I feel that this article is one of the most interesting articles we’ve read so far. It flows in a timeline fashion which makes it very easy to follow. As the timeline goes on, you can easily follow along and see all the damage we’ve caused as the societies have changed. We start off with hunter gathering societies which eventually changed to agrarian societies. These agrarian societies developed agriculture which in turn started disturbing the natural cycle. This shows that ever since we started to build actual communities and societies, we’ve been disturbing the way of nature. The only difference between the disturbance of today and the disturbance by agrarian societies is the extent to which we’re hurting the planet. With the development of agriculture, humans caused ecological irreversible effects. There was some damaged caused by this. Nowadays, however, it’s hard to explain how we’re damaging the environment because there’s SO much we’re doing. As told by Rees, “empirical evidence suggests that resource consumption already exceeds the productive capacity of critical biophysical systems on every continent and waste production already breaches the assimilative capacity of many ecosystems at every scale”. Our societies take more from the planet in a short period of time and give less back. There isn’t enough time for the planet to develop those resources again because all we do is continue taking them. The way that I view the relationship between us (humankind) and the Earth, is how one would se the relationship between a guy and his super materialistic girlfriend. The girlfriend asks for extremely extravagant and expensive gifts every other day but doesn’t give the boy a chance to work and get the money in order to get those gift. In this case, most people would look down upon the girl because she’s taking advantage of her boyfriend and draining him of everything he has. Compared to this scenario, humankind is the girlfriend and Earth is the boyfriend. We’ve seen societies completely collapse due to improper resource management and due to misuse of those resources. There’s not much time left for the current societies either, because they will eventually collapse as well if we don’t start planning to help the environment. Incorporating resource management in urban planning can be a great help if we get on it as soon as we can, otherwise it might be too late to undo all of the damage we’ve done over centuries.
