ammi's

Kursen jag läser på engelska nu heter "Sustainability in a Multicultural world". Jag visste inte ens vad sustainability betydde när kursen började, men det betyder "hållbarhet", och det är det kursen framför allt handlar om. Att öppna ögonen för hållbarhet när det gäller människans framtid här på jorden. Det handlar också om att påverka andra till att tänka på hållbarheten. Så tänkte dela med mig av Reflection 1 som jag skrev! (I början skulle det vara typ ett brev, riktat till ett 11-årigt barn, därför har jag skrivit "Hello Child").

Hello child!
I’m writing you this letter to tell you about what’s going on in the world. It might be hard to understand, it’s hard even for me because we’re always so focused on our own lives. I heard you’re around the age of 11, and here is some shocking facts: The human has been walking on earth for 200 000 years now. That’s a really long time, right? We're about 7 billion people on earth right now, but we have not always been so many. The amount of people on earth has doubled in 40 years. In the year of 1970 there were 3 billion people on our planet.

Everything has gone so fast in the last century and we can thank our ancestors for the human race success. They worked for their lives and in a very sustainable way, and that’s why we´re here today. But has the human race really succeeded? Well, that’s an important and interesting question.

The human development has caused a lot of problems. Here are mentioned a few: The climate has changed on account of emissions caused by us humans, the production and availability of energy has become more and more important, and the availability of fresh water is not fairly distributed. Let’s start with the climate change. When the number of people on earth increases, so does their need for resources increase simultaneously. The need for energy has increased since people need their homes to be warm, they need electricity for light and technology, and they need, or want, to be able to transport themselves.

As you surely understand, energy is needed for all of these examples.
Since the need for energy has increased so fast, the earth has also changed. There is different ways of getting energy. You get it from various sources, and there are renewable sources and nonrenewable sources. About 100 years ago it became very popular to use oil as energy. Machines with engines were built, and they were as strong as a hundred men. These engines needed energy (fuel from oil) to work. Oil is drilled and pumped from deep down in the ground and you retrieve it with big oil-drills.

Maybe you think that’s very innovative, and yes it is, but there is a problem. Oil is a nonrenewable resource, which means there is a limit to how much you can use. The oil is getting harder and harder to find, because there is less and less left of it. There is another problem too: When you burn oil, it emits a gas called carbon dioxide and that affects our climate. To explain it short, the more carbon dioxide we emit into the atmosphere, the warmer the average temperature will be on earth.

In the last fifty years, the climate on earth has changed more than ever before, and that’s mainly because of all the nonrenewable fuels we burn. When the average temperature increases, things on earth start to change. Some parts of the world will experience fatal weather change; storms, extreme heat, and flooding to mention a few examples. This may destroy cities and kill a lot of people, and it’s mainly because of how the rich people have chosen to live, that is, the rich people’s life style and consumption.

There are a lot of people on earth that do not affect the climate significantly, and those are the ones that live a simple life in harmony with nature and survive on their farming and their good relationship to Mother Nature. They might live like the rich people did a couple of thousand years ago, but they live sustainably compared to the rich, consuming people. It’s unfair that they are usually the hardest affected of all because of us rich people.

Many of the poor have a real struggle finding water, something we in the developed countries take for granted. The industries consume huge amounts of water for different reasons. The water on earth has to be distributed evenly. The amount of water on this planet will always remain the same. The water we drink is the same as our ancestors drank, or even the dinosaurs drank. We can’t get more water on the earth and we have to provide all the people with water, especially those who struggle to get it. We have to change our water distribution so that it becomes fair and sustainable. Remember, we only have one home, and that’s our earth.

Solutions
I’ve chosen to put the political solutions as the most important one. On the topic day, Per told us that the politics are the roof of the solutions, and I agree. A politic that encourages the people to live a sustainable life would help us a lot to achieve sustainability, but currently the politics aren’t involving sustainability as much as they could do.

The responsibility lays therefore on us, the people, to affect the politics and be willing to live more sustainably. In that way, the leaders and parties will get more dedicated in environmental questions. That leads us in to the next important solution. The personal solutions. If we, individually are willing to change the society, I think that is the best opportunity to change the norm system.
But how should everyone be willing to do that? That’s also our personal responsibility, to spread the information about sustainability and show our friends that we’ve started to care about the environment.

I believe a lot in “local cultures”, if you encourage a sustainable lifestyle in your circle of friends, most of the friends will be more aware of the environment and maybe, after a while, become more sustainably, because of the “group pressure”. When you reach that point, maybe the technology could be a great help to spread the word and affect other people. I haven’t been aware of the responsibility we actually have, until today, especially our generation.

We have to get more sustainably and affect the coming generations to be so as well. Otherwise, this world will be a harder and harder place to live in. The modern technology has developed very fast, and it helps with creating counter measures for our pollution. So it’s a great time for us to make use of the modern technology for that purpose. That’s our most important task when it comes to personal solutions.

I don’t think that small changes in your every day life, for example lower your meat consumption, will affect the environment in the long-term, unless you spread the word and affect other people to do the same. It’s even better if you start to ask for more vegetarian food in the stores, because the stores are always trying to adapt their offer for us consumers.

If you’re not willing to lower your meat consumption, you can choose meat with better environmental conditions. The more the people buy it, the more the stores will be forced to offer it. When it comes to that point, the meat-competition will increase and the “good” meat will be cheaper. That leads us in to the next solution, which is economical instruments, and I think that’s the least important solution. It might be good in the short-term because it affects people to choose a sustainable lifestyle, if something is cheaper, (for example cycling instead of car-driving) more people might choose that. But in the long-term I donk think economical instruments will have big effects.
Instead, if we ask for a better meat-market, the competition starts and the prizes will automatically decrease.