How society affects the environment

The consumption habits in society have changed significantly over the years and, above all, with the greatest technological development of these last three decades. Currently, the need to fill a void, or simply follow the flow of society, through the purchases of goods and products that sometimes we do not even need is increasingly evident. Years ago, when this “abundance” of products did not exist, saving on the goods one had was valued, while today, the reality is very different.

One of the most palpable problems of the change in consumption habits is that more and more waste is generatedwhich in most cases end up in the environment, directly affecting it or affecting the species that live there, for example, the increase in plastic packaging that comes from many products, is 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, as is the case of electronic devices or household appliances.

Another very important problem is the means of transportation and fossil fuels that are 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 hardship, while others consume above their needs. This generally creates a global North that consumes services, but is a clear “ecological debtor” to the South, while the South generally acts as a recipient of these ecological impacts of lifestyle in the global North.

From the extraction of the resources needed to produce these goods to their waste dumped into nature, they produce major negative impacts on the environmentthe living beings that inhabit it and our own quality of life. You have to know that until you can purchase 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 has increased greatly. greenhouse effect such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane or organochlorine compounds. These gases cause heat retention within the atmosphere and affect the ozone layer in the upper parts of the atmosphere. As a result, in recent years the planet has been overheating, leading to global climate change and its feared 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 the biocapacities of our planet by 50%, mainly affecting processes such as climate change (mentioned above), the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity loss.

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

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 sound pollution, which cause species to modify their eating habits, migrations, behaviors or reproductive patterns.

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