I really liked how this article provided a pretty in depth analysis regarding resource management, urban planning, and sustainable development over the period of time humans have started to build cities to where we are right now. It also did a great job of breaking down civilization into a few phases where RM, UP, and SD were significantly changed to suit the needs of the global population during those specific time periods. The general trend was basically the more advanced our technology got, the larger the world population grew, and the more damage we did to our environment. The trend also seemed to take a shape of an exponential growth graph where the past 200 years took on huge technological developments leading to unrecoverable environmental damage. The graph in section 4 showing the timeline also shows the more we progress and advance as a civilization, the more problems we created for ourselves to face and the harder it was to manage our resources effectively and develop in a way that would sustain the environment. It just wasn’t practical because of the growing population and also the “side effects” of our technology would created new environmental problems on a consistent basis. One example of this is in section 3.4.1 where chemical fertilizers were mentioned to create food faster for people, but that eventually bit us in the back and created a slew of new problems including water pollution and the consumption of even more fossil fuels because these chemical fertilizers depended on them. Even though we thought we took a direction towards solving the problem of hunger, it created two more new problems regarding the environment.
I think at the present, sustainable development is the hardest of the three concepts to tackle and it has to be carefully intertwined within the other two concepts. As mentioned in the introduction, there are also a lot of conflicting views and definitions towards sustainable development, which can hinder our progress because people aren’t necessarily agreeing on the same solutions, which creates more problems because the longer we take to implement a plan, the worse the condition of the environment gets. At this point, we are already at a stage where the population is growing at extremely alarming rates and resources are being used up way faster than they can be replenished, with no end in sight. There needs to be remodeling of our cities soon that can lead us into a direction to still grow as a population, but also keeps our resource use in check. However, I don’t really see how we can get the environment to a point that it will replenish faster than it is used up unless there are serious reductions to the global population. If we can’t implement any good solutions, eventually the population will grow to a point where there will be no resources left and we will be in deep trouble by then and many many lives will be lost.
