Mathematics, Sustainability, and Global Learning

The Earth’s natural systems provide an environment for living beings on Earth. However, overtime, the human population has grown at a very fast pace, especially over the past hundred years. Human societies, up until recently, have not been very environmentally conscious due to a lack of understanding and technology regarding sustainable living and treating the Earth respectfully. Human society, at out large current size, is at a global overshoot—this means that we are using more resources than we have, and eventually our environment will run out of means to sustain the human population. We calculate how to reduce overshoot by either linear or exponential change, depending on the rate at which governments could potentially set goals to reduce our extravagant and careless use of resources. Global learning needs to occur, and for this to happen it is important that humans work as a team to live more sustainably—this means that all humans need to recognize that there are significant issues with our environment and the way that we are living. Governments need to be the leaders that they are supposed to be, and implement policies to work towards this goal, and also to implement mandatory learning about our environmental crisis. There are clear relationships between our human activities and destroying the Earth’s natural system, and the biggest issue that I see is our amount of waste and our lack of properly dealing with our waste.

2 thoughts on “Mathematics, Sustainability, and Global Learning

  1. I agree with your statement that the human race has been growing at the fastest rate in history and we have not been environmentally conscious about our actions. And it is true that we are due for a complete overshoot within the next ten years if we all do not live more sustainable lives. There absolutely must be some policies passed to ensure that we can fix the problems of the past, but there must be some reward system or consequences if people don’t finally make a change. Through global learning, we can make a difference before it’s too late.

  2. I agree with this. My only concern is that in order to generate a consensus of knowledge on the environment we need to have non conflicting ideas on it. Specifically, there are many governments including the united states that do not believe climate change is not heavily influenced by humans. Until we unite and have one idea about sustainability we cannot work towards a goal and make the earth a better place to live.

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