The Importance of Sustainability

It has been said that humans have used up two-thirds of the world's resources and we are basically living on borrowed time. We sometimes forget just how interconnected the world really is. Every choice we make creates change and causes ripples that go on endlessly. Sometimes even the smallest, seemingly insignificant decisions end up creating huge reactions in the world around us, whether we know about them or not.


The term 'sustainability' has been a hot topic in many highly respected conservation circles for years now but there still seems to be very little change on the ground, if it's happening higher up at all. But what does it actually mean?


One definition defines sustainability as ''An action that can be continued indefinitely with little, or manageable, impact on the environment''. We need to implement this in our everyday lives. The amount of water we drink, the food we throw away and even the amount of paper we use.


We have been told all of this from primary school and yet day to day we forget these things but they are so important. The links of life are slowly breaking and the eco-system is so sensitive that a break in one link will throw it all out of balance, causing a huge increase in global warming and climate change.


Unfortunately, people still believe that global warming and climate change won't affect them. Say, for instance, the icebergs melt. It seems pretty far fetched, but it's not and it's actually happening -really, really fast. It is creating huge negative ripples, and not just literally. Polar bears are dying by the hundreds. The change in the water temperature is causing fish to die as well as penguins. Slowly, because everything is interlinked, the food chain becomes non existent and all those animals will no longer exist. 

We have to care about the world around us. It is no longer the 'next generation's problem'. It is ours and it's affecting us today. Right now. The sad thing is that it is so easy to make more sustainable and responsible decisions but we are so stuck in our patterns that we don't even realise it.

Make a change in your life and whether you know it or not, it makes a huge difference in the life of something else, whether another human right now or a plant or animal in the future.