e-portfolio for Aimee Caplen for paper 3 draft

Sustainable Abundance

The word’s resources have diminished due to the increase of the world’s population. The world is required to use these resources to stay alive. Unfortunately, as David E. Nye and other scholars note, the world has a certain carrying capacity. Nye’s statement, “Ultimately the world’s carrying capacity is not a scientific fact but a social construction” is correct. The world’s population doesn’t necessarily choose who uses the world’s resources because the population of six billion is the cause of the slow decline of resources. Therefore, the world’s carrying capacity is socially constructed.

The carrying capacity ranges from scholar to scholar. The amount of people the world’s resources can support will soon run out, but when? Henry David Thoreau, part of the minority who favored simplicity, believed that “rather than constantly expand one’s desires, it was better to simplify material life.” A simple material life is long forgotten. Today there are few people who follow Thoreau’s simple life ideal. Today’s ideals include work hard play hard; simple lives mean stress free lives; and more leisure time because there are more opportunities for family time outside of one’s jobs. Technology is a way of life therefore today’s ideals have driven away from Thoreau’s simple life is the better life philosophy. Technology has not only created an abundance of products to be consumed by humans, but has helped their lives become relatively easier compared to the lives of those before the large use of technology. Robert Thurston drew conclusions about the easiness of the human lives now. Technologies are “mainly engaged in supplying our people with the comfort and the luxuries of modern life, and in converting crudeness and barbarism into [a more] cultured civilization.”

The nineteenth century became known as the mechanical age. Technology, though a convenient invention, began to create problems for the earth and its people. Thomas Carlyle declared that a steam had “accelerated a process which was going on already, but too fast.” Henry Adams believed that technology had accelerated out of control. For example, the production of cars requires a vast amount of resources that “requires as much energy” to produce the materials for the car “as it does to drive the car for a decade.” However cars have become a necessity for the majority of the population. Also agricultural technology that increases the production of many goods such as bushels of wheat and barley has affected the environment. Even though, the use of the new machines and chemicals increases productivity and profitability it ultimately destroys the soil. Pesticides and other chemicals are profitable and save the crops from weeds and insects that will either suffocate or eat the crops. Although the use of the chemicals is profitable, the consideration of the soil being ruined is not high on the company’s priority list. A company usually fallows the soil every five years therefore limiting the amount of acres in use. Though profitable, the company must consider that using the chemicals will have a long-term affect on the soil and ultimately limit the world’s resources and carrying capacity.

I for one sometimes forget that our world’s resources are slowly decreasing. The amount of paper used to print out documents, sometimes unnecessary, is increasing at a faster rate than it takes to grow and produce the paper. Today’s population needs to consider how much they waste the resources provided to them, or else the world’s carrying capacity will not be able to have all the necessary resources for the world’s growing population.