021’s heatwave appears to have set a European record, pushing temperatures to 48.8C in Sicily in August. Meanwhile, wildfires and heatwaves are stripping the planet of life.

Until now, the destruction of habitats and extraction of resources has had a more significant impact on biodiversity than the climate crisis. This is likely to change over the coming decades as the climate crisis dismantles ecosystems in unpredictable and dramatic ways, according to a review paper published by the Royal Society.

“There are many aspects of ecosystem science where we will not know enough in sufficient time,” the paper says. “Ecosystems are changing so rapidly in response to global change drivers that our research and modelling frameworks are overtaken by empirical, system-altering changes.”

The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a s tudy on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

Writer Zadie Smith describes every country’s changes as a “local sadness” . Insects no longer fly into the house when the lights are on in the evening, the snowdrops are coming out earlier and some migratory species, such as swallows, are starting to try to stay in the UK for winter. All these individual elements are entwined in a much bigger story of decline.

Our biosphere – the thin film of life on the surface of our planet – is being destabilised by temperature change. On land, rains are altering, extreme weather events are more common, and ecosystems more flammable. Associated changes, including flooding , sea level rise, droughts and storms, are having hugely damaging impacts on biodiversity and its ability to support us.

In the ocean, heatwaves and acidification are stressing organisms and ecosystems already under pressure due to other human activities, such as overfishing and habitat fragmentation.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) landmark report showed that extreme heatwaves that would usually happen every 50 years are already happening every decade. If warming is kept to 1.5C these will happen approximately every five years.

The distributions of almost half (47%) of land-based flightless mammals and almost a quarter of threatened birds, may already have been negatively affected by the climate crisis, the IPBES warns . Five per cent of species are at risk of extinction from 2C warming, climbing to 16% with a 4.3C rise.

Connected, diverse and extensive ecosystems can help stabilise the climate and will have a better chance of thriving in a world permanently altered by rising emissions, say experts. And, as the Royal Society paper says: “Rather than being framed as a victim of climate change, biodiversity can be seen as a key ally in dealing with climate change.” PW

The hidden threat of nitrogen: ‘Slowly eating away at biodiversity’

On the west coast of Scotland, fragments of an ancient rainforest that once stretched along the Atlantic coast of Britain cling on. Its rare mosses, lichens and fungi are perfectly suited to the mild temperatures and steady supply of rainfall, covering the crags, gorges and bark of native woodland. But nitrogen pollution, an invisible menace, threatens the survival of the remaining 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of Scottish rainforest, along with invasive rhododendron, conifer plantations and deer.

While marine plastic pollution in particular has increased tenfold since 1980 – affecting 44% of seabirds – air, water and soil pollution are all on the rise in some areas. This has led to pollution being singled out as the fourth biggest driver of biodiversity loss.

In Scotland, nitrogen compounds from intensive farming and fossil fuel combustion are dumped on the Scottish rainforest from the sky, killing off the lichen and bryophytes that absorb water from the air and are highly sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

“The temperate rainforest is far from the sources of pollution, yet because it’s so rainy, we’re getting a kind of acid rain effect,” says Jenny Hawley, policy manager at Plantlife, which has called nitrogen pollution in the air “the elephant in the room” of nature conservation. “The nitrogen-rich rain that’s coming down and depositing nitrogen into those habitats is making it impossible for the lichen, fungi, mosses and wildflowers to survive.”

Environmental destruction caused by nitrogen pollution is not limited to the Scottish rainforest. Algal blooms around the world are often caused by runoff from farming, resulting in vast dead zones in oceans and lakes that kill scores of fish and devastate ecosystems. Nitrogen-rich rainwater degrades the ability of peatlands to sequester carbon, the protection of which is a stated climate goal of several governments. Wildflowers adapted to low-nitrogen soils are squeezed out by aggressive nettles and cow parsley, making them less diverse.

About 80% of nitrogen used by humans – through food production, transport, energy and industrial and wastewater processes – is wasted and enters the environment as pollution.

“Nitrogen pollution might not result in huge floods and apocalyptic droughts but we are slowly eating away at biodiversity as we put more and more nitrogen in ecosystems,” says Carly Stevens, a plant ecologist at Lancaster University. “Across the UK, we have shown that habitats that have lots of nitrogen have fewer species in them. We have shown it across Europe. We have shown it across the US. Now we’re showing it in China. We’re creating more and more damage all the time.”

To decrease the amount of nitrogen pollution causing biodiversity loss, governments will commit to halving nutrient runoff by 2030 as part of an agreement for nature currently being negotiated in Kunming. Halting the waste of vast amounts of nitrogen fertiliser in agriculture is a key part of meeting the target, says Kevin Hicks, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute centre at York.

“One of the biggest problems is the flow of nitrogen from farming into watercourses,” Hicks says. “In terms of a nitrogen footprint, the most intensive thing that you can eat is meat. The more meat you eat, the more nitrogen you’re putting into the environment.”

Mark Sutton, a professor at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, says reducing nitrogen pollution also makes economic sense.

“Nitrogen in the atmosphere is 78% of every breath we take. It does nothing, it’s very stable and makes the sky blue. Then there are all these other nitrogen compounds: ammonia, nitrates, nitrous oxide. They create air and water pollution,” he says. He argues that if you price every kilo of nitrogen at $1 (an estimated fertiliser price), and multiply it by the amount of nitrogen pollution lost in the world – 200bn tonnes – it amounts to $200bn (£147bn) every year.

“The goal to cut nitrogen waste in half would save you $100bn,” he says. “I think $100bn a year is a worthwhile saving.” PG

Invasive species

The problem for islands: ‘We have to be very careful’

On Gough Island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, scores of seabird chicks are eaten by mice every year. The rodents were accidentally introduced by sailors in the 19th century and their population has surged, putting the Tristan albatross – one of the largest of its species – at risk of extinction along with dozens of rare seabirds. Although Tristan albatross chicks are 300 times the size of mice, two-thirds did not fledge in 2020 largely because of the injuries they sustained from the rodents, according to the RSPB .

The situation on the remote island, 2,600km from South Africa, is a grisly warning of the consequences of the human-driven impacts of invasive species on biodiversity. An RSPB-led operation to eradicate mice from the British overseas territory has been completed, using poison to help save the critically endangered albatross and other bird species from injuries they sustain from the rodents. It will be two years before researchers can confirm whether or not the plan has worked. But some conservationists want to explore another controversial option whose application is most advanced in the eradication of malaria : gene drives.

Instead of large-scale trapping or poisoning operations, which have limited effectiveness and can harm other species, gene drives involve introducing genetic code into an invasive population that would make them infertile or all one gender over successive generations. The method has so far been used only in a laboratory setting but at September’s IUCN congress in Marseille, members backed a motion to develop a policy on researching its application and other uses of synthetic biology for conservation.

“If a gene drive were proven to be effective and there were safety mechanisms to limit its deployment, you would introduce multiple individuals on an island whose genes would be inherited by other individuals in the population,” says David Will, an innovation programme manager with Island Conservation , a non-profit dedicated to preventing extinctions by removing invasive species from islands. “Eventually, you would have either an entirely all male or entirely all female population and they would no longer be able to reproduce.”

Nearly one-fifth of the Earth’s surface is at risk of plant and animal invasions and although the problem is worldwide, such as feral pigs wreaking havoc in the southern United States and lionfish in the Mediterranean , islands are often worst affected. The global scale of the issue will be revealed in a UN scientific assessment in 2023.

“We have to be very careful,” says Austin Burt, a professor of evolutionary genetics at Imperial College London, who researches how gene drives can be used to eradicate malaria in mosquito populations. “If you’re going after mice, for example, and you’re targeting mice on an island, you’d need to make sure that none of those modified mice got off the island to cause harm to the mainland population.”

In July, scientists announced they had successfully wiped out a population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes using a gene drive in a laboratory setting, raising the prospect of self-destructing mosquitoes being released into the wild in the next decade.

Kent Redford, chair of the IUCN Task Force on Synthetic Biology who led an assessment of the use of synthetic biology in conservation, said there are clear risks and opportunities in the field but further research is necessary.

“None of these genetic tools are ever going to be a panacea. Ever. Nor do I think they will ever replace the existing tools,” Redford says, adding: “There is a hope – and I stress hope – that engineered gene drives have the potential to effectively decrease the population sizes of alien invasive species with very limited knock-on effects on other species.” PG

Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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Harvard students share thoughts, fears, plans to meet environmental challenges

For many, thinking about the world’s environmental future brings concern, even outright alarm.

There have been, after all, decades of increasingly strident warnings by experts and growing, ever-more-obvious signs of the Earth’s shifting climate. Couple this with a perception that past actions to address the problem have been tantamount to baby steps made by a generation of leaders who are still arguing about what to do, and even whether there really is a problem.

It’s no surprise, then, that the next generation of global environmental leaders are preparing for their chance to begin work on the problem in government, business, public health, engineering, and other fields with a real sense of mission and urgency.

The Gazette spoke to students engaged in environmental action in a variety of ways on campus to get their views of the problem today and thoughts on how their activities and work may help us meet the challenge.

Eric Fell and Eliza Spear

Fell is president and Spear is vice president of Harvard Energy Journal Club. Fell is a graduate student at the Harvard John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Spear is a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

FELL: For the past three centuries, fossil fuels have enabled massive growth of our civilization to where we are today. But it is now time for a new generation of cleaner-energy technologies to fuel the next chapter of humanity’s story. We’re not too late to solve this environmental challenge, but we definitely shouldn’t procrastinate as much as we have been. I don’t worry about if we’ll get it done, it’s the when. Our survival depends on it. At Harvard, I’ve been interested in the energy-storage problem and have been focusing on developing a grid-scale solution utilizing flow batteries based on organic molecules in the lab of Mike Aziz . We’ll need significant deployment of batteries to enable massive penetration of renewables into the electrical grid.

SPEAR: Processes leading to greenhouse-gas emissions are so deeply entrenched in our way of life that change continues to be incredibly slow. We need to be making dramatic structural changes, and we should all be very worried about that. In the Harvard Energy Journal Club, our focus is energy, so we strive to learn as much as we can about the diverse options for clean-energy generation in various sectors. A really important aspect of that is understanding how much of an impact those technologies, like solar, hydro, and wind, can really have on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s not always as much as you’d like to believe, and there are still a lot of technical and policy challenges to overcome.

I can’t imagine working on anything else, but the question of what I’ll be working on specifically is on my mind a lot. The photovoltaics field is at a really exciting point where a new technology is just starting to break out onto the market, so there are a lot of opportunities for optimization in terms of performance, safety, and environmental impact. That’s what I’m working on now [in Roy Gordon’s lab ] and I’m really enjoying it. I’ll definitely be in the renewable-energy technology realm. The specifics will depend on where I see the greatest opportunity to make an impact.

Photo (left) courtesy of Kritika Kharbanda; photo by Tiera Satchebell.

Kritika Kharbanda ’23 and Laier-Rayshon Smith ’21

Kharbanda is with the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference, Harvard Circular Economy Symposium. Smith is a member of Climate Leaders Program for Professional Students at Harvard. Both are students at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

KHARBANDA: I come from a country where the most pressing issues are, and will be for a long time, poverty, food shortage, and unemployment born out of corruption, illiteracy, and rapid gentrification. India was the seventh-most-affected country by climate change in 2019. With two-thirds of the population living in rural areas with no access to electricity, even the notion of climate change is unimaginable.

I strongly believe that the answer lies in the conjugality of research and industry. In my field, achieving circularity in the building material processes is the burning concern. The building industry currently contributes to 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, of which 38 percent is contributed by the embedded or embodied energy used for the manufacturing of materials. A part of the Harvard i-lab, I am a co-founder of Cardinal LCA, an early stage life-cycle assessment tool that helps architects and designers visualize this embedded energy in building materials, saving up to 46 percent of the energy from the current workflow. This venture has a strong foundation as a research project for a seminar class I took at the GSD in fall 2020, instructed by Jonathan Grinham. I am currently working as a sustainability engineer at Henning Larsen architects in Copenhagen while on a leave of absence from GSD. In the decades to come, I aspire to continue working on the embodied carbon aspect of the building industry. Devising an avant garde strategy to record the embedded carbon is the key. In the end, whose carbon is it, anyway?

SMITH: The biggest challenges are areas where the threat of climate change intersects with environmental justice. It is important that we ensure that climate-change mitigation and adaptation strategies are equitable, whether it is sea-level rise or the increase in urban heat islands. We should seek to address the threats faced by the most vulnerable communities — the communities least able to resolve the threat themselves. These often tend to be low-income communities and communities of color that for decades have been burdened with bearing the brunt of environmental health hazards.

During my time at Harvard, I have come to understand how urban planning and design can seek to address this challenge. Planners and designers can develop strategies to prioritize communities that are facing a significant climate-change risk, but because of other structural injustices may not be able to access the resources to mitigate the risk. I also learned about climate gentrification: a phenomenon in which people in wealthier communities move to areas with lower risks of climate-change threats that are/were previously lower-income communities. I expect to work on many of these issues, as many are connected and are threats to communities across the country. From disinvestment and economic extraction to the struggle to find quality affordable housing, these injustices allow for significant disparities in life outcomes and dealing with risk.

Lucy Shaw ’21

Shaw is co-president of the HBS Energy and Environment Club. She is a joint-degree student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.

SHAW: I want to see a world where climate change is averted and the environment preserved, without it being at the expense of the development and prosperity of lower-income countries. We have, or are on the cusp of having, many of the financial and technological tools we need to reduce emissions and environmental damage from a wide array of industries, such as agriculture, energy, and transport. The challenge I am most worried about is how we balance economic growth and opportunity with reducing humanity’s environmental impact and share this burden equitably across countries.

I came to Harvard as a joint degree student at the Kennedy School and Business School to be able to see this challenge from two different angles. In my policy-oriented classes, we learned about the opportunities and challenges of global coordination among national governments — the difficulty in enforcing climate agreements, and in allocating and agreeing on who bears the responsibility and the costs of change, but also the huge potential that an international framework with nationally binding laws on environmental protection and carbon-emission reduction could have on changing the behavior of people and businesses. In my business-oriented classes, we learned about the power of business to create change, if there is a driven leadership. We also learned that people and businesses respond to incentives, and the importance of reducing cost of technologies or increasing the cost of not switching to more sustainable technologies — for example, through a tax. After graduate school, I plan to join a leading private equity investor in their growing infrastructure team, which will equip me with tools to understand what makes a good investment in infrastructure and what are the opportunities for reducing the environmental impact of infrastructure while enhancing its value. I hope to one day be involved in shaping environmental and development policy, whether it is on a national or international level.

Photo (left) by Tabitha Soren.

Quinn Lewis ’23 and Suhaas Bhat ’24

Both are with the Student Climate Change Conference, Harvard College.

LEWIS: When I was a kid, I imagined being an adult as a future with a stable house, a fun job, and happy kids. That future didn’t include wildfires that obscured the sun for months, global water shortages, or billionaires escaping to terrariums on Mars. The threats are so great and so assured by inaction that it’s very hard for me to justify doing anything else with my time and attention because very little will matter if there’s 1 billion climate refugees and significant portions of the continental United States become uninhabitable for human life.

For whatever reason, I still feel a great deal of hope around giving it a shot. I can’t imagine not working to mitigate the climate crisis. Media and journalism will play a huge role in raising awareness, as they generate public pressure that can sway those in power. Another route for change is to cut directly to those in power and try to convince them of the urgency of the situation. Given that I am 22 years old, it is much easier to raise public awareness or work in media and journalism than it is to sit down with some of the most powerful people on the planet, who tend to be rather busy. At school, I’m on a team that runs the University-wide Student Climate Change Conference at Harvard, which is a platform for speakers from diverse backgrounds to discuss the climate crisis and ways students and educators can take immediate and effective action. Also, I write about and research challenges and solutions to the climate crisis through the lenses of geopolitics and the global economy, both as a student at the College and as a case writer at the Harvard Business School. Outside of Harvard, I have worked in investigative journalism and at Crooked Media, as well as on political campaigns to indirectly and directly drive urgency around the climate crisis.

