environment crisis essay

Environmental Issues Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on environmental issues.

The environment plays a significant role to support life on earth. But there are some issues that are causing damages to life and the ecosystem of the earth. It is related to the not only environment but with everyone that lives on the planet. Besides, its main source is pollution , global warming, greenhouse gas , and many others. The everyday activities of human are constantly degrading the quality of the environment which ultimately results in the loss of survival condition from the earth.

Source of Environment Issue

There are hundreds of issue that causing damage to the environment. But in this, we are going to discuss the main causes of environmental issues because they are very dangerous to life and the ecosystem.

Pollution – It is one of the main causes of an environmental issue because it poisons the air , water , soil , and noise. As we know that in the past few decades the numbers of industries have rapidly increased. Moreover, these industries discharge their untreated waste into the water bodies, on soil, and in air. Most of these wastes contain harmful and poisonous materials that spread very easily because of the movement of water bodies and wind.

Greenhouse Gases – These are the gases which are responsible for the increase in the temperature of the earth surface. This gases directly relates to air pollution because of the pollution produced by the vehicle and factories which contains a toxic chemical that harms the life and environment of earth.

Climate Changes – Due to environmental issue the climate is changing rapidly and things like smog, acid rains are getting common. Also, the number of natural calamities is also increasing and almost every year there is flood, famine, drought , landslides, earthquakes, and many more calamities are increasing.

Above all, human being and their greed for more is the ultimate cause of all the environmental issue.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Minimize Environment Issue?

Now we know the major issues which are causing damage to the environment. So, now we can discuss the ways by which we can save our environment. For doing so we have to take some measures that will help us in fighting environmental issues .

Moreover, these issues will not only save the environment but also save the life and ecosystem of the planet. Some of the ways of minimizing environmental threat are discussed below:

Reforestation – It will not only help in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem but also help in restoring the natural cycles that work with it. Also, it will help in recharge of groundwater, maintaining the monsoon cycle , decreasing the number of carbons from the air, and many more.

The 3 R’s principle – For contributing to the environment one should have to use the 3 R’s principle that is Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Moreover, it helps the environment in a lot of ways.

To conclude, we can say that humans are a major source of environmental issues. Likewise, our activities are the major reason that the level of harmful gases and pollutants have increased in the environment. But now the humans have taken this problem seriously and now working to eradicate it. Above all, if all humans contribute equally to the environment then this issue can be fight backed. The natural balance can once again be restored.

FAQs about Environmental Issue

Q.1 Name the major environmental issues. A.1 The major environmental issues are pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change. Besides, there are several other environmental issues that also need attention.

Q.2 What is the cause of environmental change? A.2 Human activities are the main cause of environmental change. Moreover, due to our activities, the amount of greenhouse gases has rapidly increased over the past few decades.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Search the United Nations

• Issue Briefs
• Commemoration
• Branding Package
• Our Common Agenda
• Press Releases

The Climate Crisis – A Race We Can Win

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September, “the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”.

No corner of the globe is immune from the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption, conflict, and terrorism. Sea levels are rising, the Arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying, and forests are burning. It is clear that business as usual is not good enough. As the infinite cost of climate change reaches irreversible highs, now is the time for bold collective action.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES ARE RISING

Billions of tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every year as a result of coal, oil, and gas production. Human activity is producing greenhouse gas emissions at a record high , with no signs of slowing down. According to a ten-year summary of UNEP Emission Gap reports, we are on track to maintain a “business as usual” trajectory.

The last four years were the four hottest on record. According to a September 2019 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, we are at least one degree Celsius above preindustrial levels and close to what scientists warn would be “an unacceptable risk”. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change calls for holding eventual warming “well below” two degrees Celsius, and for the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase even further, to 1.5 degrees. But if we don’t slow global emissions, temperatures could rise to above three degrees Celsius by 2100 , causing further irreversible damage to our ecosystems.

