The Green Living: “Think Big, Act Small”, Essay Example

In the United States of America, some states are in search of renewable energy sources – wind, water, and solar energy – for energy. Recently twenty-three States and the Columbian District have set principles for how much of their energy must be produced by renewable sources (McDilla, 2008, p. 5). Conservationists have always spent thousands of hours striving to save the world. They have written columns, demonstrated, protested, and even celebrated the pursuit of this particular cause. The expression “think big, act small” describes a priceless approach to conservation, but it could be improved if we include our own personal routine activities to live more lightly on the earth. To me, acting locally to preserve the environment means neighborhood cleanup projects, recycling activities, and community gardens. This personal assessment guides readers to the next step of making their lives more environment-friendly. Thus people need to visualize a greener world, participate in ‘greening’ activities, and make their own lives compatible with a healthy environment.

Watching these impacts of our choices and seeing the earth wearing down, I could not help but think of how and what I could do to change and start leaving a positive imprint on earth. Conserving energy seems to me is to stick out most, but still what can I do, just one person make a change that would really have an impact on earth? If we all take time and look what is happening around us, we can easily judge and manage. Whether good orbad, we can manage it quite easily, and we could change the impact. Then I conducted research that could help me become more knowledgeable about energy conservation. After this research I have learned how to save energy instantly.

Almost 85 percent of the energy consumption comes from fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas supply (Cohen, 2011, p. 73). Although the supplies of these are vast, they are not infinite. Moreover, more significant support from Cohen (2011, p. 73) to it, the earth’s atmosphere and biosphere may not survive the environmental impact of burning such enormous amounts of these fuels.Rohli and Vega (2008, p. 17) also support this by saying that carbon stored over millions of years is being released in a matter of decades, disrupting the earth’s carbon cycle in unpredictable ways. But fossil fuels are not the only source of energy, and burning fuel is not the only way to produce heat and motion. Renewable energy offers us a better way to survive. Some energy sources are “renewable” because they are naturally stocked up, because they can be managed so that they last forever, or because their supply is so enormous that they can never be meaningfully used up by humans (Blackbum, 1987, p. 59). Moreover, renewable energy sources have much smaller environmental impacts than fossils and nuclear fuels (p. 74).

Solving these environmental crises, then, reduces to altering the factor that is out of balance. Since the earth’s fundamental capacity of natural resources is finite and can only expand so much in order to accommodate the rapidly increasing demands that are being placed on it (Gieske, 2011, p. xxix), somehow, regardless of the type of country, a method for reducing consumption and impact on the earth must be devised in order to reestablish harmony and balance. Mirroring the factors within the formula, I figured this out that the three ways to cause this positive change are: stabilization and/or reduction of population, technological improvements, or radical socioeconomic change. At this point, most demographers agree that the world’s population is now slowly stabilizing, but that this is not enough to reestablish balance, because per capita consumption of materials and energies continue to rise exponentially (Thompson, & Turk, 2006, p. 16). Usually, then, environmentalists search for a technological solution to reduce environmental impact, thus commoditizing environmentalism itself.

References

Blackburn, John O. (1987). The Renewable Energy Alternative: How the United States and World Can Propser Without Nuclear Energy or Coal. Duke University Press.

Cohen, Nevin. (2011). Green Business: An A-to-Z Guide. SAGE.

Gieske, Tim. (2011). EcoCommerce 101: Adding an Ecological Dimension to the Economy. Hillcrest Publishing Group.

McDilla, Dinae Grow. (2008). 365 Ways to Live Green: Your Everyday Guide to Saving The Environment. Adams Media.

Rohli, Robert V., & Vega, Anthony J. (2008). Climatology. Jones & Barlett Learning.

Thompson, Graham R., & Turk, Jonathan. (2006). Earth Science and the Environment. Cengage Learning.