Wendy C Hamblet: Mending Fences, A Restructure Proposal for the United Nations
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Taking action may be expensive, but the cost of doing nothing is even greater. Deforestation concerns not just plant and animals but the soil and minerals as well. The overuse of soil and excess use of chemical fertilizers can be hazardous to the ecosystem, though this is precisely what can be expected where profit is the only motivating concern. Even the development of genetically altered food has raised new issues concerning the health of the ecosystem, not to mention our health as human beings.
There have been laws enforced in the United States that require the replacement of resources taken. However all too often we have seen that nations are willing to override their own sound policies where corporations with their influential lobbyists have undue sway over the policies of the politicians. This demonstrates that ecological problems need to be addressed and sound responses enforced on a global level. Global legislation is needed.
Another area of concern has to do with the growth rate of the human population of the earth. It is not the actual size of the population that is the problem, but rather it is the distribution of resources that leaves many people destitute while others live in overabundance and waste. But, further, this maldistribution results in the rush of people to the city areas, in the hopes of improving their individual lots. This leads to the condensing of people into small areas, ghettoized areas of the poor, and abandonment of the land that might otherwise have fed them. All these malpractices are taking their toll on our environment. Even those people who live in industrialized nations where there exist greater job opportunities become part of the problem of sound ecosystems management since they waste more resources than they replace. Urban sprawl and resultant higher per capita resource consumption in smaller house holds pose serious challenges to biodiversity conservation.
So how does one solve this problem? Do we put a control on population? Rather, there is not a need for population control but rather a need to spread the population equally throughout the land. National governments and the global governance overseers must work together to encouraged local areas to designate build infrastructure, provide houses, provide forested sections throughout the area and be certain that there are opportunities for jobs and decent living standards. We see this policy as serving in the protection of forest and farm lands as well as interweaving these purposes with the dispersal of population—thus labor and housing.
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