How society affects the environment

The consumption habits in society have significantly changed over the years and, especially, with the greatest technological development of the last three decades you. Currently, the need to fill a void, or simply go with the flow of society, by purchasing goods and products that sometimes we do not even need is increasingly evident. Years ago, when this “abundance” of products did not exist, the saving of the goods that were had was valued, while today, the reality is quite different.

One of the most palpable problems of the change in consumption habits is that more and more waste is generated , which in most cases ends up in the environment, directly affecting it or affecting the species that inhabit it, for example, the increase in plastic containers that come from many products, are a highly polluting waste and, sometimes, difficult to reuse. Furthermore, the problem of planned obsolescence forces us to replace many old goods with new ones, such as electronic devices or household appliances.

Another very important problem is that of the means of transport and the fossil fuels used to generate energy, which produce large amounts of pollutants.

And all this occurs on a planet full of social inequalities, in which large sectors of the population suffer hardships, while others consume more than their needs. This generally creates a global North that consumes services, but is a clear “ecological debtor” of the South, while the South generally acts as a recipient of these ecological impacts of the lifestyle in the global North.

From the extraction of the resources that are needed to produce these goods to their waste dumped into nature, they produce great negative impacts on the environment , the living beings that inhabit it and our own quality of life. You have to know that until you can buy products in stores, there is a long process of manipulating resources and waste is generated at each stage .

Since the industrial revolution and with the increase in the number of vehicles in circulation, the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane or organochlorine compounds has increased greatly . These gases cause the retention of heat within the atmosphere and affect the ozone layer in the upper areas of the atmosphere. As a result, in recent years the planet has been overheating, leading to global climate change and its dreaded consequences.

An example of this is that the ecological footprint on the planet has more than doubled in the last fifty years. The consequence is that we are currently exceeding our planet’s biocapacities by 50%, mainly affecting processes such as climate change (mentioned above), the nitrogen cycle and the loss of biodiversity .

These environmental impacts also have effects on the biodiversity of our planet, affecting the survival of living beings that develop in these environments. In this sense, factors such as climate, soil fertility, temperatures or rainfall are ecological principles that influence the distribution of plant and animal populations on Earth. Society and its different activities lead to significant variations in these factors and as a consequence put certain species on the brink of extinction or lead to the extinction of species altogether.

In addition to environmental pollution, daily human activities lead to other less known types of pollution, but which also constitute a threat to species, such as light, electromagnetic or noise pollution and which cause species to modify their eating habits, migrations , behaviors or reproductive patterns.