BHAT: The failure to act on climate change in the last few decades, despite mountains of scientific evidence, is a consequence of political and institutional cowardice. Fossil fuel companies have obfuscated, misinformed, and lobbied for decades, and governments have failed to act in the best interests of their citizens. Of course, the fight against climate change is complex and multidimensional, requiring scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial expertise, but it will ultimately require systemic change to allow these talents to shine.

At Harvard, my work on climate has been focused on running the Harvard Student Climate Conference, as well as organizing for Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard. My hope for the Climate Conference is to provide students access to speakers who have dedicated their careers to all aspects of the fight against climate change, so that students interested in working on climate have more direction and inspiration for what to do with their careers. We’ve featured Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, members of the Sunrise Movement, and the CEO of Impossible Foods as some examples of inspiring and impactful people who are working against climate change today.

I organize for FFDH because I believe that serious institutional change is necessary for solving the climate crisis and also because of a sort of patriotism I have for Harvard. I deeply respect and care for this institution, and genuinely believe it is an incredible force for good in the world. At the same time, I believe Harvard has a moral duty to stand against the corporations whose misdeeds and falsification of science have enabled the climate crisis.

Libby Dimenstein ’22

Dimenstein is co-president of Harvard Law School Environmental Law Society.

DIMENSTEIN: Climate change is the one truly existential threat that my generation has had to face. What’s most scary is that we know it’s happening. We know how bad it will be; we know people are already dying from it; and we still have done so little relative to the magnitude of the problem. I also worry that people don’t see climate change as an “everyone problem,” and more as a problem for people who have the time and money to worry about it, when in reality it will harm people who are already disadvantaged the most.

I want to recognize Professor Wendy Jacobs, who recently passed away. Wendy founded HLS’s fantastic Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and she also created an interdisciplinary class called the Climate Solutions Living Lab. In the lab, groups of students drawn from throughout the University would conduct real-world projects to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The class was hard, because actually reducing greenhouse gases is hard, but it taught us about the work that needs to be done. This summer I’m interning with the Environmental Defense Fund’s U.S. Clean Air Team, and I anticipate a lot of my work will revolve around the climate. After graduating, I’m hoping to do environmental litigation, either with a governmental division or a nonprofit, but I also have an interest in policy work: Impact litigation is fascinating and important, but what we need most is sweeping policy change.

Candice Chen ’22 and Noah Secondo ’22

Chen and Secondo are co-directors of the Harvard Environmental Action Committee. Both attend Harvard College.

SECONDO: The environment is fundamental to rural Americans’ identity, but they do not believe — as much as urban Americans — that the government can solve environmental problems. Without the whole country mobilized and enthusiastic, from New Hampshire to Nebraska, we will fail to confront the climate crisis. I have no doubt that we can solve this problem. To rebuild trust between the U.S. government and rural communities, federal departments and agencies need to speak with rural stakeholders, partner with state and local leaders, and foreground rural voices. Through the Harvard College Democrats and the Environmental Action Committee, I have contributed to local advocacy efforts and creative projects, including an environmental art publication.

I hope to work in government to keep the policy development and implementation processes receptive to rural perspectives, including in the environmental arena. At every level of government, if we work with each other in good faith, we will tackle the climate crisis and be better for it.

CHEN: I’m passionate about promoting more sustainable, plant-based diets. As individual consumers, we have very little control over the actions of the largest emitters, massive corporations, but we can all collectively make dietary decisions that can avoid a lot of environmental degradation. Our food system is currently very wasteful, and our overreliance on animal agriculture devastates natural ecosystems, produces lots of potent greenhouse gases, and creates many human health hazards from poor animal-waste disposal. I feel like the climate conversation is often focused around the clean energy transition, and while it is certainly the largest component of how we can avoid the worst effects of global warming, the dietary conversation is too often overlooked. A more sustainable future also requires us to rethink agriculture, and especially what types of agriculture our government subsidizes. In the coming years, I hope that more will consider the outsized environmental impact of animal agriculture and will consider making more plant-based food swaps.

To raise awareness of the environmental benefits of adopting a more plant-based diet, I’ve been involved with running a campaign through the Environmental Action Committee called Veguary. Veguary encourages participants to try going vegetarian or vegan for the month of February, and participants receive estimates for how much their carbon/water/land use footprints have changed based on their pledged dietary changes for the month.

Photo (left) courtesy of Cristina Su Liu.

Cristina Su Liu ’22 and James Healy ’21

How Earth Day gave birth to environmental movement

The culture of Earth Day

Spirituality, social justice, and climate change meet at the crossroads

Liu is with Harvard Climate Leaders Program for Professional Students. Healy is with the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference. Both are students at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

HEALY: As a public health student I see so many environmental challenges, be it the 90 percent of the world who breathe unhealthy air, or the disproportionate effects of extreme heat on communities of color, or the environmental disruptions to the natural world and the zoonotic disease that humans are increasingly being exposed to. But the central commonality at the heart of all these crises is the climate crisis. Climate change, from the greenhouse-gas emissions to the physical heating of the Earth, is worsening all of these environmental crises. That’s why I call the climate crisis the great exacerbator. While we will all feel the effects of climate change, it will not be felt equally. Whether it’s racial inequity or wealth inequality, the climate crisis is widening these already gaping divides.

Solutions may have to be outside of our current road maps for confronting crises. I have seen the success of individual efforts and private innovation in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, from individuals wearing masks and social distancing to the huge advances in vaccine development. But for climate change, individual efforts and innovation won’t be enough. I would be in favor of policy reform and coalition-building between new actors. As an overseer of the Harvard Student Climate Change Conference and the Harvard Climate Leaders Program, I’ve aimed to help mobilize Harvard’s diverse community to tackle climate change. I am also researching how climate change makes U.S. temperatures more variable, and how that’s reducing the life expectancies of Medicare recipients. The goal of this research, with Professor Joel Schwartz, will be to understand the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities. I certainly hope to expand on these themes in my future work.

SU LIU: A climate solution will need to be a joint effort from the whole society, not just people inside the environmental or climate circles. In addition to cross-sectoral cooperation, solving climate change will require much stronger international cooperation so that technologies, projects, and resources can be developed and shared globally. As a Chinese-Brazilian student currently studying in the United States, I find it very valuable to learn about the climate challenges and solutions of each of these countries, and how these can or cannot be applied in other settings. China-U.S. relations are tense right now, but I hope that climate talks can still go ahead since we have much to learn from each other.

Personally, as a student in environmental health at [the Harvard Chan School], I feel that my contribution to addressing this challenge until now has been in doing research, learning more about the health impacts of climate change, and most importantly, learning how to communicate climate issues to people outside climate circles. Every week there are several climate-change events at Harvard, where a different perspective on climate change is addressed. It has been very inspiring for me, and I feel that I could learn about climate change in a more holistic way.

Recently, I started an internship at FXB Village, where I am working on developing and integrating climate resilience indicators into their poverty-alleviation program in rural communities in Puebla, Mexico. It has been very rewarding to introduce climate-change and climate-resilience topics to people working on poverty alleviation and see how everything is interconnected. When we address climate resilience, we are also addressing access to basic services, livelihoods, health, equity, and quality of life in general. This is where climate justice is addressed, and that is a very powerful idea.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environmental Issues — Environmental Problems: Challenges and Solutions

Environmental Problems: Challenges and Solutions

Categories: Ecology Environmental Issues

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Words: 1427 |

Published: May 17, 2022

Words: 1427 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Introduction, environmental problems, global climate change (greenhouse effect), energy conservation, renewable energy sources, sustainable energy.

Greenhouse gas emissions must be balanced or reduced, with the help of RES and energy conservations.
Energy conservation is vital to sustainable development and, although it has its limitations, it must be performed in all possible ways. This is necessary not only for us but for the next generation as well.
Renewable energy sources and technologies should be used more to prevent upcoming energy shortages and environmental problems.
Energy, environment and sustainable development Ibrahim Dincer a, *, Marc A. Rosen
A review of renewable energy sources, sustainability issues and climate change mitigation
Perman R, Ma Y, McGilvray J. Natural resource and environmental economics. London: Longman, 1996.
Dincer I. Energy and environmental impacts: present and future perspectives. Energy Sources 1998;20(4-5):427-53.
Aebischer B, Giovannini B, Pain D. Scienti®c and technical arguments for the optimal use of energy. Geneva: IEA, 1989.
Anon. Global energy perspectives to 2050 and beyond. London: World Energy Council Technical Report, 1995

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Human Impacts on the Environment

Humans impact the physical environment in many ways: overpopulation, pollution, burning fossil fuels, and deforestation. Changes like these have triggered climate change, soil erosion, poor air quality, and undrinkable water. These negative impacts can affect human behavior and can prompt mass migrations or battles over clean water.

Help your students understand the impact humans have on the physical environment with these classroom resources.

Earth Science, Geology, Geography, Physical Geography

23 Hot & Evergreen Environment Essay Topics to Write About in 2023

Topics for an Essay on the Environment in the Climate Change Context

This cluster of topics deals with the most debatable aspect of environmental issues – global climate change. If you yearn to craft an extended ‘how to save the environment’ essay, you should find a relevant topic right here.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Sustainable Development and Climate Adaptation

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence is used across multiple industries, with more or less success. While the range of technology application extends by leaps and bounds, people are still struggling to realize the full potential of AI and how to use it at maximum efficiency. As many experts predict the next AI quantum leap in the nearest future, you could elaborate on how current and prospective AI capabilities can help humans maintain sustainable development and find ways to adapt to intensifying climate change.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Control Measures

The greenhouse gas issue has been discussed for years, and various emission-reducing measures have been taken, but unfortunately, they only have temporary and limited effects. As of today, no viable solution is in sight. While scientists are looking for ways to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming, you might want to write an essay about how countries and international organizations can improve the control efficiency of the already implemented measures, as violating them is a global problem.

Individual Carbon Footprint Reduction Strategies

The question of whether an individual or small-collective effort to reduce the carbon footprint has an impact – if any – on preventing or minimizing global climate change is always interesting to discuss. It also has so many aspects that students should easily find an individual yet compelling angle to the issue that will echo in many souls. One of such angles is actually measuring a particular individual’s carbon footprint in order to then reduce it more effectively.

Perspectives of Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage

Contrary to the previous carbon-related topic, this one fits great not for individuals but for entire industries. Capturing carbon directly from the air is today absolutely cost-ineffective; however, this is virtually the only perspective method of reducing the amount of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and turning it into useful products like polyurethane or synthetic fuel. There are plenty of interesting things one might be able to write even in a short essay on environment protection through inventing cheaper and more efficient ways to capture and store carbon.

Global Climate Change and Its Economic Impacts

As countries around the world experience the impacts of climate change, understanding how it affects global economics is essential. The thing is, due to ever-increasing globalization, climate-related issues or solutions applied in one part of the world can affect the supply chains or final products on another side of the planet. Also, this essay could discuss how extreme weather events, changing precipitation patterns, and other environmental factors can impact various economic sectors, i.e., agriculture and energy systems, to name a few.

Urban Environment Pollution Essay Topics

Urban spaces with industrial enterprises are one of the major sources of environmental pollution. Taking this into account, you can consider writing a protect environment essay on one of the topics highlighted below.

Clear Air: Strategies for Improving Air Quality in Cities

Air pollution can have devastating consequences for human health and local ecosystems, especially in developing countries that use primarily fossil fuels across industries. Hence, it is vital to implement effective prevention measures to reduce emissions from plants and vehicles where possible. This topic could discuss possible strategies that governments may consider in order to reduce air pollution levels in their respective countries or regions.

Green Building Practices Around the Globe or in a Particular Region

In recent years, green building has become quite popular not only among private homeowners but also urbanists and industrial architects. Erecting separate buildings, entire blocks or communities, and plants that are environment-friendly might be the solution to many problems of modern cities (for example, the above-mentioned air pollution issue) and also a way to partially fight worldwide deforestation. As a result, there are lots of aspects to this topic you can elaborate on and craft an outstanding piece.

Present-Day and Prospective Waste Management Systems and Solutions

Improper waste management may cause severe pollution of urban spaces, potentially posing health risks to cities’ inhabitants. In case you decide to write an essay about this issue, you can discuss existing waste management systems available globally (landfills, incinerators, recycling centers), as well as emerging technologies like plasma gasification or conversion, etc. Apparently, the piece should focus on developing eco-friendly solutions aiming at reducing human-produced waste.

Networked Environmental Sensors Usage Techniques and Benefits

To bring about a healthier planet, we need to be able to monitor and measure ongoing processes. Technology has made it possible with distributed networked sensors that give us real-time data about the environment, be it vast ocean spaces or cities. When writing about environmental sensors, you can describe how they help track pollutants and acidification levels in air and water, reduce waste by tracking water and energy usage within buildings and enable greater sustainability more than ever before.

Essay Topics About the Environment & Economics

Whether we want it or not, the environment and economics are closely tied. In the context of coming up with an interesting and current environmental essay topic, this provides a wide pool of ideas to develop into a full-fledged paper.

The Economics of Climate Change

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today, and understanding its economics is essential for finding solutions. This topic could analyze how different countries have responded financially to climate change mitigation efforts and what new strategies might be developed in order to better address the issue in the future.

Long-Term Energy Storage as a Way to a More Sustainable Economy

With the global shift to renewable energy sources, the economy faces yet another challenge. The thing is, present-day energy storage solutions (i.e., lithium-ion batteries) are great for the short term. But what about longer stretches when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind dies down? Students interested in this aspect of environmental protection and sustainable development can write about prospective methods of long-term energy storage, like molten salt, thermal batteries, integrating solar and wind power production with innovative storage solutions, etc. If these technologies can be perfected, we could wave goodbye to astronomical power prices and enjoy a more sustainable global economy.

Best Practices and Benefits of Using Drones in Organic Farming

Organic farming involves using natural methods without chemicals or genetic modification and contributes greatly to environmental protection. Using new technology – for example, drones – to help improve “the old farming ways” can be an extremely engaging and fruitful topic for an environmental essay.

Methane Emissions Reduction Technologies and Practices

Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases – and about a quarter of its global emission is attributed to agriculture. An essay about methane should discuss improving the technologies (i.e., scrubbers and biodigesters) used to capture emissions from cow farms. It should also cover emerging practices such as composting organic waste.

Will Graphene Save Earth and Humankind?

Graphene is the latest revolution in planet-saving materials, and it’s much more than just a trend. Just one atom thick yet stronger than steel and thinner than paper, graphene has incredible conductive powers that can be applied to water filtration systems and superconductors for transferring energy with minimal loss over long distances, to name a few. This revolutionary material could prove to be the keystone of revamping Earth into a sustainable home.

Topics for Essays About Water Consumption & Preservation

Water is the source of life on Earth. However, if humankind doesn’t take care of this precious resource, it could beshrew all living creatures on the planet. The importance of water for the environment gives you plenty of topics to write about in the forthcoming year.

Methods to Fight Ocean Acidification

Increased ocean acidification results from high concentrations of carbon dioxide, which gets absorbed into the water. This effect can have far-reaching consequences not only for marine life but also for humanity as a whole since oceans play a crucial role in regulating temperatures on Earth. This topic could discuss potential solutions or ways to mitigate ocean acidification and its planetary-scale adverse impacts on the environment.

Freshwater Scarcity & Conservation Efforts

Freshwater scarcity is an increasingly pressing issue around the world due to growing populations consuming more than nature can sustainably produce. A paper on this topic could look at how different countries are addressing water scarcity issues through conservation efforts such as desalination plants or aquifer recharging systems.