Glaciers and ice sheets in polar and mountain regions are already melting faster than ever, causing sea levels to rise. Almost two-thirds of the world’s cities   with populations of over five million are located in areas at risk of sea level rise and almost 40 per cent of the world’s population live within 100 km of a coast. If no action is taken, entire districts of New York, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities could find themselves underwater within our lifetimes , displacing millions of people.

FOOD AND WATER INSECURITY

Global warming impacts everyone’s food and water security. Climate change is a direct cause of soil degradation, which limits the amount of carbon the earth is able to contain. Some 500 million people today live in areas affected by erosion, while up to 30 per cent of food is lost or wasted as a result. Meanwhile, climate change limits the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

In many regions, crops that have thrived for centuries are struggling to survive, making food security more precarious. Such impacts tend to fall primarily on the poor and vulnerable. Global warming is likely to make economic output between the world’s richest and poorest countries grow wider .

NEW EXTREMES

Disasters linked to climate and weather extremes have always been part of our Earth’s system. But they are becoming more frequent and intense as the world warms. No continent is left untouched, with heatwaves, droughts, typhoons, and hurricanes causing mass destruction around the world. 90 per cent   of disasters are now classed as weather- and climate-related, costing the world economy 520 billion USD each year , while 26 million people are pushed into poverty as a result.

A CATALYST FOR CONFLICT

Climate change is a major threat to international peace and security. The effects of climate change heighten competition for resources such as land, food, and water, fueling socioeconomic tensions and, increasingly often, leading to mass displacement .

Climate is a risk multiplier   that makes worse already existing challenges. Droughts in Africa and Latin America directly feed into political unrest and violence. The World Bank estimates that, in the absence of action, more than 140 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia will be forced to migrate within their regions by 2050.

A PATH FORWARD

While science tells us that climate change is irrefutable, it also tells us that it is not too late to stem the tide. This will require fundamental transformations in all aspects of society — how we grow food, use land, transport goods, and power our economies.

While technology has contributed to climate change, new and efficient technologies can help us reduce net emissions and create a cleaner world. Readily-available technological solutions already exist for more than 70 per cent   of today’s emissions. In many places renewable energy is now the cheapest energy source and electric cars are poised to become mainstream.

In the meantime, nature-based solutions provide ‘breathing room’ while we tackle the decarbonization of our economy. These solutions allow us to mitigate a portion of our carbon footprint while also supporting vital ecosystem services, biodiversity, access to fresh water, improved livelihoods, healthy diets, and food security. Nature-based solutions include improved agricultural practices, land restoration, conservation, and the greening of food supply chains.

Scalable new technologies and nature-based solutions will enable us all to leapfrog to a cleaner, more resilient world. If governments, businesses, civil society, youth, and academia work together, we can create a green future where suffering is diminished, justice is upheld, and harmony is restored between people and planet.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Sustainable Development Goals

Climate Action Summit 2019

UNFCCC | The Paris Agreement

WMO |Global Climate in 2015-2019

UNDP | Global Outlook Report 2019

UNCC | Climate Action and Support Trends 2019

IPCC | Climate Change and Land 2019

UNEP | Global Environment Outlook 2019

UNEP | Emission Gap Report 2019

PDF VERSION

Download the pdf version

Share this via Facebook Share this via X Share this via WhatsApp Share this via Email Other ways to share Share this via LinkedIn Share this via Reddit Share this via Telegram Share this via Printer

Addressing the Climate Crisis in Times of Pandemic

As More Climate Chaos Looms, Slashing Fossil Fuels Is Key

© 2020 Brian Stauffer for Human Rights Watch

By Katharina Rall

While the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the news for much of 2020, climate change—the other global crisis threatening catastrophic impacts on peoples’ lives—has continued to gain ground . The pandemic itself may have temporarily limited some activities such as aviation, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but governments have largely squandered the opportunity to accelerate more meaningful emissions reductions in their economic policies. In 2021, governments will need to do much better, and there are some reasons to be hopeful they might.

