Towards a Sustainable Future

Sufficient and serviceable resources - land, water, air and energy, must be available to ensure a secured and quality life for the future generations. However, this is a very ideal condition that's feared by the world that will only remain as a dream. Proofs of issues and problems in resource sharing and distribution can be seen worldwide. Thus, if one looks in the global perspective, one can see more 3.7 billion humans that are malnourished and undernourished. With the present imbalance that is mounting between the population growth and the sustaining of life through the natural resources, many are alarmed. More and more international groups and environmentalists are admonishing every human being to actively conserve water, energy and all other biological resources. Everybody must understand that this is a global issue and that the rapid growth of population brings consequences and damages to the earth's resources and to the humanity as a whole. This paper aims to address this issue by weighing which of the two ghosts is less scary than the other: population growth or the diminishing of natural resources, specifically the oceans. Which problem must be given a bigger attention? Which problem has a deeper impact? These questions we shall try to answer as we go along with our discussion.

POPULATION, DISTRIBUTION AND DIMINISHING RESOURCES

Ocean resources nowadays are but an insipid silhouette of the abundance that was once enjoyed but the world. But the vanishing of marine life seems to come unnoticed by other people. Now, we cannot anymore witness accounts from old conquerors and pirates diaries about a place of innumerable whales and abundant large fishes, they remain legend-like, classical tales that belong to books and fictions, not a reality. And as the human population heading towards 9 billion, a certainly an enormous number of mouths to feed, can we sustain the yields of seafood? One solution that is being considered is the vast expansion of protected ocean areas to safeguard ecosystems and bestow nurseries for marketable fishes. Others see expanded marine aquaculture as the most effective way to deal with the issue. However, no matter what type of solution that we apply on solving the issue of sharing the natural resources in the ocean, the problem of diminishing ocean capitals will always come up. The oceans are rapidly being exhausted of fish stocks because of over-fishing and that coral reefs are eradicated by global warming and massive biodiversity; leaving some ocean areas devoid of life at the point where recovery is impossible. Meeting the food needs of the over and ever intensifying global population requires replication of the current ocean resources output on the decades to come. We are presently exploiting one-thirds more than what the planet can offer. The human population must be given the necessary focus and action then. And unless efforts are set to address the mounting global population, problems on natural resources distribution, including ocean resources, will not be solved.

CONCLUSION

If I were the United States Federal Government Secretary, the EPA Director, or a United Nations delegate, I would be focusing on the urgency and the importance of the growing human population. The global population will expand from the present 6 billion to almost 9 billion in the years to come and the implications of that situation has more impacts than the distribution of the ocean resources. If I am to solve population problems, I will not only solve resources distribution and scarcity, I will only address other issues like effective governance and industrialization. Giving more attention on curtailing the number of mouths to feed is much more effective than finding a way to properly distribute our ocean resources; because even if a program/solution is developed to solve distribution problems, if population is still growing, distribution problems will continue to persist.

REFERENCES

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