Sea Level Rise and Its Impact on Coastal Communities

As sea levels continue to rise in different parts of the world, this topic could explore ways affected communities are preparing for potential flooding by implementing adaptation strategies such as coastal defenses and mangrove reforestation efforts.

Ways to Reduce Water Usage in Agriculture

Around 70% of the world’s freshwater is used in agriculture, and this volume has to be reduced if humankind expects to survive in the already foreseeable future. Developing an essay on this topic could talk about capturing and storing water methods, drought-tolerant crops, dry farming, compost and mulch, and conservation tillage techniques.

Essay Topics About Renewable Energy Sources and Related Technologies

It is impossible to imagine how humankind can resolve looming global environmental issues without including renewable energy sources as a critical part of the solution. Due to the variety of existing sources, this segment offers multiple topic options, all of them being interesting, innovative, and potentially groundbreaking.

Will Humankind Be Using Renewable Energy Sources Only by the End of the 21st Century?

Renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are today widespread and efficient enough to pose an alternative to fossil fuels. However, implementing each technology in real life has many nuances and technical complications. Hence, it might be really interesting to research the topic and estimate whether entirely switching to renewable energy sources from oil, coal, and natural gas by the end of the 21st century is reasonable.

Advances and Problems in Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion has the potential to become a true game-changer in power generation. Based on fusing hydrogen into helium, this process is an incredible source of renewable energy that runs the Sun and is tried to be mimicked here on Earth. What makes this especially attractive is its zero-carbon emissions and no radioactive nuclear waste — two big environmental benefits we need more than ever before. You can delve into the details of this topic and explain to your readers how nuclear fusion can save the world for future generations.

New Approaches to Using Hydrogen in Energy Transition

Lately, hydrogen is becoming more and more important for power generation. This is directly connected with the development of renewable energy sources that are increasingly used to obtain hydrogen from water. Also, you can explore and write about the fact that hydrogen plays a crucial role in storing renewable energy. Overall, hydrogen usage in terms of environment, sustainable development, and energy transition offers many aspects you can craft your essay about.

Solar Power: How Technological Advances Are Increasing Solar Energy Efficiency

The growth of solar energy has been extraordinary in recent decades, with solar cells now capable of producing more energy than ever. An essay about solar power may explore the advances in the technology – for example, solar glass – meant to increase its efficiency and broaden the sphere of its usage

Public Electric Transport, Cars, and Trucks: Benefits, Challenges, and Scope for Improvement

We are now living in the electric vehicles boom era. However, the vast majority of them are produced today for private use. An eager student can write an extended essay about the effects the massive introduction of public electric transport and long-distance transportation trucks will have on protecting the environment. On the other hand, you can also describe challenges people might face during the such transition and suggest ways of overcoming them.

As you can see, there are plenty of interesting environment essay topics to choose from for your next college paper in 2023. Depending on what your interests are, there’s sure a topic on this list that will get your creative juices flowing. Yet, should so happen that you wouldn’t find anything worthy of your attention, you can always look up more topics in online databases with 100% free essays . Whichever topic you choose, make sure to write with passion and creativity – your readers will thank you for it!

Modern Environmental Issues: Climate Change

Climate change is one of the major issues of the modern world, which poses a threat to the globe as a whole. Although there is a wide range of debates and arguments revolving around the given problem, it is evident that some alterations from normal, natural values are taking place. Human influence due to the activities might be the key catalyzer of the initiation of these processes.

In order to understand the source of climate change, one needs to distinguish it from global warming. It is stated: “global warming is one symptom of the much larger problem of human-caused climate change” (Kennedy and Lindsey par. 1). In other words, climate change had taken place before humans evolved, but the issue lies in the one, which is caused by direct human intervention (Kennedy and Lindsey par. 2). Therefore, such activities cause a rise in global temperature, which manifest in a wide range of undesirable consequences, such as droughts or floods. For example, the forest disturbances, such as abiotic or biotic imbalances, is mostly caused by sudden climatic variations (Seidl et al. 395). The fact of global climate change is confirmed by scientific observations and is not disputed by most scientists.

Moreover, climate change directly affects global water distributions through rains. It is stated: “lack of rain stresses vegetation and supplemental water reserves, and when their frequency increases, those reserves are less likely to recover before the next dry spell” (Gray par. 3). For example, in the United States alone, there were clear changes in occurrence and volume rate of heavy rainfall events, where northeastern states experienced a major increase (Gray par. 5). Therefore, it is essential to develop strong infrastructure for vulnerable communities in order to protect them from incidents of droughts and floods. The water distribution change also highly influences lakes and nearby groups of people (“Building Resilience in the Great Lakes” par. 1). The plausible solution can only be derived through the cooperation of all parties, including public officials, engineers, and the local population. It is stated: “active community participation ensures the evaluation and management of risk and monitoring and evaluation of adaptation options” (“Building Resilience in the Great Lakes” par. 2). In other words, the community itself is a key determinant of success in adapting to the climatic shifts.

Climate systems change both as a result of natural internal processes and in response to external influences, both anthropogenic and natural. Among the main external influences are changes in the Earth’s orbit, solar activity, the greenhouse effect and volcanic emissions. Climatologists agree that the temperature on Earth has increased recently, but the reason for this increase is debatable (Crate and Nuttall 61). Climate model estimates suggest that the average temperature of the Earth could rise by a significant amount. It is highly likely that this will lead to other climatic changes, including rising sea levels and changes in the amount and distribution of precipitation. The result will be an increase in natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, possibly lower yields and the disappearance of many species. However, it is difficult to unambiguously link any specific event to global warming.

The concern is that in addition to the natural causes of climate change, which have always been, another factor is added – anthropogenic. This is the result of human activity, whose influence on climate change is becoming stronger every year. The sun is the main driving force behind the climate. For example, uneven heating of the earth’s surface is one of the main causes of winds and ocean currents (Crate and Nuttall 109). Periods of increased solar activity are accompanied by warming and magnetic storms. In addition, the climate is influenced by changes in the Earth’s orbit, its magnetic field, the size of continents and oceans, and volcanic eruptions. These are all natural causes of climate change because until recently, they determined climate change. This involves the beginning and end of long-term climatic cycles such as ice ages. Solar and volcanic activity can explain half of the temperature changes, where solar activity increases the temperature, and volcanic activity decreases it.

Recently, one more factor has been added to natural elements, which is anthropogenic or caused by human activity. The main anthropogenic impact is the intensification of the greenhouse effect, the effect of which on climate change is higher than the influence of changes in solar activity. The greenhouse effect is the delay by the Earth’s atmosphere of the planet’s thermal radiation. Solar energy, passing through the atmosphere, heats the surface of the Earth, but the thermal energy emitted by the Earth cannot escape back into space, since the Earth’s atmosphere traps it. It transmits short wavelengths of light from the Sun to the Earth and traps long heatwaves emitted from the Earth’s surface. The greenhouse effect arises from the presence in the Earth’s atmosphere of gases that have the ability to trap long waves, and they are called greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases have been present in small quantities in the atmosphere since its formation. For example, polar bears, seals and penguins will be forced to change their habitats as the polar ice disappears (Crate and Nuttall 54). Many species of animals and plants will also disappear, not having time to adapt to the rapidly changing habitat. In the 19th century, the reason for such cooling was the eruption of volcanoes, and, in the current century, the reason is the desalination of the world ocean as a result of the melting of glaciers (Crate and Nuttall 152). In the short term, there may be a shortage of drinking water, an increase in the number of infectious diseases, and problems in agriculture due to droughts. In addition, there may be an increase in deaths from floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and droughts. The poorest countries, which are least responsible for exacerbating the problem and least prepared for climate change, could be hit hardest (Crate and Nuttall 87). Warming and rising temperatures, in the end, can reverse everything that has been achieved by the work of previous generations. The destruction of established and habitual farming systems under the influence of droughts, irregular rainfall can put the population on the brink of starvation.

In conclusion, after a rapid breakthrough into space and amazing discoveries made there, humanity again turns its focus to its common planet Earth. Earth problems should occupy an important place among fundamental knowledge. The future of the civilization and the general outlook that determines the prospects for the further development of society largely depends on their solution. One should be aware that the international scientific community now bears a colossal responsibility. The correct determination of climate change trends in the future and the directions of the main consequences of this change will save humanity from immeasurable disasters.

Works Cited

“Building Resilience in the Great Lakes.” U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit , 2019, Web.

Crate, Susan A., and Mark Nuttall. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions . Routledge, 2016.

Gray, Ellen. “ Earth’s Freshwater Future: Extremes of Flood and Drought .” Global Climate Change , National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2019, Web.

Kennedy, Caitlyn, and Rebecca Lindsey. “ What’s The Difference Between Global Warming and Climate Change? ” Climate.gov , National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015, Web.

Seidl, Rupert, et al. “Forest Disturbances Under Climate Change.” Nature Climate Change , vol. 7, 2017, pp. 395-402.

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News from the Columbia Climate School

The Growing Awareness and Prominence of Environmental Sustainability

Steve Cohen

I know that there is a great deal of ideological intensity in our culture today: our attention is constantly drawn to distinctions between red states and blue states and between conservatives and liberals. While conservatives often oppose government action to remedy problems, most environmental problems are plain to see, and there is more consensus than you’d think on the need to keep our air, water, and land free of poisons. We agree there is a problem, we don’t always agree on the solution.

Throughout the 21st century Gallup has asked its respondents: How much do you personally worry about the quality of the environment? In March of 2001, 77% responded: “a great deal” or a “fair amount” and 22% said “only a little” or “not at all.” In 2021, the response was 75%-24%, and this past March, 71%-28%. Given the margin of error in those surveys, those responses are substantively the same—most Americans are worried about environmental quality. In 2001, 57% of those sampled thought the environment was getting worse, and 36% thought it was getting better. This past spring, 59% thought it was getting worse, and 35% thought it was getting better. The stability of these perceptions of the environment is striking. Americans in the 21st century worry about the environment, but unlike 20th century Americans, they no longer identify with environmentalism.

Gallup paints a picture of an American electorate that does not consider itself to be “environmentalists”—57% rejected that label in 2022. But at one time, many more Americans considered themselves environmentalists. In 1989, 76% said they were environmentalists, and only 20% said they weren’t. What changed? People still see the problem, but they have come to mistrust the solutions proposed by “environmentalists.” The image of environmentalism has suffered as environmental advocacy left the political center and became a left-wing issue. But paradoxically, most Americans care about environmental quality and for a long time have worried that it is getting worse . Environmentalism and environmental advocacy have become victims of America’s polarization politics.

People continue to worry about the environment, but is environmental quality actually getting worse? The issue is complicated. Some environmental resources, such as America’s air and water, are cleaner today than they were in 1970 when we established EPA. We have moved millions of people out of pathways of exposure to toxic waste. But biodiversity is threatened, invasive species have increased, and the climate is being altered. Drinking water and sewage infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate. I think Americans are correct to worry that the environment is getting worse. More to the point, when we ignore the environment, it gets worse; when we apply attention, ingenuity, and new technology to its care, it gets better. Despite many more motor vehicles in 2022 than in 1970, air pollution from motor vehicles is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

But what happened to environmentalism? What went wrong? In my view, there have been two forces at work here. One is corporate and conservative propaganda arguing that regulation harms the economy. That is the “job-killing regulation” argument. The fact that regulation tends to create jobs as industry complies with new standards seems to be ignored. The second force that has harmed environmentalism is self-inflicted. It’s the arrogant scolding attitude of some environmentalists: Shaming families for buying SUVs. Telling people that their consuming behaviors are unethical. The first environmentalists were conservationists aiming to preserve forests and lands for posterity but also for hunting and fishing. With over six million members, the National Wildlife Federation is America’s largest environmental organization. It was founded in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression. Its founders and many of its members were and are hunters and anglers. Vegetarian environmentalists came a little later.

What is needed is a big-tent version of environmentalism comprised of rural hunters and anglers, environmental justice advocates, and environmentalists willing to work with people who share environmental values but differ on other issues. That coalition is sitting there, ready to activate.

While the last few decades have made environmental protection a more partisan issue, there is strong evidence that young liberals and conservatives are more concerned about the environment than older conservatives. Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy of the Pew Research Center wrote in 2020 that:

“There is strong consensus among Democrats that the federal government is doing too little on key aspects of the environment, such as protecting water and air quality and reducing the effects of climate change. But among Republicans, there are sizable differences in views by generation. Millennial and younger Republicans – adults born in or after 1981 – are more likely than Republicans in the Baby Boomer or older generations to think government efforts to reduce climate change are insufficient (52% vs. 31%).”

Young conservatives do not buy the solutions to environmental problems proposed by liberals and supported by young progressives, but they understand the problem. Part of the reason for this growing awareness is that senior-level private sector managers have begun to see both the risk and opportunity in environmental problems. The opportunity lies in the new products and services that are finding market appeal because they appeal to environmental values. Investors are devoting capital to electric vehicles, sustainable fashion, physical and nutritional wellness, nature excursions, and sustainable supply chains. Corporations are conducting life cycle analyses of their products to identify places to reduce waste, costs, and environmental impacts. Agri-businesses like Land O’Lakes are using automation, artificial intelligence, and satellite data to precisely calibrate the water, fertilizer, and pesticides they apply to crops—reducing pollution run-off while saving massive amounts of money.

Investors have begun to see the financial risks posed by environmental degradation. They are demanding that companies analyze and disclose those risks, and the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission is proposing a complex rule governing the requirements for soon-to-be-mandated climate risk disclosures . Extreme weather, sea level rise, and shifting climates are impacting agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, and virtually all economic activities. Young conservatives are unlikely to reject an assignment from their CEOs to analyze and discuss climate risk. CEOs need to understand that risk since it has started to hit their bottom line and investors need to understand environmental risk to assess the financial risk of their investments.

What we are seeing is that environmental awareness has come full circle. In the 1970s and 1980s, preventing pollution was a consensus issue since pollution was observable and obviously dangerous. It is returning to consensus status for the same reason. In the later part of the 20th century, air, water, and toxics regulation stimulated private sector technological innovation: water filtration, sewage treatment, waste-to-energy, catalytic converter, and stack scrubber technologies enabled cost-effective compliance with environmental rules. Climate policy is starting to do the same thing in the 21st century. Advances in renewable energy and battery technologies are occurring with growing frequency. Electric vehicles are no longer visionary prototypes but mass market production models.

Anyone paying attention realizes we are on a more crowded and polluted planet. If we are to continue to grow our economies, we need to pay greater attention to the environmental impact of our production and consumption. The field of sustainability management has been developed to ensure we learn how to do that, and the entire field is built on a growing awareness of the needs of environmental sustainability.

Objective conditions have always been the foundation of environmental policy. You could see and smell polluted air, water, and toxic waste. Moreover, cause and effect could also be observed: You could see the pipes and smokestacks spewing out poison. Climate change and biodiversity are more subtle and less easily observable problems, and, unlike many 20th-century issues, the cause and effect are global and beyond the reach of sovereign states. Nevertheless, the impacts predicted by climate modelers decades ago can now be seen, and the risks posed are being internalized by capital markets resulting in the demand for corporate climate disclosure. Ideological efforts to oppose these disclosures will have the same impact as a move to end financial accounting might have: no impact whatsoever. Growing environmental threats have increased environmental awareness throughout society and increased the prominence of our efforts to ensure that economic growth is accomplished with as little environmental impact as possible.

Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Columbia Climate School, Earth Institute or Columbia University.

Regulating Air Toxics from Petrochemical Plants

Garbage, Product Design, and the Circular Economy

Electric Vehicle Adoption Requires More Effective Public and Private Management

Celebrate over 50 years of Earth Day with us all month long! Visit our Earth Day website for ideas, resources, and inspiration.

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184 Environment Essay Topics + Examples & Writing Prompts

Environment issues essay focuses on pollution problems, climate change, etc.

