Towards Ecopedagogy

Towards Ecopedagogy: Response

                This piece of literature written by Richard Kahn is an astonishing wake-up call to reality. People do not want to believe that there is a real issue occurring right outside their window, but there is. This real issue refers to the degradation we, as humans, are causing to our Earth: over-deforesting, overfishing, overhunting, and simply overproducing and over-consuming. It is eye-opening to see the results of our actions in just the past century. With a majority of the population living in poverty and only the top percentages of our population in control of resources, money, and other necessities, our world as we know it is soon going to disappear.

                Not only are we as human beings making poor choices, but we are making these poor choices in the most harmful way possible. Let us take farming as an example. Farming has been around for ages, but only recently has farming become a cruel and inelegant practice. Since when has the maltreatment of animals been accepted? In Towards Ecopedagogy, there is a fact pulled from Matthew Scully’s book Dominion that states that “nothing less than 103 million pigs, 38 million cows and calves, 250 million turkeys, and 8 billion chickens are slaughtered annually in America alone.” These numbers alone should be enough to get Americans to raise a little red flag and notice that this is not okay. But, let’s pretend that this was okay, and we were simply killing these animals to survive. Any additional animal deaths should from these numbers on, not be tolerated. This means that the animal deaths related to hunting, sport or pelt, global transportation, scientific experiments and so on should not be accepted in our society. Excessive killing of these animals is cruel and unnecessary and it needs to stop.

                Another way that people are going to be the sole cause of Earth’s future “dysfunctional-ity” is through deforestation practices, over-farming, and over-development. It should be apparent to everyone that our practices are actively making a huge negative impact on the environment. Cutting down trees to make paper should be controlled. There should be a maximum numbers of trees allowed to be cut down for making paper, and any trees cut down over that maximum should result in a large penalty of some sort (not monetary, however, because that would cause a gap between the rich and the poor industries). Also, excessive development needs to be brought under control as well. Like it says in this writing, “since the end of the 1960’s, half of the planet’s wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth’s soils have been agriculturally degraded so as not to support life.” That means that even if we bull-dozed the buildings that stood on a particular region that had been filled or drained for development, the nature that once flourished there would not be able to grow back. That is a disappointing and ominous thought; basically, we cannot undo what we have done. Every decision we make is final.

                In this writing, Kahn explains that we have achieved good things but have had to sacrifice other elements of our life in order to do so. For example, the last four decades has led to “startling achievements in science and technology.” By itself, this fact is seemingly harmless; however, the steps taken to accomplish these achievements have had “devastating effects upon planetary ecosystems…”  What this means is that yes, we are doing all these great things but we had to cause all these bad things along the way. What we really need to do is find a way to accomplish “all these great things” without having to sacrifice an element of our environment.

These practices of over-doing everything are “escalating and most are accelerating.” It is scary to think that we are doing things at such an unstoppable rate. We as a human race are condemning our future to doom by allowing for all these bad things to happen. While it would be nearly impossible to rally everyone around a single idea that could reverse the damage we’ve done, we need to start brainstorming ways to at least get “these trends” to slow down.