In 2020, there were devastating floods in the Philippines , destructive wildfires in California, deadly heatwaves in Southern Africa , and a record-breaking hurricane season in Central America. These and other events amplified by climate change are taking a mounting toll on lives and livelihoods, especially of marginalized populations. In 2020, Human Rights Watch documented how climate change in Canada is depleting Indigenous peoples’ access to traditional food sources and contributing to a growing problem of food poverty. In Colombia, we showed how more frequent droughts are worsening malnutrition among Indigenous children. In the United States, we exposed how extreme heat is linked to adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth. These climate-related harms have profound impacts on the realization of people’s basic human rights .  And they are only a few of the growing impacts around the world that are expected to intensify as temperatures continue to rise in coming years. The consensus among scientists is that it will be catastrophic if we fail to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. It is still possible to prevent such an outcome, but only if we are able to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil, toward renewable energies like wind and solar. Despite this consensus, fossil fuels continue to dominate energy markets for several reasons. Most governments actively support the fossil fuel sector through subsidies and tax-breaks, which do not benefit those populations most impacted by climate change. Inadequate environmental regulations and little accountability for clean-up also mean that companies can externalize the true cost of fossil fuels, i.e. avoid paying for the environmental, health, and economic impacts. The choices governments make about where to direct funds to stimulate and support a post-Covid-19 recovery could be a game changer to enable rapid transition to renewable energy, and to protect the rights of those impacted by the Covid-19 and climate crises. However, to date, too many governments have chosen to double down on their support for fossil fuels. Canada, one of the world’s top -10 greenhouse gas emitters, increased government fossil fuel subsidies, with sums of over US$14 billion, as part of its Covid-19 recovery. The US has spent at least $72 billion of its Covid-19 recovery funds supporting fossil fuels, while only $27 billion went to support cleaner energy. The European Union, despite committing to reducing fossil fuel dependence as part of its European Green Deal , continued to subsidize fossil fuels by at least US$ 165 billion per year .

What hope is there that 2021 will be different? First, governments will have new opportunities to prioritize renewable energy sources over fossil fuels as they inevitably roll out more Covid-19 stimulus packages. This time they can make wiser choices about which sectors of the economy they need most to support to protect the lives and wellbeing of their populations in the longer term. Second, all governments are due to scale up their domestic climate action plans to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Very few complied with the 2020 deadline for doing that, but with the next global climate summit approaching in November 2021, there is increased pressure to be more ambitious. If governments choose to use their continuous Covid-19 spending to support a just transition, they will be able to submit plans that help save both their economies and the climate.

Lastly, the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters seem poised to take more ambitious climate action. Incoming US President Joe Biden has promised that the US, the world’s second-biggest emitter, will re-join the Paris Agreement, reach net zero emissions by 2050, and redirect fossil fuel subsidies to renewables. China, the world’s top emitter, in September pledged to reach net zero emissions before 2060. It remains to be seen how serious these big emitters are about meeting these commitments. But the pledges will in themselves increase the pressure on other top emitters to meet their carbon neutrality goals . If the top ten emitters don’t, we’ll lose another crucial year. And the threat of catastrophic consequences will intensify; for Indigenous peoples in northern Canada, pregnant people exposed to heat in the US, and Indigenous children in Colombia. For other marginalized populations around the globe, and ultimately for all of us.

Protecting Rights, Saving Lives

Human Rights Watch defends the rights of people in close to 100 countries worldwide, spotlighting abuses and bringing perpetrators to justice

Friday essay: thinking like a planet - environmental crisis and the humanities

Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Tom Griffiths does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

View all partners

Many of us joined the Global Climate Strike on Friday, 20 September, and together we constituted half a million Australians gathering peacefully and walking the streets of our cities and towns to protest at government inaction in the face of the gravest threat human civilisation has faced.

It was a global strike, but its Australian manifestation had a particular twist, for our own federal government is an international pariah on this issue. We have become the Ugly Australians, led by brazen climate deniers who trash the science and snub the UN Climate Summit.

