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1.How are the choices of the humans challenging the environment?                                    2. What kind of decisions do I make which can impact the world's environment?                                    3. Who makes the decisions in the society to work towards the protecting the environment?              4. How are economic activities organized and what is their impact on the humankind and the environment?

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1.How are the choices of the humans challenging the environment?                                    2. What kind of decisions do I make which can impact the world's environment?                                    3. Who makes the decisions in the society to work towards the protecting the environment?              4. How are economic activities organized and what is their impact on the humankind and the environment?

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1. With human needs increasing, the challenges faced by the environment increases. Humans are using rain forests as a resource for our needs and uses which creates a challenge to environment. With greater consumption of energy from the surroundings, the environments struggles to cope up with the damage caused by humans. Other practices like air pollution directly affects the environment by polluting it. Fossil fuels are also a major issue and challenge environments are dealing with; With high amounts of carbon dioxide released, the plants and trees do not have enough time to absorb all of it. Therefore, it is our responsibility to sustain the environments.

2. The decisions that i take that can impact the world's environment is my consumption of energy and resources. By using sustainable resources like cloth bags instead of plastic bags. The use of energy through ovens, microwaves and other electronic devices also matter and i can prioritize that. Other practices like recycling waste can help use resources that are for waste. In terms of carbon emissions, i could reduce the use of vehicles when going close by and use sustainable methods like cycling.

3. It is important for the society to decide all together in order to sustain the environment. With massive changes caused all throughout the society, the environment will sustain. A society can follow practices like recycling all the waste, can plant trees all around the neighborhood and inside. The societies can ban the use of plastics and to reduce carbon dioxide, carpooling can take place. Such methods can sustain the environment.

4. One major economic activity which impacts the environment the most is the transport and trade of oil. The extraction of oil is a long process and often produces huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The trading and transport of this oil is also highly risky as it is transported through ships and can lead to oil leaks into oceans which destroy the environment inside the oceans, even killing life underwater

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1. Humans have constantly yearned to make living as comfortable and for them as possible. In the process of fulfilling our dreams of global domination and power over all factors that govern life, we have caused severe damage to the natural world. Choices like those made in the 1930s to replace coolants like ammonia with CFCs, or those made over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries to set up numerous coal fired power plants have shaken the environment bringing about tremendous anthropogenic change. While there is incontrovertible evidence that human activity has caused severe environmental damage, the last 3 decades have seen active participation by countries worldwide to help curb the effects of human-induced climate change.  Humans have challenged the environment consistently by continually increasing their demands while the pools of resources did nothing but deplete. Never satisfied with any level of comfort, our aim to always be better than ourselves has made us tunnel visioned and incapable of perceiving the true effects of our actions until it is far too late. By choosing to log more forests  to acquire timber for homes we are hamstringing the environment's capability to absorb the fumes that will be released by the power plants set up to power those homes. The few trees that are left will be contaminated as the human residents of the houses built by logged ones will produce waste that will inevitably find its way to them. Mining coal to power those houses will bring about habitat loss and increase soil erosion. The effects of humanity's choices are a chain of impossibly complicated and intertwined chains of cause and effect that all end with the death and extinction of the human race.

2. The impact of my decisions is limited to my choices in how live as a consumer. While it is not practical to cut off dependence on commercial produce, I can still be conscious about the products that I choose to consume to reduce my carbon footprint. It is unlikely that this will have any perceivable impact on the environment, the demand for environmentally irresponsible products can only be reduced through individual efforts. Furthermore, I can employ my knowledge of concrete action that can be taken to make the future more sustainable to spread awareness about the necessity for change. A combination of the two will allow me to directly help us move towards sustainability, and propagate the movement at the community level.

3) The responsibility for the implementation of environmentally responsible practices falls upon every inhabitant of the planet. Yet due to diversified contributions to unsustainable conditions, and inconsistent distribution of power to combat it spread across individuals, government, and private bodies, these groups hold varying degrees of responsibility on different fronts of the problem. The government is the only institution with the funds, the power, and the scope of operation to introduce and implement regulations that will curb environmentally irresponsible practices. Further, where the government has a broad scope and binding power, private organizations are not slowed down by the long-winded process a proposal must go through before being officially adopted. Therefore, it is left to private organizations to take action along the lines of government issued regulations.
Individuals make up the largest group as   they represent the personal contributions of everyone present in both other sectors. To further clarify the roles of the government and public organizations, they can be understood providing the structure and course-correction (by limiting consumption/emission/other factor affecting sustainability). The individuals must observe, understand, and act according to these guidelines. The cumulative efforts of individuals is the only practical way to meet the 2030 UN SDGs, and while it is challenging to quantify the magnitude of change that is possible with consistent efforts from everyone in words, it is evident in the success of smaller nations such as Singapore of Switzerland that have been able to successfully reconcile all 3 sections of society to work towards a sustainable future.

