Thinking like a Mountian

For a man living in the 1950's  Aldo Leopold had a surprisingly open, accepting and ecological sustainable view to humanity. Despite the rational way he writes many of his peers would have dismissed his findings and views of them as hippie-like, irrational., and not seeing the whole picture; yet despite this the opposite is true. Today we know the truth of his views as he saw it then, humans cause problems not solutions.

In his own time he understood how an ecosystem works, he understood that if you take any element out, no matter how harmful or minute it may seem, it has a very important role to play in its interaction with other species. His example of the wolves being eliminated and the deer overpopulating is a classic predator prey example, but isn't the only situation where this is applicable. With symbiotic relationships both sides are vital, and when one is eliminated the the other fails too.

In closing, Leopold understood the bigger picture and was able to look beyond just the needs and desires of humanity, and into the lives that it affects, the ones that aren't spent walking on two legs.

TED Talk on Sustainability

It's said that every 7 days we create a city the size of Seattle. I don't mean anything like the quality of Seattle, what I'm talking about is mostly slums, in developing countries. Very in-sustainable communities built with no existing infrastructure. Whole cities- lacking proper water, sewage, or typically any form of electricity or reliable means of getting food. Weather we realize it or not we, western civilization, is also like this somewhat. Sure we have reliable means of covering our basic needs, but for how long??? If the way we live right now was even remotely sustainable, we would need 10 Earths to make it so. Eventually we WILL NOT be able to continue living the way we do and inevitably "UN-develop" ourselves into poverty.

This is why we need to be creating solutions for all of these eventual problems we'll face sooner rather than later. If we create larger cities we need better ways to travel within them, without holdup. We need sustainable reliable means of getting food. We need to learn to sustain the environment so we can continue to learn and innovate from it. Because without it, we have no means to learn something NEW.

Myself, I believe this is a very important issue, and think about it, does anyone actually like pollution? Traffic?
I sure don't.

Through sustainable and smart practices, these issues are preventable, but without these methods, well, the outcome wouldn't be nice, that's for sure.