Environment issues essay aims at spreading awareness of pollution problems, climate change, global warming, and many other issues. It is a common type of essay for writing parts of a lot of exams. Environment protection essay is also assigned to high school and college students.

In this article, you will find out:

Current TOP-7 environment issues
184 environment essay topics
How to outline your essay
Different essay writing tips
4 essay examples
🌎 Environment Issues Essay
💡 184 Essay Ideas
📑 Outlining Your Essay
🛡️ Environment Protection: Essay Example
☘️ Eco-friendly Environment: Essay Example
♻️ Human Impact on the Environment: Essay Example
🗑️ Effect of Plastic on Environment: Essay Example

🌎 Environment Issues Essay – What Is It About?

Ecology has always played a significant role in all people’s lives. We all depend on it, but unfortunately, more and more environmental problems occur each year. They affect nature and our way of life. To stop the spread of these issues, we need to get to know them first.

Top 7 Environmental Issues of 2024

Here’s the list of some relevant environmental issues that take place in the modern world. Before writing your paper, you might want to learn as much information on the topic as you can. Let’s take a closer look at each of the issues, their causes and effects.

The picture contains a list of some relevant environmental issues of the modern world.

Deforestation

Each year there are fewer trees and forests. Why is it happening?

According to World Population Balance , the U.S. population grows by over a million people each year . An increasing number of people leads to the growing demand for land for living, agriculture, highways, etc. We have no other option but to cut the amount of open land, which leads to deforestation.

Plastic Pollution

Plastic may seem a suitable material: it is flexible, cheap, and strong. However, plastic is also hazardous and toxic to the environment. According to National Geographic , 91% of all the plastic ever produced hasn’t been recycled . It takes around 400 years for it to decompose, so it continues to pollute nature.

Each year, around one-third of food produced worldwide gets wasted . This amount is enough to feed about 3 billion people.

Food waste also leads to the waste of resources, global warming, and climate change.

Why do people waste food? It might be happening unintentionally. For example, when you leave last bites on your plate or throw away the leftovers that you couldn’t manage.

Air Pollution

According to Worldwide Health Organization , around 7 million people die due to air pollution annually . It causes lung cancer and other respiratory diseases.

What causes air pollution?

There are numerous reasons: outdoor pollution such as vehicles, industries, and agriculture. Household air pollution like exposure to smoke from cooking or heating might also be one of the reasons.

Global Warming

The rise of temperature causes a lot of different adverse effects on the world. It causes:

climate change
glaciers melting
crop-destroying
insect swarming
deforestation
ice shelves collapsing
tropical storms, and many other issues

Recent events such as wildfires in Australia and California result from global warming too.

Biodiversity Loss

As humankind continues its development, it overuses resources from nature. Since agriculture needs more systems each year, people turn forests, fields, and other natural habitats into them. It leads to biodiversity loss. Some species’ population has decreased dramatically by 68% from 1970 to 2016 .

Melting Ice Caps

Melting ice caps is also a serious issue because it’s the main reason for the sea-level rise. It mainly concerns the Arctic since this is where climate change has the most significant negative impact. The sea level rise might affect coastal regions by flooding them. Moreover, it might force around 340 million to 480 million people to migrate and cause overpopulation.

💡 184 Environmental Essay Topics

If you’re struggling with choosing your environmental issues essay topics, here’s the list of 184 essay topics ideas. It is better to choose something you’re genuinely interested in.

How does melting ice caps affect the rising sea level ?
Renewable sources of energy: Controversies .
The correlation between population growth and deforestation.
The environment pollution in the US .
How does plastic affect nature?
American Indian environmental movement in Arizona.
The danger of food waste and the ways to prevent it.
Environment: Sustainable development in Abu Dhabi .
Dangerous effects of air pollution .
Environment: Greenhouse gases and hydrological cycles .
Harmful effects of global warming .
The science of global warming and its effects.
Biodiversity loss: Causes and effects.
Water pollution and associated health risks.
The correlation between climate change and melting ice caps.
Environmental ethics: The case for animal rights .
How can we improve agriculture ?
Environmental issues and plastic industries.
Human impact on nature.
Environmental security: Global warming and pollution .
Environmentalist movements and their impact on politics .
Environmental damage because of oil spills .
Ecotourism and its benefits.
Water pollution in China.
The pros and cons of nuclear energy .
Farming, animal consumption, and environment .
The correlation between globalization and ecological issues .
The global climate change as a manmade disaster.
How to save the world from air pollution?
The evolution of insect wings in response to environmental changes .
How does our lifestyle affect the environment?
Water resource problem and its causes.
The importance of waste management and recycling .
Global warming in Australia: Environmental health .
Production and consumption impact on the environment.
Environmental racism and justice .
How dangerous is microplastic?
Global warming policies and options.
How can zero-waste help our planet?
Scope of improvement of the environmental impact of air travel .
The advantages of green engineering.
Renewable energy sources controversies.
What is earth day, and why is it important?
Environmental impacts of Heathrow Airport: Demand for a strategic sustainable transport .
Social impact on climate change .
Waste handling and control as fundamental phenomena.
Healthy lifestyle habits and their impact on the environment.
The role of waste management in the environment .
The most vulnerable regions to the rising sea level.
Global warming: Human vs. natural causes.
The change of the average air temperature in my area.
Implementing environmental sustainability in Dubai .
Acid rain: Causes and effects.
Sustainability and waste management.
Social and environmental sciences connection.
Environmental governance and institutional arrangements in Niger Delta oil spills .
Conservation projects in my region.
Solar panels and their advantages.
Pandas’ extinction and how we can prevent it.
Sustainability in the built environment .
What is an ecosystem , and how does it work?
Maritime risk assessment and environmental management .
Melting glaciers and their impact on the environment.
Alternative fuels and the US nation development.
The correlation between climate change and natural disasters .
The noise pollution: Negative effects .
Why is ocean acidification dangerous?
Changing ecosystems: Effects of global warming.
Climate crisis and climate refugees.
Global warming: A real danger or a hoax?
How climate change impacts agriculture .
Ocean wave energy technologies .
The greenhouse effect and how it works.
The real effects of greenhouse gases.
The ways to prevent global warming .
The water-energy-food nexus and problem mitigation .
Deforestation and its impact on climate.
Gulf oil spill: facts, causes, response, effects.
How does tree planting affect climate change?
Alternative energy sources vs. fossil fuels .
The reason behind plants and animal extinction.
Environmental sustainability in the Dubai police force .
Population growth : Causes and effects.
Fossil fuels as a significant part of the future energy mix .
The reason behind birds’ migration.
Cost of plastic recycling in US.
What is green construction , and why is it beneficial?
Sustainable building and environmental design .
How can responsible consumption help nature?
Green technology and how it can help the environment.
Global warming: causes and consequences.
How can we improve agriculture without harming the environment?
Environmental conservation and resource management .
Invasive species and how they can harm the environment.
GMO : Advantages and disadvantages.
Air pollution and mortality rates.
The process of the nutrient cycle.
What are sustainable environmental practices ?
Solutions to the environmental crisis in Vietnam .
How can we save more energy?
Solar energy effects on the environment .
What are alternatives to plastic?
Construction and demolition waste management in the UAE .
Commercial fishing impact on the ocean.
Mitigating climate change through trade schemes.
What is a marine ecosystem, and how do we affect it?
Nine challenges of alternative energy .
Energy efficiency and its importance.
Climate change causes: Position and strategies.
How do fossil fuels damage the environment?
Sustainable building materials and technologies in the construction industry .
The controversy behind environmental laws .
Environmental risks: opposing views.
Air quality in your country.
Why is urban sprawl a problem?
Energy sources: types and development.
Different types of environmentalism.
Global warming, climate change, and society’s impact on the environment .
Wildlife reserves and how they work.
Wind power in the United States .
Ecotourism regulations in your country.
Columbia river, its salmon culture and human impact.
Ecological footprint and its impact on nature.
Is solar energy important for the future of humanity ?
Simple everyday habits that can help the environment.
Integrated sustainable water resource management plan.
Different ways of recycling water .
Global warming and carbon dioxide .
What is sustainable food?
Dubai municipal solid waste management.
The most popular renewable energy sources .
Environmental issues in developing and developed countries .
Various factors of sustainability .
Atomic power as a renewable energy source .
Climate change and global warming difference.
Los Angeles regional collaborative for climate action.
Human impact on climate.
The reasons behind climate change.
Virtual water and the water-energy nexus.
Why is carbon dioxide harmful?
Environmental benefits and problems of concrete .
The reasons for the carbon dioxide increase.
Water scarcity: An issue of living in the US .
Fracking and why it is bad.
The cost effectiveness of recycling plastic.
Ozone depletion: Causes and effects.
History of the environmental law in the US .
Three basic methods of ecological research.
Renewable energy sources in the aviation industry .
Different types of recycling.
Sources of energy: classification and aspects.
Volunteer organizations and their contribution to environmental health.
Quality and environmental management .
Does eco-friendly marketing help the environment?
The major contributors to water pollution .
Carpooling and its contribution to the environment.
Chemicals as the worst pollutants on the Earth.
Human impact on global warming .
The health effects of air pollution in America .
The water purification technology.
Solar energy in the modern world.
Environmental organizations and what they do.
Green space as an urban environment of Sydney .
Environmental activities to do at home.
How to protect the Egypt Nile River from pollution ?
Famous environmental activists and the difference they made.
Wind energy: is it viable or not?
What is emancipatory environmentalism?
Water resource plan: The problem of overdrawing the surface water .
Green political parties and their influence.
Global warming causes and mitigations.
Environmental justice : Goals and causes.
Pollution of the marine environment .
Can any country become green?
Flint poisoning: Environmental racism and racial capitalism .
Environmental law and its history.
Investment into alternative energy.
How does emission trading work?
Wind energy and non-renewable energy .
Ecological niches and their types.
Waste diversion programs in Ontario in 1996-2010.
Pollution and its impact on our health.
Dubai coast: Environmental sampling and analysis .
The most significant causes of desertification .

Didn’t find the topic that perfectly suits your taste? You are welcome to use our essay topic generator !

📑 Environmental Issues Essay: Outline

The environmental issues essay consists of three parts: introduction , body , and conclusion . The optimal length is five paragraphs (around 200-300 words).

So, what do you write in each of them?

In the introduction part , you can mention the following:

the current environmental situation in the world;
the specific topic you chose;
your thesis statement.

The introduction part shouldn’t be very long. One paragraph is usually enough.

The thesis statement is your main idea that you need to support in your body part. Let’s say you want to write about the dangerous effects of air pollution. “Air pollution not only harms the environment but also is the cause of numerous diseases.” This might be your thesis.

Need to formulate a thesis statement? Use our thesis-making tool !

In the body , make sure to:

elaborate on your thesis statement;
find reliable references with precise information;
suggest some advice on the chosen problem;
be argumentative.

The length of the body depends on the size of the whole paper. A five-paragraph essay should contain a three-paragraph body. A five-page research paper, in its turn, would have a four-page body.

Finally, write your one-paragraph conclusion . Here you can:

sum up your essay;
restate your thesis statement.

🛡️ Environment Protection Essay: Writing Prompts & Example

Environment protection starts with each of us. So, a good essay topic might be about how each of us can contribute to it.

You can list some options of how we can protect the environment. You can try to persuade the reader to contribute. It might be simple everyday steps or a more significant contribution like volunteering. Make sure to mention their benefits as well.

Some sample questions to answer in your essay:

How can we protect the environment?
What are the ways to decrease pollution?
What are the governmental policies of environmental protection?
How should we preserve nature?

Environment Protection Essay Example: 250 Words

☘️ eco-friendly environment essay: writing prompts & example.

What to write in an eco-friendly environment essay?

You can list various ways to maintain an eco-friendly environment. Here are some of them:

Eco-friendly marketing
Green movements
Eco-friendly technology
Water-conserving
Energy conserving
RRR (reduce, reuse, recycle)

Another option is to explain how you maintain an eco-friendly environment. Maybe you recycle your waste at home or avoid using fuel vehicles? You can also create a list of effective and ineffective ways to create an eco-friendly environment. It is better to read some articles on this issue before starting your writing.

Eco-friendly Environment Essay Example: 250 Words

♻️ human impact on the environment essay: writing prompt & example.

As we all know, people are the ones who affect nature the most. So, in this essay, you can elaborate on how people harm the planet.

Some of the issues you could focus on are:

Air pollution
Water pollution
Plastic pollution
Climate change
Overpopulation
Global warming

Make sure also to include your advice on how we can solve these problems.

Human Impact on the Environment Essay Example: 250 Words

🗑️ effect of plastic on environment essay: writing prompt & example.

Plastic undoubtedly plays a significant role in our life.

In your essay, you can list the reasons why plastic is damaging. You can also suggest ways of how we can reduce the usage of plastic.

Some of the topics you can mention in your essay:

Microplastic
Plastic effect on animals
The reasons why plastic is toxic
Plastic decomposition and why is it harmful
What can we replace plastic with?

Effect of Plastic on Environment Essay Example: 250 Words

Now you are ready to share your thought on environmental issues in your essay. What is your opinion on environmental issues? What topic would you like to write about? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

❓ Environment Issues FAQ

How have approaches to environmental issues changed over the years.

Over the years, environmental problems have become more complex. It takes more time to study and identify them. However, technology is constantly developing and contributes to solving environmental problems now.

Why is it important to cooperate with other countries on environmental issues?

A lot of issues such as air pollution or climate change are very wide-range. If people can’t cross the different countries’ boundaries that easily, these problems can. So, it can only be solved by international cooperation of different countries. That is why we should support international nonprofit organizations.

What are some of the major environmental issues in Europe?

Some of the major environmental issues in Europe are: • climate change • nuclear waste • biodiversity loss • waste disposal • deforestation • water pollution.

Why is globalization potentially damaging to the environment?

Globalization has different positive impacts on the world. However, it has contributed to environmental damage as well. Globalization leads to consumption and export increase. These also lead to the rise of gases and the used fuel amount. Finally, the greenhouse effect is increasing because of that.

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1 Centre for Functional Ecology, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
2 Department of Social Sciences and Management, Universidade Aberta, Lisbon, Portugal

The dominant manners in which environmental issues have been framed by sociology are deeply problematic. Environmental sociology is still firmly rooted in the Cartesian separation of Society and Nature. This separation is one of the epistemic foundations of Western modernity—one which is inextricably linked to its capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal dimensions. This societal model reifies both humanity and nature as entities that exist in an undeniably anthropocentric cosmos in which the former is the only true actor. Anthropos makes himself and the world around him. He conquers, masters, and appropriates the non-human, turning it into the mere environment of his existence, there solely for his use. If sociology remains trapped in this paradigm it continues to be blind to the multiple space-time specific interrelations of life-elements through which heterogeneous and contingent ontologies of humans and extra-humans are enacted. If these processes of interconnection are not given due attention, the socioecological worlds in which we—human as well as others—live cannot be adequately understood. But misunderstandings are not the only issue at stake. When dealing with life-or-death phenomena such as climate change, to remain trapped inside the Society/Nature divide is to be fundamentally unable to contribute to world reenactments that do not oppress—or, potentially, extinguish—life, both human and extra-human. From the inside of Anthropos' relation to his environment the only way of conceiving current socioecological problems is by framing them in terms of an environmental crisis which could, hypothetically, be solved by the very same societal model that created it. But if the transformation of some of the world(s)' life-elements into the environment of the Human is part of the problem, then, socioecological issues cannot be adequately understood or addressed if they are framed as an environmental crisis. Instead, these problems need to be conceived as a crisis of Western modernity itself and of the kind of worlds that are possible and impossible to build within it.

