2008 Woodie Awards
Destroying environment causes reasons to reform
Jaclyn Bloth
Issue date: 1/25/05 Section: Features
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Signs of the war the U.S. is currently waging are everywhere. These signs can be seen in our cities, highways, towns, factories, farms and residential developments. I am refering to the war in Iraq.. This fi ght is man verses mother earth; civilization verses nature. Man is seemingly on a crusade to expand until every last inch of the earth is ruined or covered with buildings and cement. Every time a new neighborhood goes up, an entire ecosystem is destroyed. We are so careless with our waste that we end up polluting the air, land, water...you name it, weʼve polluted it.
Like most Americans, I was just standing dumbly by, waiting for the human race to deplete all of Earthʼs natural resources. But then I traveled to a small developing nation in Central America that showed me an answer.
Costa Rica, a seemingly insignificant country placed in the midst of under-developed nations laden with strife, is easily overlooked. However, this small country has done something that the much bigger United States has failed to; it has embraced a compromise that can end the battle of civilization verse nature, hopefully once and for all. The answer is sustainable development.
This is the development of a nation using only methods that can be sustained over long periods of time. This would exclude any dependence on non-renewable resources, such as oil. Renewable resources are also protected so that they are not used up before they are able to renew themselves. This would prevent, for example, rainforests from being cut down at a faster rate than they can grow back.
The result is that rainforests just get smaller and smaller. Through sustainable development, forests would be protected from depletion by the use of an alternate logging method. In this method, only a few trees per acre would be cut down, which would allow the forest to maintain its framework and fill in the empty spots. Because of this sustainable logging method, Costa Rica is the only nation in the world whose rainforest is actually growing in size.
Like most Americans, I was just standing dumbly by, waiting for the human race to deplete all of Earthʼs natural resources. But then I traveled to a small developing nation in Central America that showed me an answer.
Costa Rica, a seemingly insignificant country placed in the midst of under-developed nations laden with strife, is easily overlooked. However, this small country has done something that the much bigger United States has failed to; it has embraced a compromise that can end the battle of civilization verse nature, hopefully once and for all. The answer is sustainable development.
This is the development of a nation using only methods that can be sustained over long periods of time. This would exclude any dependence on non-renewable resources, such as oil. Renewable resources are also protected so that they are not used up before they are able to renew themselves. This would prevent, for example, rainforests from being cut down at a faster rate than they can grow back.
The result is that rainforests just get smaller and smaller. Through sustainable development, forests would be protected from depletion by the use of an alternate logging method. In this method, only a few trees per acre would be cut down, which would allow the forest to maintain its framework and fill in the empty spots. Because of this sustainable logging method, Costa Rica is the only nation in the world whose rainforest is actually growing in size.
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