Government politicians in Canberra constantly tell us the Great Barrier Reef is fine, coal is good for humanity, Pacific islands are floating not being flooded, wind turbines are obscene, power blackouts are due to renewables, “drought-proofing” is urgent but “climate-change” has nothing to do with it, science is a conspiracy, climate protesters are a “scourge” who deserve to be punished and jailed, the ABC spins the weather, the Bureau of Meteorology requires a royal commission, the United Nations is a bully, if we have to have emissions targets, well, we are exceeding them, and Australia is so insignificant in the world it doesn’t have to act anyway.

It’s a wilful barrage of lies, an insult to the public, a threat to civil society, and an extraordinary attack on our intelligence by our own elected representatives.

The international Schools4Climate movement is remarkable because it is led by children, teenagers still at school advocating a future they hope to have. I can’t think of another popular protest movement in world history led by children. This could be a transformative moment in global politics; it certainly needs to be. The active presence of so many engaged children gave the rally a spirit and a lightness in spite of its grim subject; there was a sense of fun, a family feeling about the occasion, but there was a steely resolve too.

A girl in a school uniform standing next to me at the rally held a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 in her hands. Many of the people around me would normally expect to see in the 22nd century. Their power, paradoxically, is they are not voters. They didn’t elect this government! They are protesting not just against the governments of the world but also against us adults, who did elect these politicians or who abide them. There was a moment at the rally when, with the mysterious organic coherence crowds possess, the older protesters stepped aside, parting like a wave, and formed a guard of honour through the centre of which the children marched holding their placards, their leadership acknowledged.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today

One placard declared: “You’ll die of old age; I’ll die of climate change”; another said: “If Earth were cool, I’d be in school.” One held up a large School Report Card with subject results: “Ethics X, Responsibility X, Climate Action X. Needs to try harder.” Another explained: “You skip summits, we skip school.”

In Melbourne, as elsewhere, teenagers gave the speeches; and they were passionate and eloquent. The demands of the movement are threefold: no new coal, oil and gas projects; 100% renewable energy generation and exports by 2030; and fund a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities. There were also Indigenous speakers. One declared: “We stand for you too, when we stand for Country.”

There were 150,000 people in the Melbourne Treasury Gardens, a crowd so large responsive cheers rippled like a Mexican wave up the hill from the speakers. I reflected on the historical parallels for what was unfolding, recalling the Vietnam moratorium demonstrations and the marches against the first Gulf War, the Freedom Rides and the civil rights movement, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the suffragettes’ campaigns.

Inspired by this history, we now have the Extinction Rebellion , a movement born in a small British town late last year which declares “only non-violent rebellion can now stop climate breakdown and social collapse”. Within six months, through civil disobedience, it brought central London to a standstill and the United Kingdom became the first country to declare a climate emergency. We are at a political tipping point.

In Australia, the result of this year’s election tells us there is no accountability for probably the most dysfunctional and discredited federal government in our history, and now we are left with a parliament unwilling to act on so many vital national and international issues. The 2019 federal election was no status quo outcome, as some political commentators have declared. Rather, it was a radical result, revealing deep structural flaws in our parliamentary democracy, our media culture and our political discourse. For me it ranks with two other elections in my voting lifetime: the “dark victory” of the 2001 Tampa election , and the 1975 constitutional crisis . Like those earlier dates, 2019 could shape and shadow a generation. It is time to get out on the streets again.

Skolstrejk för klimatet

The founder, symbol and the voice of the School Strike movement is, of course, Greta Thunberg. It is just over a year since August 2018 when she began to spend every Friday away from class sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign declaring “School Strike for the Climate”.

When she told her parents about her plans, she reported “they weren’t very fond of it”. Addressing the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2018, she said : “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.” Thunberg quietly invokes the carbon budget and the galling fact there is already so much carbon in the system “there is simply not enough time to wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge.”

In late September, Thunberg gave a powerful presentation at the UN Climate Summit; Richard Flanagan compared her 495-word UN speech to Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word Gettysburg Address. It’s a reasonable parallel that reaches for some understanding of the enormity of this political moment.

