Author Archives: liamca2016

What is the American Dream?

I believe the American dream is to ensure that everyone is treated equally and fairly and live without discrimination of any kind. It should be to get rid of poverty so everyone who wants a chance to restart their life and get a house and job can do so. It should be to end violence by working on the gun laws to ensure that the wrong people are not able to obtain a weapon they can hurt people with. The dream should be to improve the recycling system so we do as much as other countries do, such as Germany or Switzerland. It should be to reduce carbon emissions and work on obtaining energy from renewable and safer methods such as tidal, hydrogen, solar, or wind. All of these things can be achievable but aren’t thought about as much as they should be today. Our decisions appear to be all about what will give us the most money, which is another thing that needs to change.

How can BC’s waste management system be made more sustainable?

Many sources indicate that many countries have enforced strict laws when it comes to recycling, which prove to greatly impact the percentage on how much waste gets recycled. Unfortunately, North America has not followed in these footsteps, but can be changed.

According to Google, Germany has the best recycling rates of 56% of everything recycled every year, while producing 30 million tonnes of waste every year. Their method to recycling is “The Green Dot System” The concept is that the consumers are able to see if a company is also taking responsibility of paying for recovering the waste and recycling it. This concept makes companies try to minimize their resources in packaging so that they do not have to pay these fees. When this concept was put into order, Germany reduced their Waste production by one million tonnes per year.

This method could be a good way for North America to improve the recycling system here, and decrease the sizes of our landfills gradually.

What Direction should BC Forestry take?

Currently, BC Forestry allows for more jobs for people, as well as increases our economy with trades to other countries. However, I feel like we will soon have to slow down this process by cutting less trees so we do not end up ruining our environment anymore than we have. Clearcutting is a bad way to deal with this, because this is just clearing a large amount of land of trees and leaving it dry. The way to stop this is with Silviculture, which is the process of maintaining and regrowing trees in an area. We will have to have less demand on exporting goods associated with trees in order to slow everything down completely, and then we will be able to maintain our environment and economy with out either of the two crashing.

Ethic of Care

Key Question: What would an ethic of care towards the environment look like?

 

  1. What would be needed to create it?                                                                                                                      In order to create an ethic of care, people would need to actually care more about the environment, by ensuring we do not harm it.
  2. What would we have to believe about the environment? How should we see it?                                       We should see that the environment is what allows all living things to exist on our planet, and if destroyed, pieces of life will also be destroyed.
  3. How would we act?                                                                                                                                       We would be more careful about how we’re affecting the environment. For example, we would litter significantly less, as littering has caused a lot of issues to the environment. We would also be more careful about polluting our air.
  4. What would be different about the world if everyone adopted this ethic of care towards the environment? Benefits and drawbacks?                                                                       If we stopped littering as much, we would be able to begin to clean our planet from previously littered materials and improve the habitats for the wild life. However, if we were to apply stricter laws for pollution, many people could lose their jobs due to factories being shut down for polluting too much.
  5. Should we adopt an ethic of care towards the environment?                                                      I would say yes, because the environment is what we depend on for life, and if we destroy it, then we will not be able to continue for much longer.