Is
Human Sustainable?
This
maybe a stupid question, but is it worth thinking? If sustainability is calculated
as number that if we dispose something that need a large time to restore,
the number drops; on the contrary, if we contribute something to the
environment, the number raises. Under this condition, can we ever get a
positive number? Or just get a balance?
From
the day we born to the world, we have been using the resources on earth. Maybe
in ancient times, we just breathe in oxygen and release carbon dioxide. But in
this age, we have a doctor and few nurses to get us out of our mother’s uterus.
That doctor and the few nurses eat, breathe, take thousands hours to study to
get the qualification to do the surgery. There will be air-conditioning and
lighting in the surgery room, thus there will be electricity used. In addition to
this, for the scissors that cut our umbilical cord, we need alcohol to sterilise
those equipments; after the surgery, we need water to clean them as well.
Afterwards, there will be enormous energy to light up the warming chamber. Just
the moment we are brought to the world, how much energy that has spent on one
individual, how many points has been deducted?
And
as we grow up in the school, everything we do is not sustainable. We eat food
from plastic packed products bought in supermarket, we study with light that is
operated from electricity generated by unsustainable resources, we study with
lots of books papers that are made from chopping off thousands of trees. In
addition, we get to school by private car motivated from fossil fuels. None of the things that we do is sustainable, or at least for me.
Until
the day we die, that our body with nutrients stored in tissues and organs can
return back to the ground (just limited to those who are not burnt, if we are
burnt, there will be air pollution), we can gain ourselves back some points. But
of course that cannot compensate the food that is eaten by the doctors and
nurses who did the surgery for us. Therefore, for me, human is never a sustainable
creature. On the world’s point of view, we are even a group of cancer tissue. What
we can do is to minimise the points we lost on the day we born. What a tragedy….