4. Economic activities have profound impacts on the environment as they are often the primary drivers of the actions of private organizations. As most of the world, and of greater economic importance, the United States runs on a pro free market and laissez-faire economy, economic activities are organized to gain dominance within that system, more often than not showing disregard for its environmental implications.

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Environment, Individuals, and Government: A Reflection [Anika, Jaahnavi, Siddharth, Varshini]

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Environment, Individuals, and Government: A Reflection [Anika, Jaahnavi, Siddharth, Varshini]

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1. Decisions made between expansionism and environmentalism at the government level, and between comfort and a 'green' way of living at the lifestyle level. For example, at the govt. level: regulations on pollutants, or electric car and public transportation budgets, or choice in power plant type.
These decisions have been leaning more towards comfort and expansionism, meaning that natural resources have been exploited more.

2. The choices we make relating to our lifestyle, like going vegan, installing solar panels, using metal straws, avoid single use plastics, waste segregation, using sustainability sourced products, using public transport are all small choices we can take to start to preserve our environment at the individual level.

3. At the individual level, anyone can and should take steps to go greener. At the higher levels, the responsibility is taken up by the NGOs, the governments, and the industries to encourage people to change to become greener and to become greener themselves.

4. Economic and environmental performance must go hand in hand. The natural environment is central to economic activity and growth, providing the resources we want to provide goods and services,and absorbing and processing unwanted by-products within the style of pollution and waste. Environmental assets contribute to managing risks to economic and group action, helping to regulate flood risks, regulating the local climate (both air quality and temperature), and maintaining the supply of fresh water

We need to make sure that with the economic growth, the environment doesn't have that negative effect on humankind. Economic growth increases the opportunities for us to  have multiple (non-renewable) sources, which is harmful for the environment.

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1) How are the choices of the humans challenging the environment?
2) What kind of decisions do I make which can impact the world's environment? 
3) Who makes the decisions in the society to work towards the protecting the environment? 
4) How are economic activities organized and what is their impact on the humankind and the environment?

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1.Humans work on the basis of increasing efficiency, to extract the maximum amount of resources at a minimum of cost to sustain our growing population and ever increasing lifestyles. Population growth is in and of itself linked directly to increases in our ability to extract more energy from our surroundings. This means that the choices of humans in having more extravagant lifestyles and consuming more, places greater and greater amounts of stress on our environment that can only support so much, at our current rate of consumption we would require 1.5 earth's to sustain ourselves, and this overburdening of an ecological footprint is becoming more and more prevalent
2. The decisions I make that can impact the world's environment mainly relate to my own consumption of resources, the kinds of products I buy, where they come from and the amount of energy I consume, which of course requires further resources from the environment and increased carbon emissions. For example my decisions to travel, or how many products I buy or energy I consume through appliances will directly affect the environment. However I can also make decisions such as composting or growing plants in the balcony that will offset my ecological footprint
3.The major decisions are made by the government, after all legislature is the only thing that can affect large groups of people and curb their freedoms or decision making processes. While industrialists and scientists can also make decisions that impact the environment, in the end it is the government who have been designated to make decisions for large groups of people.
4.Economic activities are, as mentioned previously, currently extremely capitalistic when looking at the world as a whole, maximum efficiency for minimum cost. This incentivizes activity that generates revenue and encourages cutting costs and using processes that provide the most production value for investment, often at the cost of the environment, thought hat could be changed through new technologies and legislature
-Mihir

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1. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have depended on fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. The burning of fossil fuels adds to more amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing major levels of global warming. In addition to this, humans have also caused deforestation. These are examples of how humans have impacted/challenged the environment. These actions are done to sustain the rising population of humans for resources.

2.  A few things that many people do to impact the environment negatively is electricity consumption via non renewable resources, transportation,  huge amounts of water consumption,  the products we buy, etc. These daily activities impact the environment because our energy and resource consumption adds to pollution.

3.  Everyone plays a part towards the impact done to the environment. Individuals can work towards controlling their consumption. Governments can work towards setting up strict laws against pollution or against anything in general done to damage the environment and organisations can work towards spreading awareness about these issues and also raising funds to fight the issues.

4. Economic activities majorly depend on the trading of natural resources such as oil and metals. These usually have a negative impact on the environment since in order to trade these resources, countries have to extract those resources. This means that they often end up exploiting the environment. An example of this is the Amazon Rainforest, where the amount of deforestation is inversly proportional to the country's economic growth.