The Urgent Need For Environmental Stewardship Today

What is environmental stewardship?

What do they do? “The term environmental stewardship has been used to refer to such diverse actions as creating protected areas, replanting trees, limiting harvests, reducing harmful activities or pollution, creating community gardens, restoring degraded areas, or purchasing more sustainable products”. Their responsibility of an environmental stewardship is to keep order and maintain the natural environment. Some practices involved in protecting the environment are restoration, recycling, regeneration, conservation, and other things (shandas & Messer 2008).

They believe that anybody who's actions take part in affecting environmental resources should take some of the blame on how they are leaving the environment. When talking about environmental stewardships they try to keep the balance while still trying to fulfill the interest of society, the people’s futures, and other species, as well as their own personal needs. Although instead of draining the resources dry for their personal needs, they do it in moderation so the environment will not take a major relapse. Stewardship activities care duties carried out by stewards, which can be people, groups, or a group of actors. The actions of an individual stewardship might involve decisions made daily by individuals who maintain preservation or rebuilding of soil, management of vegetation, removing unwanted species, what type of extraction is supposed to be used, and related environmental impact, or the type of harvest used depending how delicate or vulnerable the habitat area is. The actions taken by stewardship can be done by groups or communities to be able to manage common pool resources or common areas (Bennett & Whitty).

This can include decisions within companies, group of people, and communities to impose a stricter upkeep than what is authorized by the government. Majority of the time, stewardship need organizations to fulfill their activities such as enterprises or corporations like multi-stakeholder or hybrid networks. These partnerships may consist of local communities, public agencies, NGOs, funding bodies, and civil society organizations. One of the concerns that stewardship face is capacity, which involves communities or groups of people who are able to spare their resources. There are two reasons why a steward would take action: broader governance factors and local community assets.

First, having the aptitude of local communities to take stewardship action is needed by local assets, which will make resources available so action can be taken. An example of this is, having infrastructure, financing, technology, levels of wealth or poverty, skills, rights, knowledge etc. With all this support, the resources of the communities will be able to take stewardship action.

The second would be governance, which involves systems of institution it consists of laws, formal, policies, informal and informal organizations, and decision-making processeses and structural process, which are related to power and politics (Lockwood & Davidson 2010).

In this time of age, we are in need of environmental stewardship’s as our society activities have caused many problems to the environment ever since we as man have learned how to tap into earth’s resources. As our demands increase for the population so does the increase in natural resources, agriculture and livestock also increases, as we demand more and more of it. With this continuing to happen this will lead to consequences and it will soon lead us to population explosion, which has already happened because we are over populated as of now. As the human population continues to grow in a rapid rate, fluctuate in numbers, so does the impact on the environment. Right now our world holds at least a couple of billions of people, and with the amount of people we have, also including the billions of animals, that is enough to make a huge change on the environment, global, and regional impact.

Some obvious changes you will notice will be things like climate changes, fish population thinning, and the declining of the wild ecosystem would be some of the most noticeable. Although it is not just the resources that we over use. Their other things like the use of chemicals fertilizers, soil and water that contain toxic compounds, pesticides that we use to increase production like in farms and animals that causes air pollution. Earlier I had mentioned the thinning of fish well to elaborate on that the fertilizer we use have toxins that kill the aquatic animals. Another problem is every time we try to build cities or increase cultivation, we are removing trees, other plants that these animals use as food. We are literally kicking them out of their homes and are threatening the survival of their species and any plants and trees we cut down along with them.

I understand that people want the wellbeing of society to be in good circumstances, but they also have to think about the environment. It is like cause and effect if one suffers the other will suffer later on in life. As of now, society is doing well although because we use the environment to help our society flourish although if you look at the environment it is not doing so well. The reason the environment is not doing as good as our society is for the reason that there is no balance between the two. There must be balance in order for both parties to flourish it cannot be 70/30 or 60/40 it has to be 50/50. In our society, many of the issues we have coming from the environment can put an end to the quality of life on earth. Some examples of this are, doing nothing with the excess of waste, tearing down natural habitats, contaminating the air, and water. All these issues occurring in the environment are problems created by us, but some of the main issues that are well-known are, global warming, pollution, and loss of habitat etc. Everything that is wrong with our environment can be solved over time.

Lately, the saying of go green has become a part of everyday conversations and arguments. People are told to turn their lights of to save energy and recycle plastic, aluminum, cardboard, and glass. Although people are not told why they should be doing this. The problem is that people or companies will always try to make a profit where they can. What I mean by this is these companies see that we are trying to fix the problem we have created towards to environment. They see the people trying to go green, by recycling bags, bottles, and other things then these businesses start to either raise or overcharge merchandise to make a profit. Sometimes societies do try to help the environment in any way they can, but how can you expect people to pay more money if they can’t afford it because of bills that are prioritized first in order for you to live, have a home etc. Not everybody can afford to go green if the prices are too expensive or are charging you for additional items that you are required to have without choice. Do not get me wrong I know there are people who care and do not care about the environment but at least try to make it easy for the people who do want to help save it.

