Senior Struggles: Humans are destroying the earth
By Haley Peterson | Editor in Chief
March 6, 2013
By this point in my life, I feel like I have a basic grasp on the ground-breaking workings of humanity.
But then this idealized mindset that the human race is doing amazing things is shattered–all because of my AP Environmental Science class.
Throughout the history of the universe, humans have only been around for a minuscule snip-it of time.
Yet, we’ve caused more harm to the planet in the last 200,000 years than every lemur and liger, seagull and sneed, urchin and unicorn, and dingo and dinosaur combined.
Basically, humans are destroying the earth.
We are literally burning through our “liquid petroleum” supply in the Middle East.
We are gashing a giant scar across the face of the earth by urbanizing land unsuitable to be urbanized.
We are coating our food with toxic chemicals that not only deplete the soil’s ability to grow food, but also increase our risk of developing cancer.
And we are reproducing at a rate that will sooner or later (most likely sooner) lead to shortages of food, water, material resources, land, and pretty much every other aspect necessary to human existence.
Forget the fact that the Amazon Rainforest, the most biologically diverse biome in the world, is being torn down and ripped apart by industries seeking a cheap area for cattle to be fattened up, only to be slaughtered later and morphed into chemical- and antibiotic-laced hamburgers.
There’s no need to worry about the twice-the-size-of-Texas conglomeration of plastic floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
Maybe with all our unsightly planetary obliteration going on, we’ll end up wiping out the human race next.
And then all the lemurs and ligers, seagulls and sneeds, urchins and unicorns, and dingos and dinosaurs can go back to living lives free from human ignorance and greed.
About Haley Peterson
Haley has always been ambitious and her senior year is no exception. As the Editor in Chief of The Charger Account, she has set her expectations high for this year's staff. Outside of journalism, Haley is a captain on the cross country team, a four-year varsity starter on the softball team, and president of Usherettes. She is also a self-proclaimed foodie who loves to experiment in the kitchen.
Todd Borden: 
Gloria Dugan: 
Jack: 
Lawrence:
Haley, while you bring up a good point about our overconsumption about the planet’s limited resources, I’m not sure that defaulting to ‘the way that the planet used to be before human intervention’ is a realistic objective, for our specie’s survival or for the well-being of other species on the face of the earth.
If you think about it in terms of general physical phenomena in the universe, humans are essentially a force of nature that decreases entropy; instead of creating chaos, our minds allow us to create organized society and more importantly, organized information. That would most certainly be lost of we were to revert to a more primordial earth, and it’s one of the only things that humans can safely say that they’ve contributed in ‘the grand scheme’ of things.