Are we doing enough to protect our environment?

Question

Are we doing enough to protect our environment?

Answer 1

No of course not.  We waste water, energy, fuel, paper everything.

If only everyone stopped for 5 minutes and thought about what they are doing to the environment and how they could improve what they are doing then it wouldn't be such a problem.

Answer 2

I think we are. You may disagree. In fact I am sure you disagree, otherwise you would not have asked the question.

Answer 3

We can always do better.  Sometimes through action and other times through inaction.  Action, like trying to undo the messes we've made, and inaction, leaving nature to recover on its own.  As an example, I am studying to become a restoration ecologist.  We'll go in to a human-damaged area and help "fix" things according to our knowledge of it how the area worked when healthy.  This may include planting native vegetation, helping to restore natural soil conditions, and so forth.  Then we step back and let nature do the rest.  We stick the bandaid on, promoting healthier conditions, but nature does the actual healing. :)

What inspired me was the local parkway.  The creek coming off the mountain had been artificially straightened to help with agricultural flooding years earlier.  But what it REALLY did was severely injure the wetlands that the stream fed into, putting many birds at risk.  (These wetlands are a particularly important rest stop for several threatened species during migration.)  So a team of people went in there, "re-bent" the stream, and restored what they could.  Two years later, and there is wildlife around that hasn't been seen there for ages.  I saw my first fox there.  And cougars go there on occasion (probably for the copious amounts of catnip that grows along the paths, hehe).

Essentially, we should always strive to do better, to try to promote ecological health in everything we can.  But we should never get it into our heads that we know better than nature.  And we shouldn't ever try to adapt the land to ourselves.  Because really, it should be the other way around.

Answer 4

no.. we could do a lot more

Answer 5

We could always do better but I think we are doing enough.  There are other countries like China and India that are not doing their share.  They are poverty stricken so it is hard to blame them too much.  Our water and air is getting cleaner in spite of what is common said.  We should continue to protect our shared resources and habitat.

Answer 6

Probably not, but the biggest threat to the environment is the discredit of sound environmental policy by the inane global warming farce.

Answer 7

No.  We are doing too much.  It is our interference with natural processes, playing God through technology, that has screwed up our environment this bad.  The only thing we can do is develop benign technologies and limit population growth.  We have reached the limit of what our planet can support.

Answer 8

yes, we will all probably be dead before it effects us, just don't have kids cause it might effect them