What ecological challenges have been created by rising human populations around the world?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Under the impact of the environmental problems, the number of international environmental organizations increased. There were 20 when the Second World War started in 1939, and about 40 in the late 1940s. By 1990, there were 340 . Such an increase would have been impossible had the century not also witnessed unprecedented human impact on our planet. The changes humans wrought—and the damage they inflicted—became glaringly visible and measurable, provoking the movement that we now usually call environmentalism: a deepening and spreading conviction that humans are part of the web of the natural world; that our relationship with our environment is the inescapable framework for everything we do; and that, in consequence, care of the environment is our essential priority, whether as a self-interested strategy or as a moral or religious duty that we owe to other forms of life. By the end of the twentieth century, environmentalism was a contender to be the world's most widely shared consensus. We can best understand the eco-history of recent times in the context of changing notions about the place of humankind in nature. We know too much about our common ancestry with other animals, the behaviors we share with other cultural creatures (especially nonhuman apes), the moral overlap between Homo sapiens and other species, and our ties to a complex, interconnected ecosystem, to go on thinking of humans as apart or distinct from the rest of nature. The future of our relationship with the rest of nature is best considered in the light of evidence dispersed throughout this book. Many of the failed civilizations of the past weakened or wrecked themselves by overexploiting their environments.