Introduction

Sociology studies interaction—specifically, it studies interactional distributions and enactments of power-knowledge and ontologies. That much still remains true. But there have been considerable changes—both within and outside the social sciences—since the times of Marx, Weber, Simmel, and other classical sociologists. The field's opening to the study of environmental issues has shattered many of what have historically been its epistemological and ontological foundations. As is the case of all of the social sciences and humanities, “thinking through the environment” deeply “unsettles” many of sociology's core assumptions 1 , 2 .

In order to be able to adequately understand “environmental issues”—and among them the very much urgent issue of climate change—sociology needs to move beyond the analytical exclusive focus on human interaction(s). There have been several proposals in this direction, but they still remain less than mainstream research stances (although it is arguable that this is less the case now than it was some decades ago). It is not possible to remain trapped inside the confines of what humans do with each other and expect to understand the myriad interrelations of human and extra-human life-elements 3 of the world(s). To remain enclosed by an a priori defined privilege of human interaction is to stay incapable of seeing the true extent of the networks of life-elements that compose the socioecological phenomena that sociology studies. This does not mean that sociologists must become experts of all things, which would undoubtedly lead them to become experts of nothing. But there is a need to significantly widen the scope of the interrelations that we study. Humanity still has an important place in research, but the analytical focus must move from the intra-human to “the web of life,” to adopt Moore's (2016a , b ) concept.

To be precise, the problem at hand is the Western modern paradigm of knowledge and practice in which sociology moves itself (i.e., the paradigm for whose constitution and maintenance it contributes). Among other things, this paradigm is patriarchal, colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric. It institutionalizes forms of existence that enact specific types of human-nature relations where the second term is subordinated to the first ( Santos, 1991 , p. 14 et seq .; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq ., p. 169 et seq ; Plumwood, 1993 ; Lander, 2009 ; Latour, 2010 ; Moore, 2016a , b ).

Given this, what is needed is not a calibration of research elements similar to the one that was done from the 1960s onward when, to accompany formal political decolonization happening in the Global South, sociology started opening its doors to the study of human worlds outside of the West (obviously, there where sociologists preoccupied with extra-Western phenomena before this date, but they were far from being the majority). To replicate this now is unsustainable because we are not dealing with more human elements to add to the mix. For some decades now, we have been facing an irruption of the extra-human into what has historically been a human-focused field of inquiry. It is not further human populations that are entering our field of vision but trees, and animals, and water, and gases, and rocks. As such, any attempt to merely add up a new element—the environment, nature, or whatever one chooses to call it—to our considerations simply does not work 4 .

If epistemological and ontological changes stop there, as they are prone to do, sociology is not doing anything very original. It is merely replicating the same Cartesian divide of Society vs. Nature that has, since its beginning, characterized it. For 200 years, sociologists have mainly dealt with this divide by focusing on just one of its poles—the better one, the most interesting one; or so we thought. To add the environment to our conceptualization of the world still leaves us trapped in a conceptualization of an anthropocentric world. We still focus on Society. We just start taking into account the ways in which human action conditions Nature.

“Thinking through the environment” ( Rose et al., 2010 ) should be unsettling for sociology. It should lead us not to rethink but rather to fundamentally unthink ( Wallerstein, 2001 ) what sociology has taken for granted for far too long. This exercise of unthinking Western modernity and its foundational epistemological and ontological assumptions leads to the radically relationist study of the multiple and heterogeneous interconnections between different life-elements of the world(s), neither of them a priori classifiable as belonging to “humanity” or “nature” but rather thus constituted through and along the very process of interrelation. As such, adding up Nature to Society (or Humanity, or Culture, or any equivalent) does not do. This position validates the reification of both terms and keeps them, as they have been for 500 years in slightly different ways, in relation to each other ( Moore, 2016a , b ). And, given human privilege vis-à-vis the non-human, Society's relation to Nature wrongly distributes agency, viewing it solely as a human capacity, thus turning nature into mere passivity. Even narratives on the Earth's revenge on humanity reinforce this insofar as in them nature's action is mostly re-action to the effects of what humanity—the only true actor in this story—does.

Unthinking what we know—including what we know about how we know—implies refusing to understand this issue in terms of humanity's relation to nature but rather conceptualizing it in terms of the space-time specific interrelations of different elements of the web of life. These are not in relation to each other, and much less are they in a binary relation in which one of the parts acts upon the other, the former's actions generating a set of consequences on the latter. These multiple life-elements enter into multiple space-time localized relations with each other, collectively establishing contingent, dynamic, and conflictual arrangements of human and extra-human beings and things—in Haraway's (2016 , p. 34 et passim ) formulation, composing “multispecies muddles.” In other words, through their collective practices they compose collectives; they collectively enact worlds.

In this essay we propose to unthink some of sociology's foundations of knowledge and practice. We do this by focusing on the Western modern dominant concept of nature, and particularly by discussing its transformation into the environment. The first section starts by looking at the Cartesian conception of the world in terms of Society/Nature, which necessarily subordinates the life-elements placed in the second term to those placed in the first. We then locate the Society/Nature divide within the wider Western modern dualistic logic, which is inherently totalizing and hierarchical. With this background, we argue that current mainstream sociological approaches to the study of human-nature relations have not sufficiently broke with its paradigmatic Western modern origins, making them unable to understand the multiplicity of interrelations between life-elements by which socioecological phenomena are enacted. The following section starts by looking at how nature is turned into the environment of Western modern humanity, which is an essential process for the latter's dominant approach to the government of human life. We then discuss how this is inextricable from capitalism insofar as it allows nature to be enacted as a series of commodities. Following this we argue that if the concept of the environment is inherently problematic, then environmental sociology has a foundational problem that it may be unable of solving. The section ends by contending that, due to these conceptual and practical problems, the environmental crisis is the wrong framing for the current Western modern crisis of enactment of socioecological ontologies and worlds.

There are far more sociological concepts and practices in need of unthinking. And much more could be said about nature and (its conversion into) the environment. Our position in this essay is quite humble and has no pretension to exhaustively discuss all that need to be unthought. We are merely pointing to some of the perplexities that have been bothering us in our common research, thus adding to the collective effort(s) of unthinking Western modern enactments of life with the hope that others will find this exercise relatable to their own intellectual and political concerns.

Questioning Nature

The last 50 years have seen the emergence of many significant contributions to the exercise of unthinking Western modern enactments of the world(s) that inspires this essay: from the historical-philosophical tours de force of Foucault (1994 , 2005a , b , 2012a ), Kuhn (2009) , or Feyerabend (1993) , to science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), passing through several schools of feminist and decolonial thought 5 . All of these have been listened to and developed by many other researchers, and we build our own work from and alongside them. Nonetheless, the critical exercise of unthinking and re-enacting is still far from being the norm for research carried out within sociology. This is undoubtedly the case of research on matters of human-nature relations.

Most sociological research on the general field of the relation of humanity to the rest of the cosmos has a firm footing on the Cartesian division of Nature and Society (or Culture, or any equivalent) ( Descartes, 1982 ). As is the case of other fields on inquiry, research on “the environment” develops both through stances that are (to various degrees) critical of certain arrangements of practices characteristic of Western capitalist modernity and through positions which present—and, many times, believe—themselves as defending the axiological neutrality of science. Both of them are very much heterogeneous and this analytical partition is merely a shorthand. But most of these stances tend to implicitly validate and solidify the Social Contract argument of Hobbes (2002) , Rousseau (2003) , or Locke (2001) , according to which the creation of any sort of civil and political—in essence, social—state is inherently dependent on the exit from the state of nature 6 . In this fashion, the sum of human beings, all of them exemplars of ego cogito , is withdrawn from the rest of the cosmos. All that is not humanity is thus transferred to one or more of the following categories: chaos, vital threat, landscape, romantic ideal, and/or resource reservoir.

No matter what category each of the constitutive parts of the non-human is put in—and the exact distribution varies dynamically according to space and time—it is thought of as being in relation to humanity. However, by definition, it is not part of humanity. Human and non-human (natural), their ontologies are different, even if the existence of each of them is ontologically dependent on the existence of the other. Ego cogito does not change his or her essence because of the action of the elements of the non-human 7 . He is in himself and from himself. In the same manner, nature's essence is unchangeable. The modern project of dominion of nature ( Plumwood, 1993 ; Scott, 1998 ; Serres, 1998 ; Latour, 2010 ; Debaise et al., 2015 ) operates around the idea of taming nature, of molding it to humanity's wishes (or rather to the wishes of some members of humanity). In this fashion, Western modern human action is able to reshape nature's appearance, to cut down trees, to relocate animals and plants, to make water change its course, to hollow out nature by extracting what lies within it, to disrupt its homeostatic equilibriums. But this does not change nature's essence as Nature opposed to Human, as Nature in so far as it is non-Human. Nature's role as the Great Outside of the Human is not up for questioning. Paradoxically, it is assumed to remain (ontologically) the same even as it is made to change (geologically, geographically, biologically, etc.) by human action. It remains reality out-there, existing independently of how it is perceived, prior to statements made about it, in a definite and singular form ( Law, 2004 , p. 23 et seq .). It can be seen, interpreted, measured, classified, used, etc., precisely because of its ontological stability.

The Society/Nature divide is a fundamental foundation of Western modern thought patterns, which are inherently dualistic ( Santos, 1991 , p. 14 et seq .; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq .; Plumwood, 1993 ; Said, 2003 ; Castro-Gómez, 2005 ; Lander, 2009 ) 8 , 9 . There are many dichotomies that play a relevant role in Western modernity—Mind/Body, Self/Other, White/Non-white, Metropole/Colony, West/East, and so forth. But Society/Nature, alongside Subject/Object and Male/Female, are the fundamental modern dichotomies in reference to which all others work ( Plumwood, 1993 , p. 41 et seq .). Importantly, modern dichotomies are expressions of hierarchical relations, one of the terms being privileged and the other subaltern. As Plumwood (1993 , p. 41 et seq .) argues, this hierarchical logic is where the command role played by the former three dichotomies becomes clear: the privileged term of every other dichotomy—Mind, Self, White, Metropole, West, etc.—tends to be seen as having characteristics associated with Masculinity, Society, and the active and rational Subject, whereas the subordinate term—Body, Other, Non-white, Colony, East, etc.—tends to be associated with Femininity, Nature, and the irrational (in the sense of being incapable of rational thought) and passive Object.

This hierarchical logic is clear in the dominant conceptualization of Society/Nature. The mythologem that is the state of nature is what one leaves in order to collectively create a social existence, the only one that truly matters, the one that, although imperfect, is far better that the alternative of nature—with its chaos, dirtiness, discomfort, aggression, etc. And we must keep in mind that, within this paradigm, nature is in fact the only alternative to society. It is the sole alternative because dichotomies are exercises in totality-as-way-of-ordering-reality, i.e., they are representations of a universe in which nothing can exist outside either one or the other of the two entities in relation, thus conceptually eliminating even the imagination, not to mention the praxis , of an existence unrelated to this logic ( Plumwood, 1993 ; Santos, 2006 , p. 91 et seq .).

Most sociological research on issues of the environment implicitly solidifies this philosophical stance. Uncritically taking for granted that there is something fundamentally different (i.e., better) in humanity (or society, or culture, or whatever else one chooses to call it), this heterogeneous field of inquiry tends to practice a “sociology of the social” ( Latour, 2007 ) which, paradoxically, is extended from the social to its outside—without ever truly rearticulating the terms of their relationship. For Latour (2007 , p. 160 et passim ), a sociology of the social is doomed to be unsuccessful in its enterprise of understanding the uncertainty and dynamism of human life because it tries to explain the social by the social instead of focusing of the myriad processes of association of human and extra-human life-elements by which both “the social” and other realms of thought and practice are enacted. The practice of a sociology of the social to study issues considered to be outside the social creates an epistemic conflict: not only should the social be explained by the social but nature, for centuries understood in Western modern thought as explaining itself as much as society does (as long as science was able to progressively determine its/their laws of operation), now also is (at least in part) explainable by the social 10 . The passivity of nature characteristic of Western modern philosophy, opposed to the reflexive action of humans, is thus reinforced—even in narratives about the Earth's revenge on humanity because of the damage the latter inflicts upon it nature's action is re-action, making humanity into the true actor of the story insofar as without it no movement would have been made by the other term of the dichotomy.

A sociology of the social can do nothing but fail when trying to understand the heterogeneous interrelations of human and extra-human life-elements. It fails by design—albeit not reflexively so—because such a sociology is firmly grounded on the Society/Nature divide and, from this standpoint, multiplicity is not visible. If it cannot be seen, the myriad connections between different life-elements cannot be made into this sociology's central research topic. As such, the worldly relations explored by this field must be reduced to those that are understandable in terms of Society/Nature. In this manner, as a starting point, the world's life-elements are distributed into the categories of this dichotomy. When research starts, this has already been done, which leads to the placement of the elements of the two categories in relation to each other—fundamentally distinct, one of them acting over the other. If they are in relation to each other, they cannot be in relation with each other. This would presuppose that there are more than two elements in relation, it would presuppose that worlds are not yet taxonomically distributed into categories, leaving their life-elements relatively free to roam and communicate with one another with disregard for analytical borders. It would assume that these worlds are not only where these life-elements act and exist but also that they are the contingent and dynamic result of this very action and existence—a form of existence-as-action which can only be carried out by the efforts, work, and energy of space-time localized humans and extra-humans.

This leaves a sociology of the social with only one way of conceiving human-natural relations. If life-elements do not interact in ways that enact worlds—which, among other things, perform-contain contingent stabilizations of nature and society—, then, it is from within each of the two realms of Society and Nature that all things must emerge, eventually overflowing from one to the other. In other words, a sociology of the social can only conceive a world in which phenomena specific to one of these realms condition existence in the other. This is a cause and effect model of limited interrelation in which, generally, human action—the action of the Human—develops through human-specific processes that occur in the environment of Nature. There is no significant interplay in the generative process by which these phenomena start; they occur because humans do things with one another. But what they do together has such a magnitude that converts them into causes of—mainly damaging—natural processes (e.g., deforestation, emissions of greenhouse gases). Human actions emerge as causes of these phenomena, leading to a set of consequences which occur in the realm of Nature, depleting and degrading it. This can, eventually, come back to haunt us; but we alone caused it and the second level consequences—from human to nature back to human—by which natural phenomena with human causes damage Society do not make Nature into a true actor in this story. Granted, this cause and effect mode of thinking can be made into something complex, attuned to the idea that different human processes can combine themselves to cause one outcome and that the same human phenomenon can contribute to several environmental consequences. But this only works if the Society/Nature divide is accepted and validated. And even then this limited conception of action and interaction is inherently incapable of seeing much of the actions and interactions by which the worlds in which we—humans as well as others—live are collectively enacted.

Only by rejecting this dichotomy as something that exists a priori , as something that predates action(s), and by understanding it as the contingent and dynamic result of (both human and extra-human) action(s), can multiplicity be taken into account. The multiplicity of heterogeneous relations between different life-elements—human, animal, plant, or mineral—is what enables each and all of them to act and to enact different arrangements [or, in Moore's (2016b) term, “bundles”] of human and extra-human ( Callon, 1986 ; Law, 2002 , 2004 ; Mol, 2002 ; Latour, 2007 , 2010 ; Haraway, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ). And the life-elements that are distributed into nature or society—which are not predetermined once and for all but rather are the object of historical and spatial conflicts, as black slaves and most women could attest—act in ways that make inappropriate the cause and effect thought models of sociology of the social's study of the environment. When different life-elements come together to act—both in peaceful and (mostly) in conflictual ways—, they are not a priori “nature” or “humanity” but are thus made through and along their collective actions. And the actions of different networks of human and extra-human life-elements constantly overflow each of the networks that originally performs them to reach other such networks, creating multiple flows of mutual communication between what is, at a certain time and in a certain place, constructed as social and natural.

