• Question: what has research told u about our planent and enviroment

    Asked by 283urak29 to Sajid, Katherine, Jayne, Duncan, anuantony on 3 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jayne Ede

      Jayne Ede answered on 3 Nov 2017:

      Not my research, but reading other people’s research, tells me that humans are treating the world exceptionally badly, close to the point of ‘no return’. The part about this that haunts me most on a daily basis is our use of plastics, especially when you see these horrendous images of dead birds and marine animals being dissected and their stomachs being full of plastic items.

      I think everything in environmental science is telling us that we can no longer keep ignoring our impact on this beautiful planet, and that we all need to take personal responsibility for how we treat it. Something I’ve tried to do recently is reduce my plastic use by buying shampoo in soap-bar form, for example, instead of getting through another plastic bottle every fortnight!

    • Photo: Duncan McNicholl

      Duncan McNicholl answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      I don’t research things like that. One thing that I’m fairly sure of is that the planet is big enough and filled with enough feedback mechanisms that it will carry on pretty much how it is for a long time: I don’t see it turning into another Venus, for instance. Having said that, I also know that the conditions that we as humans can survive are really really specific, and it may be that the way the planet carries on is by us ending up in a situation where we’ve poisoned the atmosphere for ourselves and flooded all the places that we can live, which would mean that billions and billions of people would die, which would reduce the harmful things we do to the environment and allow the planet to swing back to something more like we have now, only without humans surviving. It’s not about saving the planet, it’s about saving ourselves.

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