The Push and Pull of Anthropogenic Impacts on Environments

In last week's blog I focused on ecosystem services, the benefits that humanity procures from the environment, including food, medicine, cultural values, recreation. This week, I want to expand on the topic of ecosystem services and talk about how anthropogenic impacts on the environment exist along a spectrum. Every action that an organism takes affects its environment, but humanity has a unique relationship with the global ecosystem since we: (1) actively alter the environment on a massive scale, (2) use tools and technology to alter the environment, and (3) frequently alter environments where we don't live. Since our environmental footprint is so large and occurs in areas where we don't live, we often feel helpless to make changes and instead point fingers at nameless individuals and corporations that we feel are affecting more change. However, this week, I challenge you to instead think of human impacts on a teeter totter scale of help and harm.

A great example of how we place a human impact on this scale is fishing. Fishing has many benefits, such as providing food to many, jobs in coastal areas, recreation, and there are some cultural values associated with fishing. At the same time, fishing lines create fauna entanglement, release microplastics, and some fishing practices are not sustainable. For example, catch-and-release fishing, which many of us have participated in, may lead to changes in the genetic diversity of fish populations, since fish that are caught and released are often disoriented when they return to the water and their low energy makes them easier prey. A stakeholder might assess the balance between the pros and cons with fishing (recreational and commercial) by assigning monetary values to each activity and summing the values to determine whether fishing is a net positive or negative human impact, which is one way to use the teeter totter scale to weight the benefits and drawbacks of human activities.

We may even try to assess our own actions on this teeter totter scale to determine our own impacts on the local or global environment. It is important, however, to realize that we need to assess the action at the individual scale, because weighing the benefits of using a reusable grocery bag against the costs required to make the bag are not equitable, given that manufacturing costs cannot simply be isolated for one item (electricity requirements to start a machine is not equitable to the electricity cost for one item). Similarly, we also need to realize that we don't all have the same ability to make changes in our lives that will reduce our environmental impacts. The ability for me to use a reusable water bottle instead of buying plastic bottles of water cannot be compared to all other humans, because our local infrastructures, incomes, and access to goods/services are different. Therefore, we must take it upon ourselves to make changes in our own lives that can shift the teeter totter, rather than point fingers and tell others what they need to do.

​See you next week.