Given these shortcomings, a sociology of the social provides an inadequate framing for the understanding of the myriad relations between humanity and nature. No matter how critical it may be, research developed within this paradigm falls back into a form of Western modern reification of both Society (or Humanity, etc.) and Nature. In other words, it starts from an implicit decision to distribute the world's life-elements into these two—and only these two—categories and then proceeds to ascribe them two ontologically incommensurable essences. It is only if this conception and practice of sociology is rejected that it is possible to comprehend the myriad interrelations between (human and extra-human) life-elements. In order to move beyond this paradigm, after having started to explore the conversion of the extra-human into Nature, we now continue the discussion by looking at the enactment of Nature as the environment.

Nature Becomes the Environment of the Human

Perhaps the main shortcoming of the extension of a sociology of the social to the study of the relations between human and extra-human is immediately visible in the expression “environmental sociology.” What does this sociology deal with? The environment of something that does not belong to it. It deals with reified nature, understood as the outside that is all around equally reified humanity 11 . As Serres puts it, “the word environment , commonly used in this context (…) [,] assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature” ( Serres, 1998 , p. 33).

Such a sociology most definitely does not study the dynamic and heterogeneous interrelations between different things of and in the world, it does not highlight how these temporally and spatially specific interconnections between human and extra-human life-elements are precisely the processes by which worlds and those who live in them are collectively enacted. In short, it does not address the various forms of creating certain space-time specific arrangements of life, i.e., of creating contingent and precarious realities and of distributing their component elements in them by processes of categorization as human and other-than-human ( Law, 2004 ; Latour, 2007 , 2010 ; Debaise et al., 2015 ; Haraway, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ).

Instead, sociology starts from the positive exception of the Human. In Western modernity, given the hierarchical relation of the terms of the duality that is Society/Nature, the Human is not only outside of the non-human; it is above it. It is epistemologically, ontologically, and morally superior to Nature 12 . Nature appears in relation to —and never with —humanity, merely as the milieu of its life chances, as the resource reservoir from which humanity derives “natural resources” and, depending on space and time, as locus and arche of potential threats to its life.

As Foucault made clear, the emergence of a biopolitical rationality of government 13 in eighteenth century Europe elevated the concept- praxis of (human) population to the role of central subject-object of intervention ( Foucault, 1980 , 1994 , 2006 , 2009 , 2010 ). Around this period, the exercise of power took as its main preoccupation the protection of the human life of the collective that is population, aiming to increase its life opportunities by guaranteeing that its behavior did not deviate from statistical-scientific normality in ways that endangered it. The consolidation of industrial capitalism, the maintenance of colonial residents and administrations, and military strength-in-numbers within (as well as outside) Europe, all required large quantities of relatively healthy human beings. In order to meet this requirement of protection of human life (at least of that human life which power-knowledge conflicts lead to be placed into categories of the Human), governmental interventions became more effective by indirectly guiding these human collectives instead of directly prescribing and adjusting their conducts. As such, governmental exercises assumed the form of interventions on the milieu , the environment in which populations lived, aiming to change the manner in which collective phenomena were shaped by changing the conditions which framed the possibilities for each unit of the population to act ( Foucault, 2009 , p. 29 et seq .). The underlying logic is simple to explain, even if the processes by which it is enacted are very much complex. Want to decrease mortality rates and increase the general health of the inhabitants of a certain city? Don't prohibit individual behaviors that make people sick, like unsanitary eating or hygienic habits. Don't threaten individuals with the strong arm of the law in order to stop them from doing what has been scientifically discovered to be harmful for them. Instead, construct and maintain centrally regulated urban sewage systems, create a process of regular garbage collection, or lower taxes on food rich in protein and vitamins.

Granted, Foucault's focus is not on the environment understood as Nature—even if the phenomena which affect a human population's life are both “natural” and “social”: laws, commerce, traditions, or taxation, as well as food, climate, or disease ( Foucault, 2009 ). Furthermore, his periodization of Western modern intervention on the environment in order to govern life is off by some 200 years ( McBrien, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ; Parenti, 2016 ). But his insight on the central role played by the environment of humanity in Western modern governmental exercises must not be downplayed 14 . If one dates the start of Western modernity to the transatlantic colonial arrival of 1492 ( Wallerstein, 1993 , 2004 ; Dussel, 1995 ; Mignolo, 1995 , 2000 ; Lander, 2005 ; Quijano, 2007 ; McBrien, 2016 ; Moore, 2016b ), it becomes clear that humanity (at least that part of humanity which arrived on American shores and its descendants) has since then constructed the extra-human as being up for grabs.

This is the geohistorical 15 moment of the start of the Western modern logic of “mastery and possession” of nature—“the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe” ( Serres, 1998 , p. 32). As Dussel (1995) argues, the ego cogito was historically preceded by the ego conquiro , the Human who, having arrived outside of Europe, immediately defined the world of the non-human as existing solely for his benefit. This was the premise behind the definition of the “New World”—and, with it, of the totality of the non-human—as terra nullius , mere nature without humans which could for this motive be freely appropriated by humanity ( Johnston and Lawson, 2005 , pp. 364–365; Mignolo, 1995 , p. 260 et passim ; Plumwood, 1993 , p. 111, pp. 161–163; Wolfe, 2006 ). The process by which large portions of humanity were relegated to categories of Nature-outside-humanity was simply the necessary condition of this operation of humanity's mastery and possession of the world of the non-human. So, a double disqualification is at work in Western modern paradigm's conception of Society/Nature: on the one hand, to the Human belongs the world, subordinating nature to humanity; on the other hand, the Human is reduced to the part of humanity which in fact masters and possesses nature, de facto and/or de jure de-humanizing most human beings (in various ways), thus disqualifying them as they are placed in the concomitantly disqualified space (and time 16 ) of nature ( Dussel, 1995 ; Moore, 2016b , pp. 78–79 et passim ).

This is the paradigm in which environmental sociology moves itself. What it sees and how it sees it are strongly conditioned by the manner in which nature is transformed into the environment of humanity. As environment, nature is enacted as the mere surroundings of the Human, the latter existing at the center of an undeniably anthropocentric cosmos. Since this is a Western modern cosmos, Anthropos is clearly defined. He is ego cogito but that is not all that he is. Anthropos at the center of the universe, Anthropos for whom the universe exists, is also a capitalist being—perhaps this is what he primarily is, as the world-ecology school of thought argues by defending the “Capitalocene” as the most precise concept to encapsulate the current geohistorical era ( Moore, 2016a , b ). As such, within the Western modern paradigm, nature is enacted as the environment of homo oeconomicus .

As the environment of modern homines oeconomicae , nature—or, to be more precise, all supposedly non-human elements of the anthropocentric world—are made into resources to be conquered, dominated, and appropriated ( Serres, 1998 ; Moore, 2016b ). The reification of the extra-human as Nature is the first step of a process by which all discrete units of this Nature are enacted as potential resources to be used and depleted with all the might and the right the Human confers upon himself at the expense of all other beings and things. The environment of humanity is humanity's reservoir of potential resources. In this manner, nature-as-environment loses any meaning in itself and all of its potential significance derives from the use Western modern capitalist humanity gives it. Its lack of meaning outside of Western modern capitalist standards makes reified nature into an entity whose discrete units, both those that are known and those that might be known, are made into things-as-potential-commodities. It is not the case of the non-human being immediately enacted as commodity. Rather, it is enacted as something that, in itself, is nothing besides a collection of smaller things, each one of them potentially commodifiable 17 . In other words, nature-as-environment has no meaning besides that which Western modern capitalism is able of giving it and each of its components, and this societal model is only able to give meaning to commodities (or, to put it more precisely, it is only capable of ascribing meaning to something by commodifying it). At any given time, the environment has some discreet units that are not commodified, as well as others that are. According to the space-time specific necessities of capitalist modernity, the life-elements that are categorized as any form of Nature are brought from the field of potential commodity to that of actual commodity (and vice versa), thus expanding the total field of capitalist commodification of the non-human world 18 .

This modus operandi of commodification by grabbing parts of the environment and re-signifying (i.e., re-enacting) them as things with mercantile value transforms these life-elements into “fictitious commodities.” For Polanyi (2001 , pp. 71–80 et passim ), a process of commodification has a “fictitious” character when it ascribes market value to things that were not produced with the explicit intention of being sold as merchandise. Thus, the commodification of such things de-signifies them insofar as the market is fundamentally incapable of exhausting their total meaning. In other words, they are far more than something with market value and to transform them into commodities is to reduce all of their cultural meaning to market criteria, which makes them into elements of the world whose total significance capitalism in not able to grasp, even though it is very much capable of using and abusing them. Polanyi's foremost examples of such “fictitious commodities” are money, labor, and land—the last of which he describes as “the natural surroundings in which [society] exists,” making “land [into] only another name for nature” ( Polanyi, 2001 , p. 75).

Polanyi's discussion of “fictitious commodities” is framed in epistemological and ontological terms that are conflictual with the position we espouse in this essay. He is clearly conceptualizing commodification through the lenses of Society/Nature, reifying land-as-environment, as well as essentializing the remaining “fictitious commodities,” as is apparent when he writes that “labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities: the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. (…) None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious” ( Polanyi, 2001 , pp. 75–76). In this sense, when he writes that “land is only another name for nature”, he immediately adds that this nature “is not produced by man” ( Polanyi, 2001 , p. 75).

Following Moore (2016b )—and taking a cue from a staple position in STS and ANT—, we can argue that, in Western capitalist modernity, everything that is commodified is “originally” produced as a commodity (by being grabbed from the resource reservoir that is the environment and enacted as a commodity). The point is that there is no such thing as Nature out-there with an original essence that puts it outside the collective action of human-and-extra-human arrangements by which space-time specific ontologies and worlds are enacted—some of them as commodities. The process of “originally” producing something as a commodity is precisely this enactment.

Nonetheless, Polanyi's insight is valuable in two ways. On the one hand, it makes clear that commodification is inherently incapable of exhausting the potential meanings—the potential life—of the elements of the world(s) which are commodified (i.e., other enactments of these life-elements are possible and none has the totalizing capacity of exhausting all that any of them might be made to be). On the other hand, Polanyi's argument highlights that the peculiar market-based enactment of some life-elements as commodities is inherently damaging, both to them and to the world(s) to which they belong to (i.e., which they, together with other life-elements, compose).

In this derivatively polanyian sense, the process of turning non-human elements of the world(s) into a series of “fictitious commodities”—i.e., into resources for human production and consumption, into things that exist solely to guarantee the life of the Human 19 —is at the very core of Western modernity. This societal model exists because the extra-human is turned (reified) into Nature, which in turn is transformed into the environment of the Human and dealt with (i.e., enacted) as a reservoir of potential commodities. It is this particular kind of commodification that enables the typically Western modern capitalist human modes of action and existence that do not reflexively take into account the manner in which different networks of human and extra-human life-elements act together to enact certain types of worldly arrangements (i.e., certain types of worlds). In other words, this sequential process starts with the reification of the non-human, follows to its conversion into the Great Outside, there solely for the use of the Human, then fragments this environment into discreet units, and lastly picks and chooses which units will be commodified in a given space and time. It is this process that enables the kinds of careless human action and existence that disregard the wellbeing of the extra-human, in extremis disregarding the very condition of possibility of its existence. Given that the different life-elements of the world(s) do not adjust themselves willingly to Western modern fragmentation of reality—or, to be more precise, Western modern's enactment of fragmented realities—, the forms of human action and existence that are made possible by the sequential process of reification of the extra-human are both genocidal and suicidal. The practical symbiosis of human and extra-human life-elements of space-time specific networks, symbolically denied in Western modernity, implies that the uncaring disregard that leads to the extermination of the extra-human also describes a suicidal operation by which the Human disregards its own conditions of possibility, its own conditions of a future, of any future 20 .

If this is the “environment” in “environmental sociology,” then, this field of inquiry has a problem. Not one it can discard or correct but something more profound, which marks its very core, making “environmental sociology” inextricably linked to this enactment of the environment. As such, the only way of successfully facing this problem is to unthink the core concept of the environment. But given the intimate connection of this concept to the field of sociology that studies it, to unthink the environment is to leave environmental sociology behind in direction to a conception and a practice of sociology that has discarded the Society/Nature divide and taken as its focus the myriad interrelations between different life-elements of the world(s) by which contingent, precarious, and dynamic “multispecies muddles” ( Haraway, 2016 , p. 34 et passim ) are enacted. This would be a sociology which, while being attentive of human peculiarities, would not presume humanity to be the only peculiar entity in the cosmos and would rather assume that giving due attention to the interconnectedness of human and extra-human life-elements of specific space-times is fundamental to the adequate understanding of the phenomena it deals with. In other words, in order to make environmental sociology relevant at a politically and intellectually fundamental level, it must be unmade and reforged into something very different from what it was and still predominantly is.

If the environment is part of what must be unthought, a field of inquiry that takes it to be its core concept—or at least one of its core concepts—cannot frame the right questions for the right issues, thus making it unable of providing hypotheses and coordinates for action which might be used to face the problems at hand. It is unable of providing these hypotheses and coordinates because it is not looking at the phenomena that need to be looked at. The prime example of this is perhaps the focus on environmental problems, many times conceptualized as an (the?) environmental crisis. There can only be an environmental crisis if the extra-human is reduced to the Great Outside of the Human. Only in this paradigm does human action damage what is fundamentally other-than-human, creating a sustainability problem.

Within this paradigm, many are the solutions proposed to this unsustainability of the life of the Human. These tend to be framed in the general terms of greening capitalism, of making sure that Western modern capitalism survives by trying to reduce the rate of world(s)-destruction, thusly guaranteeing the eternal reproduction both of this societal model and of its inherent destruction of worlds, including itself. The main approach to this is technocratic ( Crist, 2016 ; Hartley, 2016 ), appearing in the form of proposals to reforest critical areas of the planet; of geoengineering projects ( Altvater, 2016 ); of attempts to reduce greenhouse gases emissions by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies or through regulated market trade of carbon credits ( Vossole, 2013 ); and so forth. At best, these are all short-term palliatives aiming to minimize—but not to fundamentally combat—climate change and other “environmental” problems. All of these solutions are doomed to fail simply because what is problematic is Western modern capitalism itself—within which both the damages and the solutions are being enacted ( Serres, 1998 ; Moore, 2016b ) 21 .

Environmental sociology is, at most, a very minor player in this game of climate/environmental-palliative prescription 22 . But it does share with this technocratic approach the same core concepts of the environment and the environmental crisis, thus reflecting many of the same shortcomings that are apparent in policy-making, engineering, economics, the natural sciences, and other technocratic fields. So maybe it is time to leave environmental sociology behind. In the face of contemporary threats to planetary life, it is increasingly urgent to move on to the radical relationism of space-time specific multiple and heterogeneous arrangements of different life-elements of the world(s), both human and extra-human. If we start making this movement, the environmental crisis is shown as fundamentally inadequate as a problem with which we should concern ourselves. It is shown to be a life-and-death-enactment fraught with the same symbolical and material problems that have marked Western modernity since its beginning—the very same problems that have brought about a state of affairs in which very real dangers are upon us. Since the environment is a severely limited, blind, and extinction-prone way of enacting the extra-human, the environmental crisis is the wrong framing for these dangers.

None of this means that all is well; far from it. Although we distance ourselves from certain discourses about the current and/or inevitably coming planetary (i.e., “environmental”) catastrophe 23 , here, we stand with Latour (2011) : one should give due attention to the Apocalypse brought about through poorly enacted realities of human and extra-human entanglement; it is not because the End has been repeatedly announced throughout history and never came that one should blind him or herself to the fact that profound and rapid changes to the biosphere are verifiable and very likely to increase in the near future, making the Apocalypse a significant material possibility—at least for humanity, but we can be sure that if we go down we will be taking others with us.

