Teaching environmental science and tackling all those environmental issues and problems led me to ponder and come up with a conclusion: Man’s ways are geared towards his own destruction.

Quest for Convenience

The primary reason for this unconscious propensity for destructive tendency emanates from man’s search for convenience, a comfortable life; search for the best way to adapt with the harshness of the environment but apparently in a short-sighted manner using technology. We want to get from one place to another faster than we could walk, we even fly! (e.g. cars, trains, airplanes) and we want to do more things than what our natural capacities can achieve (computerized systems).

Live Long and Eat More

We want to live longer than our natural life span by extending life through medicine and transplants and all those gadgets to maintain even a dead body.  We want to consume more and faster than what we need. This requires vast agricultural lands, domestication of animals in a cramped space, the rise of the fast food outlets, and creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) through bioengineering or biotechnology to satiate or even exceed food demands.

Competition for Space and Territory

We want to dominate other animals, even our own kind, in our competition for territory or space or power and for our race or species to occupy. Guns or armaments were invented and wars occurred. Some probably due to ideological grounds, but some, hey, to acquire more land. te

The Negative Outcomes

We saw that our activities or adaptations backfired to us in the form of resource depletion (such that oil prices go up and make life miserable to many who have become dependent on fossil-fueled machineries) and air and water pollution. We now have problems of acid rain and clean water is difficult or expensive to obtain. We resort to bottled water, but these themselves pose health risk because most of these containers leak toxic or carcinogenic substances. Unnatural, dangerous substances (heavy metals, dioxins) come out of our gadgets and problems of disposal is a main issue. There are more mouths to feed and maintain because of longer life span, new viruses coming out of nowhere (AH1N1 virus, ebola, SARS) which could be products of genetic engineering for all we know, and desertification issues forth due to overcultivation.There is now global warming, impending disaster of a nuclear holocaust, acid rain, air pollution which always haunt us and brings out the question of our very survival.

So What Now?

All these technological approaches to address human needs also necessitated technological fixes and it seems that those fixes can’t cope up with negative externalities or unexpected negative effects.Our technological advances are so much laden with negative externalities that we need to reexamine our development, ourselves in the long-run and ask: Is this what we really want to do to ourselves and to our world? We should rethink our direction and come up with a better path. There must be a better way to fulfill our needs and make life comfortable to everyone.