It is sickening to see the speed with which privileged old white men have rushed to pour bile on this young woman. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin quickly recognised her power and sought to neutralise and patronise her. Scott Morrison chimed in. Australia’s locker room of shock jocks laced the criticism with some misogyny. It’s amazing how they froth at the mouth about a calm and articulate schoolgirl. They are all – directly or indirectly – in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

Denialism is worthy of study . I don’t mean the conscious and fraudulent denialism of politicians and shock-jocks such as those I’ve mentioned. That’s pretty simple stuff – lies motivated by opportunism, greed and personal advancement, and funded by the carbon-polluting industries. It is appalling but boring.

There are more interesting forms of denialism, such as the emotional denialism we all inhabit. Emotional denialism in the face of the unthinkable can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin to understand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.

And there is a third kind of denialism that should especially interest scholars. It is when some of our own kind – scholars trained to respect evidence – fashion themselves as sceptics, but are actually dogged contrarians.

Read more: There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

One example is Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and professor of history at Harvard University, who calls climate science “science fiction” and recently joined the ranks of old, white, privileged men commenting on the appearance of Greta Thunberg. I’m not arguing here with Ferguson’s politics – he is an arch-conservative and I do disagree with his politics, but I also believe engaged, reflective politics can drive good history.

Rather, Ferguson’s disregard for evidence and neglect of science and scholarship attracts my attention. His understanding of climate science and climate history is poor: in a recent article in the Boston Globe he assumed the Little Ice Age started in the 17th century, whereas its beginning was three centuries earlier .

How does a trained scholar, a professor of history, get themselves in this ignominious position? For Ferguson, contrarianism has been a productive intellectual strategy – going against the flow of fashion is a good scholarly instinct – but on climate change his politics and the truth have steadily travelled in different directions and caught him out. We can say the same of Geoffrey Blainey, another successful contrarian who has cornered himself on climate change . Like Ferguson he appears uninterested in decades of significant research in environmental history – and thus his healthy scepticism has morphed into foolish denialism.

Denialism matters because all kinds of it have delayed our global political response to climate change by 30 years. In those critical decades since the 1980s, when humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions since the industrial revolution have doubled . And still global emissions are rising, every year.

The physics of this process are inexorable – and so simple, as Greta would say, even a child can understand. We are already committing ourselves to two degrees of warming, possibly three or four. Denialists have, knowingly and with malice aforethought, condemned future generations to what Tim Flannery calls a “grim winnowing”. Flannery wrote recently “the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.”

Read more: The gloves are off: 'predatory' climate deniers are a threat to our children

The history of denialism alerts us to a disastrous paradox: the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. Naomi Klein, in her latest book On Fire , elucidates this fateful coincidence, which she calls “an epic case of historical bad timing”: just as the urgency of action on climate change became apparent, “the global neoliberal revolution went supernova”.

Unfettered free-market fanaticism and its relentless attack on the public sphere derailed the momentum building for corporate regulation and global cooperation. Ten years ago, thoughtful, informed climate activists could still argue that we can decouple the debates about economy and democracy from climate action. But now we can’t. At the 2019 election, Australia may have missed its last chance for incremental political change. If the far right had not politicised climate change and delayed action for so long then radical political transformation would not necessarily have been required. But now it will be, and it’s coming.

A great derangement

We are indeed living in what we might call “uncanny times”. They are weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them.

The Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , published in 2016. The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the great derangement”, a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, in which we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of the Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. We have developed two powerful metaphors for making sense of it. One is the idea of the Anthropocene , which is the insight we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth and have now left behind the 13,000 years of the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, putting us on a par with other geophysical forces such as variations in the earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes.

The other potent metaphor for this moment in Earth history is the Sixth Extinction . Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century.

Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. The current extinction rate is a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature. There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth: five of them – sudden, shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting – and causing – the Sixth Extinction?

These two metaphors – the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction – are both historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into the Anthropocene; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller.

