The first video discussed the issue of the over-population of the United States and the problems that arise as a result. It began with introducing a scientist by the name of Paul Earlier who was a biologist. His main focus was the negative effects over-population has had on society such as the quickly depleting resources as a result of more people needing to be supported.
One of the causes of the depleting resources mentioned was the generation of baby boomers. People became so focused on raising families and having ore and more children that they did not stop and think about the long-term effects that would be created. They did not stop to think that with more people on the planet, more resources would be required and how harmful that would be to the planet. Later on in the video, some efforts to help raise awareness about the sustainability of the Earth were talked about.
One person in particular was mentioned?president Nixon. Under President Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency was formed along with other bills signed into law that were aimed at helping to protect the environment, ND the first Earth Day was celebrated. Overall, this video showed how the sustainability of the Earth is not a recent issue, and efforts to prevent future harm to the planet have been taken in the past and unfortunately have not done as well as were hoped since the Earth’s climate is still rapidly changing.
In the second video, the speaker told stories about how she had learned to give and help those less fortunate than her. She began With telling the audience how she had first been told the stories about helping others when she was a young girl in Sunday school. She continues to say how even though he stories had originally made her eager to share and help others, later on in her life, she felt less enthusiastic about giving and felt more like it was an obligation in order for her to be happy for the rest of the day.
Taking those feelings into consideration, she talks about how she quit her job and moved to eastern Africa to learn first-hand how a little bit of generosity and kindness towards complete strangers in need of help can be very rewarding. As a result of her seeing how much a small loan, like only $1 00, can do for struggling entrepreneurs to help turn their lives around and make things utter, she decided to start an online lending and investment company to help those in need.
She explained how the website had grown from giving a few thousand dollars to giving over a hundred million dollars to those struggling to make ends meet. Also, she explained how the investors can choose to be paid back in small amounts over a period of time, or choose to have the payments be donated to a non-profit organization?not only giving directly to a person in need, but giving indirectly to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people who are also in need of a helping hand.
Overall, I thought the first video was informative in a sense that issues like the sustainability of the Earth can be looked at from several different points of view and that by looking at it from a biological viewpoint, it is seen that if the Earth’s population does not get under control, resources will continue to be depleted faster than they can be replaced. It also brings up the fact that caring about the planet is not a new sensation?which is proved by the fact that the first Earth Day and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency happened when Nixon was President of the United States.
This video also made me think about how the current generation of young adults and teenagers are being blamed the most for the damage done to the planet, when they were not the ones who started the problems to begin with. The sustainability of the Earth has been an issue for several years and the main problem is the fact that we have only begun to do something about it in the past few years. The second video, in my opinion, did not seem relevant to the general subject of the course, but what did take away from it was that any action, no matter how small, has the potential to create something huge.
To put that in the perspective of the Earth’s sustainability, putting one plastic soda bottle in the proper recycling bin may not seem like much, but that one small action helps to make the planet that much more sustainTABLE in the long run. What I learned from the second video is that if every person took one small step towards one final goal, in this case, sustaining the planet, such as recycling or using more energy efficient methods of transportation, we would be TABLE to reach, if not surpass, our goal to make the environment more sustainTABLE for many more years to come.