There is a vital crisis—literally a crisis of vitality, a crisis of life enactments—but this is a crisis of world(s)-building. It is a crisis of Western modernity and of the types of life-realities that are possible (and impossible) to enact within its boundaries. It is a crisis of a societal model that, as Marx (1975) reminded us, is based on the alienation of humanity from nature, making the latter into a mere means of guaranteeing human life—which is inextricable from the alienation of each human being from what he or she produces, from his or her own self, and from other human beings 24 . This changes the problems we—both human and extra-human—have to face, making it inevitable to conclude that only through revolutionary change 25 of the Western modern capitalist societal model could the world(s)-building crisis be unmade—even if its consequences will very likely shape the conditions of possibility for most, if not all, future enactments of human-with-extra-human arrangements of life.

(Definitively Not) Conclusions: Unthinking From the Margins

How can we leave the world(s)-building crisis behind? How can Western modern problematic enactments of the web of life be successfully unmade and remade in ways that do not oppress the world(s)' life-elements, both human and extra-human? Unthinking the epistemic foundations of both Western modernity and of its predominant forms of knowledge, including the social sciences, is the first step for the much-needed reenactment of life. One of the things that this process leads to is to the reforging of environmental sociology into something quite different from what it has been. It leads to dropping the environment from a sociology that concerns itself with the multiple, heterogeneous, space-time specific relations of life-elements by which humanity and nature are contingently made and remade.

But how can this be achieved? Any answer to this question is fraught with the pitfalls of hubris . Aiming to provide definite answers to similar questions is a very Western modern stance. It is, without a doubt, possible to attempt to do so—but only at the risk of replicating the very paradigm that created the problems discussed in this essay, as well as many others. We do not have any such proposal to close what has been said. We cannot have it because what has been said is entirely open-ended. And since life is always locally enacted in particular places and times, by particular networks of human and extra-human elements, the problems of life can only be—precariously—dealt with by each of the multitudes that are implicated in its enactments. Answers for problems related to the enactments of life can—and quite likely need to—be inter-locally coordinated, but no one locality or actor is able of providing them for the others. All that we dare to put forward are tentative sensibilities and intuitions.

By their inter-local contingent and conflictual coordination(s), the multiple processes of life-reenactment that are needed in order to overcome life-and-death issues such as changes to the biosphere, deforestation, or the extinction of entire species, are inherently revolutionary. And revolutions are arduous things to make—especially when, like what is at stake in these cases of life-enactments, they cannot be made once and for all.

One cannot leave Western modernity by establishing something else in an instant. It is not possible to enact what one cannot imagine and our—individual as well as collective—imaginations are severely—albeit not completely—limited by Western modern habits of thought and practice. Given this, any revolution of Western modern forms of enacting life can only be done from within Western modernity itself. Fortunately, Western modernity is not homogeneous. It is a succession of life-enactments that have manifold forms, although they share some fundamental (i.e., paradigmatic) assumptions.

As Law and Lien (2012a) remind us, Western modernity enacts the Society/Culture divide both coherently and non-coherently. This societal model has an undeniable will-to-singularity. It attempts to construct singular ontologies of both Society and Nature that are valid everywhere. But, at the same time and with the same relative importance, even within Western modernity there are multiple enactments of society and nature. Each specific space-time makes and remakes their own version of both. This does not annul the will-to-singularity but rather makes unicity inherently dependent on multiplicity.

This is a relevant opening. It allows for revolution from within. It allows for the exploration of the multiplicity, contingency, and ambivalence that are intrinsic to Western modernity as a possible way of reframing what this societal model has tried to solidify. In this manner, it might be possible to shake things up just enough to turn solids into fluids, to agitate life-elements just enough to make it possible for them to connect with each other in different, non-oppressive and non-extinction-prone forms. Unthinking what and how we know about the elements of life is one of the fundamental processes by which Western modernity can be productively and revolutionarily shaken through its non-coherences.

It is much more likely that this can be done not from the center(s) of Western modernity but from its margins. By definition, these margins are not outside of this societal model and of its predominant ways of knowing. But these are the places where Western modernity, through its non-coherences, comes into direct contact with the possibility of something other than itself. It is from here that a transformative exercise of “border thinking” ( Mignolo, 2000 )—or, rather, border unthinking—can be carried out. These margins are the places where ontologies and realities are not-quite-made, where they are almost-enacted, where they start to be performed by local networks of life-elements but are then interrupted and discarded 26 . But even though they are not fully made, they make a statement about the potentiality of other ways of enacting the web of life. And even when these other forms of enacting ontologies of and relations between “nature,” “humanity,” and other categories, are dropped due to their impracticality or their high costs, their potentiality remains.

A sociology that deals with the multiple enactments of the web of life—and definitively not one that is “environmental”—can contribute to this border unthinking. It can do so by looking at how the world(s) can be, not in a metaphysical sense, but by exploring empirically partially enacted potentialities. It can do so by looking for those ontologies of nature, humanity, and so forth, that, although not completely enacted, are perceived and whose making is started by local actors only to then be interrupted and discarded for a myriad of reasons. It is from what can be (made to be) that it might be possible to productively fracture Western modernity's crisis of world(s)-building in direction to a multiplicity of space-time localized socioecological enactments that do not subjugate life, whether it is contingently distributed and performed as human or as extra-human.

Author Contributions

JA and FA contributed to the development of this essay's arguments, as well as to the writing and revision of the submitted manuscript.

Both JA's and FA's research for this paper was done as part of ReNATURE–Valorization of the natural endogenous resources of the Centro region (project reference CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000007), hosted at the Centre for Functional Ecology (CFE) of the University of Coimbra (UC), and funded by CENTRO2020.

Besides this, FA's research was also supported by ECOSTACK–Stacking of ecosystem services: mechanisms and interactions for optimal crop protection, pollination enhancement, and productivity, EU H2020 (Grant Agreement 773554—H2020-SFS-2016-2017/H2020-SFS-2017-2), 2018-2022; and by B-GOOD–Giving Beekeeping Guidance by cOmputatiOnal-assisted Decision making, H2020 (H2020-SFS-2018-2020), 2019-2024.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ana Manso for discussing an earlier draft of this paper.

1. ^ We are borrowing the formulation of Rose et al. (2010) : “Thinking through the environment, unsettling the Humanities.”

2. ^ This article's arguments focus on the case of environmental sociology. The fact that we are both sociologists is not irrelevant to this choice as it makes sociology the discipline whose limits and potentialities we know best. Nevertheless, the issues discussed are of broader paradigmatic consequence to the (heterogeneous) whole of Western modernity. As such, we are inclined to believe that many of what is said might be pertinent to discussions held in other fields of knowledge that still regard themselves as studying “environmental” phenomena.

3. ^ We use the term “life-elements” to refer to all entities of the world(s) that, in one way or another, contribute to the collective enactment(s) of life. These are both biologically living elements and all the other things of the world(s) that, together with the former, make up what Moore (2016a , b ) calls the “web of life.”

4. ^ See Moore (2016a , b ) for a critique of this “green arithmetic,” “the idea that our histories may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature. (…) [S]uch dualisms are part of the problem—they are fundamental to the thinking that as brought the biosphere to its present transition toward a less habitable world. (…) [T]he categories of “Society” and “Nature”—Society without nature, Nature without humans—are part of the problem, intellectually and politically” ( Moore, 2016a , p. 2).

5. ^ There are too many references to quote for any of these (internally very much heterogeneous) lines of work. We merely highlight some of those we consider to be especially relevant for this exercise of unthinking. For STS and ANT, see Callon (1986) , Latour (2007 , 2010 ), Latour and Callon (1981) , Law (2002 , 2004 ), and Mol (2002) . Haraway (1991) and Plumwood (1993) present two feminist positions that are particularly relevant for issues discussed in this essay. For the case of decolonial thought, see Dussel (1995) ; Mignolo (1995 , 2000 ); Lander (2005) , Said (2003) , and Quijano (2007) .

6. ^ Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke had fundamental divergences on several topics, which cannot be discussed here. Nonetheless, they shared the general argument mentioned.

7. ^ He might modify his lifestyle as a response to altered environmental conditions, but this is another matter altogether.

8. ^ One should bear in mind that the idea that there is a difference between mind and body, as well as between humanity and nature, is not an idiosyncrasy of Western capitalist modernity ( Plumwood, 1993 , pp. 69–103 et passim ). However, as Moore puts it, “capitalism was the first civilization to organize itself on this basis” ( Moore, 2016b , p. 84).

9. ^ Law and Lien (2012a) remind us that nature and society (or culture) are paradoxically both coherent and non-coherent in Western modernity. On the one hand, there is an undeniable will to make them singular—only one Nature and one Society, which are the same everywhere. On the other hand, since both nature and society are enacted by the practices of actor-networks that are bound to particular places and temporalities, each local network enacts—slightly or pronouncedly—different ontologies of nature and society, and therefore different forms of their relationship. But even if no two enactments of Society/Nature are the same, at any given space-time, the Western modern dualism of Society/Nature that is being enacted tends to be (re)presented as singular (i.e., as the form of Society/Nature). And, since these different enactments coordinate themselves in various ways, they converge (dynamically and contingently) to form one ontology of Society and one ontology of Nature—that is always dependent on their multiplicity. In this manner, much like Bauman (1989 , 1991 ) has shown, Western modernity's inherent ambivalence emerges as its defining characteristic, making ontological multiplicity not that which negates ontological unity but rather that upon which this unity is made ( Law, 2002 , 2004 ; Mol, 2002 ; Law and Lien, 2012a , b ). We will return to this in the conclusion of this essay.

10. ^ Nature is now at least in part but not entirely explained by the social. The extension of a sociology of the social to the study of phenomena historically considered to be outside of society presupposes that natural phenomena are conditioned by human action. As such, what happens in society changes nature—geographically, geologically, biologically, even if not ontologically—, making nature only understandable if society is taken into account. But this logic does not negate scientific specialization, i.e., it does not deny that there are natural phenomena that can only be understood by the natural sciences—even if even the latter have increasingly started to take into account a (mostly homogenized and abstract) role played by Humanity in the shaping of the phenomena they study.

11. ^ Although we are discussing the specific case of environmental sociology, other environmental social sciences deal with the non-human in a generally similar fashion: they accept and solidify the fracture between Society and Nature, they grant a privilege to the Human, and they contribute to the transformation of nature into mere surrounding of ego cogito . Different social sciences have historically approached the environment in different ways. But, insofar as their practitioners regard what they study as the “environment,” these social sciences also share an epistemic positioning. A specific social science, sociology included, can have practitioners focused on understanding the socioecological enactment of worlds, as well as practitioners who study the human (or social, etc.) dimensions of “environmental” phenomena. The latter work in the same episteme as environmental sociologists, even if the former might not. Since this is a Western modern conception, in general terms, the natural sciences subscribe to the same conception of nature-as-the-environment-of-the-Human, albeit their focus is on the other side of the divide (with some researchers trying to bridge it without unmaking it, much like what happens in the social sciences).

12. ^ The Human is morally superior to Nature insofar as ethics is defined solely as an affair of humanity. Nature is not less moral, it is not immoral, it simply is—and in that pure existence, it is amoral in reference to the Human who thus becomes the only potentially moral entity.

13. ^ “Government” is understood by Foucault (1983 , 2009 , 2010 , 2012b ) as the “conduction of conducts,” which always occurs within the framework of a given governmentality, i.e., a certain “art of government” or “rationality of government.”

14. ^ See Parenti (2016 , pp. 170–171 et passim ) for a theoretical framing of Foucault's biopolitical logic of government through the milieu in terms that make it possible to mobilize his thought in the study of the multiple interrelations between human and extra-human life-elements. Parenti does this by highlighting the dimension of biopower which deals with the enactment of non-human nature(s) as a way of enacting specific human arrangements—which, given the necessary interconnections between human and extra-human implicated in these power-knowledge exercises, by definition makes them into specific human-and-extra-human arrangements. He calls this dimension of biopower “geopower”: “if biopower is about harnessing, channeling, enhancing, and deploying the powers of bodies at the scale of territorially defined populations, then geopower is similarly the statecraft and technologies of power that make territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable” ( Parenti, 2016 , p. 171). The extension of Foucault's work to issues of human-and-extra-human enactments of collective life is being carried out by the environmentality (i.e., the environmental governmentality) school of thought. A brief exposition of environmentality's general stance can be found in Malette (2011) .

15. ^ According to Moore, the multiple interconnections between human and extra-human life-elements through which material-symbolical worlds are enacted makes geology a fundamentally historical phenomenon. As he puts it, “the co-produced character of resource production, unfolding through the human/extra-human nexus,” which he names “the oikeios ,” turns geology into “geohistory”: “Geology, in other words, becomes geohistory through definite relations of power and production; these definite relations are geographical, which is to say they are not relations between humans alone” ( Moore, 2016b , p. 95).

16. ^ One of the upmost indicators of this disqualification is the representation of humans as existing at the head of the arrow of time, always moving forward through multidimensional-albeit-linear progress, whereas non-humans, in the state of nature, are immobilized—or at the very least very much slowed down—in a time of very little value by Western modern standards. See Fabian (2014) for a framing of this logic in terms of what he calls the “denial of coevalness.”

17. ^ This applies to human beings reified as part of Nature as well as to extra-human life-elements, i.e., to unpaid domestic labor developed in the oikos for the reproduction of human biological life as it turned into wage-labor as well as to fossil fuel reserves as they turned into one modern capitalism's main energy sources.

18. ^ See Moore (2016b ) for a discussion of how capitalism functions by making a zone of exploitation of paid work-energy dependent on a zone of appropriation of non-paid human and extra-human work-energy. Life-elements are never placed in one of these zones once and for all but rather are moved from one to the other according to capitalism's space-time specific needs and capabilities.

19. ^ The life of the Human should be understood as a specific manner of living symbolically valued in Western modernity.

20. ^ See McBrien (2016) for a discussion of capitalism as a world-ecology inextricably linked to extinction, which the author frames in terms of the necrotic properties of capitalism. According to him, “capitalism was born from extinction, and from capital, extinction has flowed” ( McBrien, 2016 , p. 116). Capitalism is not only a productive system; its productive process is inherently based on destruction and death. If capitalism is a necrotic socioecological system, then, it is simultaneously genocidal and suicidal. Capital accumulation is only possible through the conversion of life into death—into resources to be depleted or into things to be annihilated because they stand in the way of these resources. In this manner, “extinction is both the immediate success and ultimate failure of the real subsumption of the earth by capital; the ecology of capital is constructed through attempted erasure of existing ecologies—ecologies that include humans” ( McBrien, 2016 , p. 117). This logic highlights the inseparable link of genocide and suicide in capital's necrosis insofar as it leads to a increasing production of negative value: if capital needs nature to appropriate and extinguish in order to generate value, then, the very process of capital accumulation decreases the part of nature that is available to be thusly appropriated, symmetrically increasing forms of nature that are hostile to this accumulation and cannot be incorporated into or avoided by this modus operandi in the longue durée (e.g., toxic waste, garbage, greenhouse gases). See also Moore (2016b ) on the extinction of Cheap Nature by capital accumulation.

21. ^ We do not intend to reduce all proposals to deal with the environmental crisis to their technocratic variations. There are other types of proposals, namely those emerging from the heterogeneous schools of environmentalism. Their discussion is beyond this essay. Nevertheless, it can be argued that most of them operate in the same epistemological and ontological framework of scientific and policy-related technocracy, and thus share the many of the same problems. Sometimes the solutions they propose are dependent on the same technologies as scientific and policy-related technocracy. But even when they are framed around notions of “going back to nature,” of living in harmony with a Nature that exist out-there, undisturbed by human action, these solutions are firmly rooted in Society/Nature. While seeking to denounce Nature's degradation by Society, both entities are reified and solidly placed in relation to each other—and a relation in which humanity is the only true actor to be found among the multiple life-elements of the cosmos. The will to leave the environment undisturbed does so in more ways than one, making it impossible to leave the environment behind and move on to space-time specific enactments of worlds through the myriad interrelations of life-elements.