Earth is alive

I’ve been considering metaphors of deep time, but what of deep space? It has also enlarged our imaginations in the last half century. In July this year, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. I was 12 at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the Moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued it would be, and my team lost.

But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the Moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured man of immortality . I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of The Age newspaper reporting those fabled days.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented that NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy: the radical effect of seeing the Earth. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped :

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty! Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the 20th century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Bill Anders declared : “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book, Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land.

Furthermore, this new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Buzz Lightyear (who is sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

Earthrise had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities. Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “ the Gaia hypothesis ”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb , an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth , revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and influential report The Limits to Growth , which sold over 13 million copies. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Earth systems science developed in the second half of the 20th century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries – thresholds in planetary ecology - and the extent to which they were being violated. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon, it now emerged, were endangering our civilisation.

The American ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949 of the need for a new “land ethic” . Leopold envisaged a gradual historical expansion of human ethics, from the relations between individuals to those between the individual and society, and ultimately to those between humans and the land. He hoped for an enlargement of the community to which we imagine ourselves belonging, one that includes soil, water, plants and animals.

In his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac , there is a short, profound reflection called “Thinking like a mountain.” He tells of going on the mountain and shooting a wolf and her cubs and then watching “a fierce green fire” die in her eyes.

He shot her because he thought fewer wolves meant more deer, but over the years he watched the overpopulated deer herd die as the wolfless mountain became a dustbowl. Leopold came to understand the beautiful delicacy of the ecosystem, which holds “a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Today, 70 years after Leopold’s philosophical leap, we are being challenged to scale up from a land ethic to an earth ethic, to an environmental vision and philosophy of action that sees the planet as an integrated whole and all of life upon it as an interdependent historical community with a common destiny, to think not only like a mountain, but also like a planet. We are belatedly remembering the planet is alive.

Climate science is climate history

Climate change and ecological crisis are often seen as purely scientific issues. But as humanities scholars we know all environmental problems are at heart human ones; “scientific” issues are pre-eminently challenges for the humanities. Historical perspective can offer much in this time of ecological crisis, and many historians are reinventing their traditional scales of space and time to tell different kinds of stories, ones that recognise the agency of other creatures and the unruly power of nature.

There is a tendency among denialists to lazily use history against climate science, arguing for example “the climate’s always changing”, or “this has happened before”. Good recent historical scholarship about the last 2000 years of human civilisation is so important because it corrects these misunderstandings. That’s why it’s so disappointing when celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson and Geoffrey Blainey seek to represent their discipline by ignoring the work of their colleagues.

Climate science is unavoidably climate history; it’s an empirical, historical interpretation of life on earth, full of new insights into the impact and predicament of humanity in the long and short term. Recent histories of the last 2,000 years have been crucial in helping us to appreciate the fragile relationship between climate and society, and why future average temperature changes of more than 2°C can have dire consequences for human civilisation.

We now have environmental histories of antiquity, and of medieval and early modern Europe – studies casting new light on familiar human dramas, including the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death in the medieval period, and the unholy trinity of famine, war and disease during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

These books draw on natural as well as human history, on the archives of ice, air and sediment as well as bones, artefacts and documents. And then there is John McNeill’s history of the 20th century, Something New Under the Sun , which argues “the human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on earth”.

These new histories encompass the planet and the human species, and provocatively blur biological evolution and cultural history (Yuval Noah Harari’s “brief history of humankind”, Sapiens , is a bestselling example). They investigate the vast elemental nature of the heavens as well as the interior, microbial nature of human bodies: nature inside and out, with the striving human as a porous vessel for its agency.

In Australia, we have outstanding new histories linking geological and human time, such as Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth and Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt .

Australians seem predisposed to navigate the Anthropocene. I think it’s because the challenge of Australian history in the 21st century is how to negotiate the rupture of 1788, how to relate geological and human scales, how to get our heads and hearts around a colonial history of 200 years that plays out across a vast Indigenous history in deep time.