Now, these days people do not care or worry about the environment. They know there is something wrong with the environment, they probably do not know by detail what the problem is, but they know the major problems like global warming and air pollution, which is emphasized by society through the media. When looking at the problems of earth’s environment you can notice that problems are getting worse as humanity’s numbers grow rapidly. There is so much this earth can provide like the quality of oxygen is getting worse, fresh water is becoming less available than what it used to be, the forest is being chopped down causing there to be less forests, the temperature seems to be changing rapidly every day. For example somedays on a winter day the morning can be freezing cold but once we hit noon the sun comes out and isn’t as cold anymore. In addition, the temperatures also keeps changing drastically because of greenhouse gases, and in the aquatic life their seems to be less fish is the ocean/seas. When looking at these problematic events occur they are happening in a large scale, which make it tough to figure out a solution because time is not on our side.

What caused global warming?

For the most part global warming was created by man-made greenhouse gases like (GHGs). Now you are probably thinking what greenhouse gases are. “Greenhouse gases (GHGs) warm the surface and the atmosphere with significant implications for rainfall, retreat of glaciers and sea ice, sea level, among other factors. About 30 years ago, it was recognized that the increase in tropospheric ozone from air pollution (NOx, CO and others) is an important greenhouse forcing term. In addition, the recognition of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) on stratospheric ozone and its climate effects linked chemistry and climate strongly” (Ramanathan & Feng 2009 37-50).

Some of the main causes of global warming come from the burning of fossil fuels, oil, and natural gases although when looking at these gases we use these resources for our everyday living. For example, these particular fuels are used to, power industrial processes, engender electricity, provide heating, aircraft engines military/civilian, and drive gas and diesel vehicles. With all the inventions that use these chemicals, they have significantly increased the atmosphere concentrations of CO2 by 35%, CH4 by 48%, and N2O by 18% since pre-industrial times (Liu & Greaver 2009). Although these gases are not dangerous to humans or wildlife with the amounts of chemicals that are found in the air.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph about these gases not being detrimental to our health. Among scientist, there is certain that some of these substances are being trapped in the atmosphere near the earth causing the effect of the planet getting warmer. Although as the problem worsens for global warming and continues to cause more problems like the melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers up in the mountains. If this carry on this will lead to the rise of sea levels, which will possibly end in the loss of an enormous amounts of agricultural land in the coastal areas. For example, Florida beaches gradually wear away due to rising sea level at just about a couple of inches every single year. There was a prediction made by the National Research Council that by 2100 that the sea level should increase between 20 to 40 inches. While climate changes may happen, might perhaps lead to a drought in a number of regions and more likely flood other areas for the reason that of patterns of, air circulation change. Although since we know what the problem is, people are working effortless to fix the problem by using less fossil fuels and looking into another course of action like different alternative energy solutions, such things like solar power, and wind.

Another problem we are facing is climate change. Climate change can occur due to chemicals like GHGs, NOx, CO, CFC, and N2O, which we talked about earlier in previous paragraphs. Trying to figure out the future while climate change is a constant occurrence is one of the toughest tasks we face in our time. Our environment which provides us with food, clean water, oxygen, storms, and erosion, and future resources, such things like genetic stocks for crop growing amongst other things, must be in one peace or at least protected enough where it is still useful. I am not saying this because it is the duties of a stewardship, but it also will help us in the future, and it could be a good resource to take care of us.

Although the problem seems to be more problematic because there are elements that impact temperature changes, things like terrestrial ecosystem responses and ocean circulation, will change as the climate changes due to time. With all the complications we face with climate changes and the different factors that come with it, our scientist need to find a way to narrow down how many possibility’s we have so we can start fixing that specific problem. What you need to know about earth’s climate. Earth’s climate depend on the functioning of natural greenhouse effect. What they mean is this affect is the outcome of heat being trapped by gases which also known as greenhouse gases. “Some elements involved in this process are water vapor, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, and amongst others are absorbed as heat radiated from the earth’s surface and lower atmosphere and then radiate much of the energy back towards the surfaces. Without this unnatural greenhouse effect, the average surface temperature of the earth would be about 60f colder. However, human’s activities have been releasing additional heat-trapping gases, intensifying the natural greenhouse effect, thereby changing the earth’s climate”.

Considering how bad global warming can get we need to put it as our priority because this is the only earth we have and it’s not just affecting the united states it is the whole world as well. We have to come up with strategies and implement them so that these issues can be taken care of. If done right and taken seriously, the issue can be overcome, and prevented as well. Just to give you an idea where we are at with global warming, think of the events from the past like heat, fire, storms, and flood weather conditions if you compare the past to right now these events are happening more often and more frequent every year. Hopefully in the future if we ever to get the year of 2100 or beyond that I really hope that these issues are fixed because as of now these events that I mention in my last paragraph are happening more frequent every year and there are hitting us harder and harder than the year before.