22. ^ In general, all environmental social sciences are minor players in this game, with the exceptions of (behavioral) psychology and (neoclassic) economics, which have a relevant role in environmental policy making ( Shove, 2010 ). Nonetheless, even economics and psychology have not shifted the dominance of the natural sciences in this field.

23. ^ See McBrien (2016) and Haraway (2016) for a critical discussion of “catastrophism” and of how mainstream narratives on the Anthropocene reinforce this worldview.

24. ^ See also Moore (2016a , p. 86 et passim ).

25. ^ Having just quoted Marx, the meaning of revolution could be misconstrued by some readers. We are not a priori framing it in any way, neither in terms of process nor in terms of teleology. By definition, the fundamental transformation of a societal model is revolutionary. And, also by definition, fundamental transformations are violent—sometimes physically, but always epistemologically and ontologically, and thus materially. But the specific character of such violent actions can only be defined by the actors who collectively develop the multiple space-time localized practices by which such transformations are brought about. Taking an example from decolonial historical processes, the “non-violent” Gandhi-model ( Gandhi, 2006 ) of revolution is not necessarily less violent than the Fanon-model ( Fanon, 2001 , 2008 ), although they are carried out by very different sets of actors-elements and practices. The inherent violence of these processes is profoundly variable both in scope and in kind, and only during their development can it be decided and classified in any way. Analytically and politically, physical intra- and inter-species overt aggression is only one of the many forms revolutionary violence can assume.

26. ^ See Law and Lien (2012b) for an empirical discussion of these not-quite-enacted ontologies in the case of salmon farming.

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Keywords: capitalism, environment, environmental crisis, nature, social sciences, society, sociology, western modernity

Citation: Aldeia J and Alves F (2019) Against the Environment. Problems in Society/Nature Relations. Front. Sociol. 4:29. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2019.00029

Received: 07 January 2019; Accepted: 28 March 2019; Published: 24 April 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Aldeia and Alves. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: João Aldeia, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Climate Change and Society

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Environmental Issues Essay

Climate change is happening because of human activity. We're releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping heat and causing the Earth to warm up. This is called global warming, and it's a huge problem. Here are some sample essays on environmental issues.

100 Words Essay On Environmental Issues

Our environment is changing due to disruption. These are small steps you can take on an individual level that together can have a huge impact on the environment. And if enough individuals start taking such steps, we could make huge strides towards preserving the environment for future generations. As an individual, you can:

200 Words Essay On Environmental Issues

500 words essay on environmental issues.

Reduce your energy consumption by changing to LED or CFL light bulbs and unplugging electronic devices when not in use;

Use public transport or carpool instead of driving;

Buy locally produced food and products as much as possible;

Separate your waste for composting and recycling instead of sending it all to landfills; and

Plant trees in your yard.

In the past several centuries, humans have altered land use in order to accommodate growing populations and economic development needs. This has led to a range of environmental issues such as habitat destruction, soil erosion, pollution, species extinction and water scarcity.

How Changes in Land Use Can Lead to Environmental Issues

As a result of the disruption due to growing population, the global climate has been thrown off balance, leading to more frequent and intense natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and droughts.

One of the most pressing environmental issues caused by changes in land use is deforestation. Trees are vital for storing carbon dioxide, as well as providing habitats for wildlife. Unsustainable logging practices have led to extreme cases of deforestation that result in global warming and habitat loss. Additionally, when trees are removed from ecosystems it can lead to soil erosion which contributes to water pollution and scarce resources for the surrounding wildlife.

In addition to deforestation there are many other activities that can disrupt land use such as oil drilling, urbanization or different types of agriculture. It’s important for us to be aware of how our behaviors can cause harm to our environment so that we can take steps towards improving land management practices in order to ensure our planet remains healthy for future generations.

You sit down to dinner, and suddenly you're confronted with a difficult decision. You can either have a steak that's been raised on a factory farm, where the animal has been exposed to antibiotics and growth hormones, or you can choose something that's organic and humanely raised.

The same dilemma confronts us when we shop for groceries, clothes, or anything else. Do we want to buy something that's bad for the environment, or do we want to make a conscious choice to purchase something that will help sustain it?

It's not always easy to make the right decision, but it's important that we try. Why has the climate been changing, and why do people think it's a problem?

Examining the Effects of Pollution

Pollution is having a devastating effect on the environment. Pollution is causing irreversible damage to our planet, and it's happening on a scale that is unprecedented in human history.

The effects of pollution are far-reaching and complex. They can be felt in every corner of the globe, from the air we breathe to the water we drink. Pollution is making our planet uninhabitable, and if we don't take action now, we will be facing a very uncertain future.

Impact of Deforestation on the Environment

Deforestation is a major issue that is contributing to climate change and has a serious impact on the environment.

When trees are cut down, it not only reduces the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, but it also leads to the release of carbon dioxide. This, in turn, accelerates climate change and contributes to the greenhouse effect. Deforestation also affects water systems, contributing to floods and droughts.

Exploring Lifestyle Changes to Reduce Environmental Impact

One of the biggest things you can do to reduce your environmental impact is to make lifestyle changes. This can mean anything from reducing your consumption to changing the way you travel and even altering your diet.

Reducing consumption means buying less, reusing and repurposing items, and recycling more. It also means being mindful of what you throw away.

When it comes to transportation, try switching to public transport or carpooling when possible. Or, if you’re looking for something a bit more sustainable, why not try walking or cycling?

Lastly, food is another area where you can make changes. Eating locally sourced food that’s in season reduces your carbon footprint and helps local farmers.

So, what do we need to do?

To start, it’s important to realize that individuals can make a difference. There is no single answer to this question; it will require action from all of us. But if we each take small steps in our own lives, we can make a big difference. Here are a few ideas to get started:

Reduce your consumption, and choose products that are environmentally friendly

Reuse and recycle whenever possible

Educate yourself and others about environmental issues

Support organizations that are working to protect the environment

Together, we can make a difference. Let's work together to create a more sustainable future for our planet.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

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Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary.

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

GIS officer work on various GIS software to conduct a study and gather spatial and non-spatial information. GIS experts update the GIS data and maintain it. The databases include aerial or satellite imagery, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and manually digitized images of maps. In a career as GIS expert, one is responsible for creating online and mobile maps.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Database Architect

If you are intrigued by the programming world and are interested in developing communications networks then a career as database architect may be a good option for you. Data architect roles and responsibilities include building design models for data communication networks. Wide Area Networks (WANs), local area networks (LANs), and intranets are included in the database networks. It is expected that database architects will have in-depth knowledge of a company's business to develop a network to fulfil the requirements of the organisation. Stay tuned as we look at the larger picture and give you more information on what is db architecture, why you should pursue database architecture, what to expect from such a degree and what your job opportunities will be after graduation. Here, we will be discussing how to become a data architect. Students can visit NIT Trichy , IIT Kharagpur , JMI New Delhi .

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive.

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Product manager.

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Stock Analyst

Individuals who opt for a career as a stock analyst examine the company's investments makes decisions and keep track of financial securities. The nature of such investments will differ from one business to the next. Individuals in the stock analyst career use data mining to forecast a company's profits and revenues, advise clients on whether to buy or sell, participate in seminars, and discussing financial matters with executives and evaluate annual reports.

A Researcher is a professional who is responsible for collecting data and information by reviewing the literature and conducting experiments and surveys. He or she uses various methodological processes to provide accurate data and information that is utilised by academicians and other industry professionals. Here, we will discuss what is a researcher, the researcher's salary, types of researchers.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues.

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems.

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software.

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description: A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Field Surveyor

Are you searching for a Field Surveyor Job Description? A Field Surveyor is a professional responsible for conducting field surveys for various places or geographical conditions. He or she collects the required data and information as per the instructions given by senior officials.

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Veterinary Doctor

Speech therapist, gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth.

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Are you searching for an ‘Anatomist job description’? An Anatomist is a research professional who applies the laws of biological science to determine the ability of bodies of various living organisms including animals and humans to regenerate the damaged or destroyed organs. If you want to know what does an anatomist do, then read the entire article, where we will answer all your questions.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs.

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story.

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion.

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications.

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product.

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans.

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

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Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems.

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Eco Criticism › Ecocriticism: An Essay

Ecocriticism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 27, 2016 • ( 3 )

Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader , edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm , and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals in ecocriticism is to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and increased technology. It is hence a fresh way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts, which brings new dimensions to the field of literary and theoritical studies. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including “green (cultural) studies”, “ecopoetics”, and “environmental literary criticism.”

Western thought has often held a more or less utilitarian attitude to nature —nature is for serving human needs. However, after the eighteenth century, there emerged many voices that demanded a revaluation of the relationship between man and environment, and man’s view of nature. Arne Naess , a Norwegian philosopher, developed the notion of “Deep Ecology” which emphasizes the basic interconnectedness of all life forms and natural features, and presents a symbiotic and holistic world-view rather than an anthropocentric one.

Earlier theories in literary and cultural studies focussed on issue of class, race, gender, region are criteria and “subjects”of critical analysis. The late twentieth century has woken up to a new threat: ecological disaster. The most important environmental problems that humankind faces as a whole are: nuclear war, depletion of valuable natural resources, population explosion, proliferation of exploitative technologies, conquest of space preliminary to using it as a garbage dump, pollution, extinction of species (though not a human problem) among others. In such a context, literary and cultural theory has begun to address the issue as a part of academic discourse. Numerous green movements have sprung up all over the world, and some have even gained representations in the governments.

Large scale debates over “dumping,” North versus South environmentalism (the necessary differences between the en-vironmentalism of the developed and technologically advanced richer nations—the North, and the poorer, subsistence environmentalism of the developing or “Third World”—the South). Donald Worster ‘s Nature’s Economy (1977) became a textbook for the study of ecological thought down the ages. The historian Arnold Toynbee recorded the effect of human civilisation upon the land and nature in his monumental, Mankind and Mother Earth (1976). Environmental issues and landscape use were also the concern of the Annales School of historians , especially Braudel and Febvre. The work of environmental historians has been pathbreaking too. Rich-ard Grove et al’s massive Nature and the Orient (1998), David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha’s Nature, Culture, Imperialism (1995) have been significant work in the environmental history of India and Southeast Asia. Ramachandra Guha is of course the most important environmental historian writing from India today.

Various versions of environmentalism developed.Deep ecology and ecofeminism were two important developments. These new ideas questioned the notion of “development” and “modernity,” and argued that all Western notions in science, philosophy, politics were “anthropocentric” (human-centred) and “androcentric”(Man/male-centred). Technology, medical science with its animal testing, the cosmetic and fashion industry all came in for scrutiny from environmentalists. Deep ecology, for instance, stressed on a “biocentric” view (as seen in the name of the environmentalist group, “ Earth First! !”).

Ecocriticism is the result of this new consciousness: that very soon, there will be nothing beautiful (or safe) in nature to discourse about, unless we are very careful.

Ecocritics ask questions such as: (1) How is nature represented in the novel/poem/play ? (2) What role does the physical-geographical setting play in the structure of the novel? (3) How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? That is, what is the link between pedagogic or creative practice and actual political, sociocultural and ethical behaviour towards the land and other non-human life forms? (4) How is science —in the form of genetic engineering, technologies of reproduction, sexualities—open to critical scrutiny terms of the effects of science upon the land?

The essential assumptions, ideas and methods of ecocritics may be summed up as follows. (1) Ecocritics believe that human culture is related to the physical world. (2) Ecocriticism assumes that all life forms are interlinked. Ecocriticism expands the notion of “the world” to include the entire ecosphere. (3) Moreover, there is a definite link between nature and culture, where the literary treatment, representation and “thematisation” of land and nature influence actions on the land. (4) Joseph Meeker in an early work, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1972) used the term “literary ecology” to refer to “the study of biological themes and relationships which appear in literary works. It is simultaneously an attempt to discover what roles have been played by literature in the ecology of the human species.” (5) William Rueckert is believed to have coined the term “ecocriticism” in 1978, which he defines as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”

Source: Literary Theory Today,Pramod K Nair

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John B. Watson and the Impact of Behaviorism on Modern Psychology

This essay about John B. Watson details his foundational role in establishing behaviorism and its broad influence across various fields such as psychology, education, and marketing. It outlines Watson’s radical shift from traditional introspective methods to focusing on observable behavior, exemplified by his famous Little Albert experiment, which demonstrated how emotions could be conditioned in humans. The essay also discusses Watson’s post-academic career in advertising, applying behavioral principles to influence consumer behavior, and his impact on modern therapeutic methods like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Despite criticisms that behaviorism oversimplified complex mental processes, Watson’s legacy persists in the way educational strategies, marketing, and therapeutic practices are designed today, showcasing the enduring relevance of his work in understanding and shaping human behavior.

How it works

Imagine if you could mold any individual into the profession of your choosing solely through the manipulation of their environment. This notion, as radical as it sounds, was the cornerstone of John B. Watson’s pioneering work in psychology. Watson, a visionary in his time, catapulted the study of human behavior into the spotlight with his groundbreaking approach known as behaviorism. His legacy is a testament to the enduring influence of behaviorism not just within psychology, but across a multitude of disciplines, from education to marketing and beyond.

Watson’s journey into the realm of behaviorism was marked by a bold departure from the introspective methods that dominated early 20th-century psychology. He championed the idea that true scientific psychology should only concern itself with observable behaviors, rather than the murky waters of the mind’s internal processes. Picture a scientist meticulously observing a subject’s response to various stimuli, much like a botanist studying the growth patterns of plants under different light conditions. Watson was convinced that by understanding these patterns, one could predict and control human behavior with remarkable precision.

This revolutionary idea was put to the test in what would become one of the most talked-about experiments in psychology: the conditioning of Little Albert. Watson demonstrated that a young child could be taught to fear a previously neutral object — a white rat — simply by associating it with a loud, frightening sound. This experiment didn’t just underline the power of environmental conditioning; it laid the groundwork for therapeutic methods aimed at modifying undesirable behaviors, and it hinted at the vast potential for applying these principles beyond the clinic, into classrooms and even the consumer market.

Watson’s influence seeped into the realm of advertising, where he applied psychological principles to sway consumer behavior. Imagine the subtle power of a well-placed advertisement, capable of nudging viewers toward a purchase they hadn’t previously considered. Watson’s foray into advertising showcased the practical applications of behaviorism, foreshadowing the sophisticated marketing strategies we see today that leverage our responses to stimuli for commercial gain.

Moreover, Watson’s ideas laid the foundational stones for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), blending behaviorist techniques with cognitive theories to treat a range of mental health conditions. CBT stands as a testament to the enduring relevance of Watson’s work, illustrating how the manipulation of external behaviors can lead to profound changes in internal thought patterns and emotional states.

Despite the groundbreaking nature of his work, Watson’s theories were not without their critics, who argued that behaviorism oversimplified the complexities of human psychology by ignoring the unseen workings of the mind. Yet, even as the cognitive revolution brought a renewed focus on internal mental processes, the principles of behaviorism continued to influence psychological research and practice.

Watson’s legacy, therefore, is not confined to the annals of psychology history. It ripples through various disciplines, informing educational practices, shaping marketing strategies, and improving therapeutic techniques. His work serves as a bridge between the scientific study of behavior and its practical applications in everyday life, demonstrating the far-reaching impact of viewing humans through the lens of their interactions with the environment.

In sum, John B. Watson was more than just a psychologist; he was a trailblazer whose ideas transcended the boundaries of his field. His emphasis on observable behavior opened new avenues for understanding and influencing human behavior, leaving an indelible mark on psychology and beyond. Watson’s journey reminds us of the power of interdisciplinary thinking and the unforeseen paths on which the quest for knowledge can embark us.

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