From the beginnings of colonisation, Australia’s new arrivals commonly alleged Aboriginal people had no history, had been here no more than a few thousand years, and were caught in the fatal thrall of a continental museum. But from the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: Australia’s human history went back aeons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age. In the late 20th century, the timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just 30 years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

Read more: Friday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin?

It’s no wonder the idea of big history was born here, or environmental history has been so innovative here. This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm – and are now intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience.

Even the best northern-hemisphere scholars struggle to digest the implications of the Australian time revolution. They often assume, for example, “civilisation” is a term associated only with agriculture, and still insist 50,000 years is a possible horizon for modern humanity. Australia offers a distinctive and remarkable human saga for a world trying to come to terms with climate change and the rupture of the Anthropocene. Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. Our nation’s obligation to honour the Uluru Statement is not just political; it is also metaphysical. It respects another ethical practice and another way of knowing.

Earthspeaking

In 2003, in its second issue, Griffith Review put the land at the centre of the nation. The edition was called Dreams of Land and it’s full of gold, including an essay by Ian Lowe sounding the alarm on the ecological and climate emergency – which reminds us how long we’ve had these eloquent warnings. As Graeme Davison said on launching the edition in December 2003:

At the threshold of the 21st century Australia has suddenly come down to earth. […] Earth, water, wind and fire are not just natural elements; they are increasingly the great issues of the day.

It is instructive to compare this issue of the Griffith Review, with the edition entitled Writing the Country , published 15 years later last summer. In the intervening decade and a half, sustainability morphed into survival, native title into Treaty and the Voice, the Anthropocene infiltrated our common vocabulary, the republic and Aboriginal recognition are no longer separable, and land decisively became Country with a capital “C”. In 2003 the reform hopes of the 1990s had not entirely died, but by 2019 it’s clear the dead hand of the Howard government and its successors has thoroughly throttled trust in the workings of the state.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution in GR2 – and it was given the honour of appearing first – was an essay by Melissa Lucashenko called “Not quite white in the head”. This year’s Miles Franklin winner, Lucashenko was already in great form in 2003. Tough, poetic and confronting, the words of her essay still resonate. Lucashenko writes of “earthspeaking”.

“I am earthspeaking,” she says, “talking about this place, my home and it is first, a very small story […] This earthspeaking is a small, quiet story in a human mouth.”

“Big stories are failing us as a nation,” suggests Lucashenko. “But we are citizens and inheritors and custodians of tiny landscapes too. It is the small stories that attach to these places […] which might help us find a way through.”

I think earthspeaking is a companion to thinking like a planet. Instead of beginning from the outside with a view of Earth in deep space and deep time, earthspeaking works from the ground up; it is inside-out; it begins with beloved Country. So it is with earthspeaking I want to finish.

Four months ago I was privileged to sit in a circle with Mithaka people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of 33,000 square kilometres of the Kirrenderi/Channel Country of the Lake Eyre Basin in south-western Queensland. In 2015, the Federal Court handed down a native title consent determination for the Mithaka enabling them to return to Country. Now they have begun a process of assessing and renewing their knowledge.

I was invited to be involved because I have studied the major white writer about this region, a woman called Alice Duncan-Kemp who was born on this land in 1901 where her family ran a cattle farm, and grew up with Mithaka people who worked on the station and were her carers and teachers. Young Alice spent her childhood days with her Aboriginal friends and teachers, especially Mary Ann and Moses Youlpee, who took her on walks and taught her the names and meanings and stories that connected every tree, bird, plant, animal, rock, dune and channel.

From the 1930s to the 1960s Alice wrote four books – half a million words – about the world of her childhood and the people and nature of the Channel Country, and although she did find a wide readership, her books were dismissed by authorities, landowners and locals as “romantic” and “nostalgic” and “fictional”.

Her writing was systematically marginalised: she was a woman in cattle country, a sympathiser with Aboriginal people, she refused to ignore the violence of the frontier and she challenged the typical heroic western style of narrative. The huge Kidman pastoral company bought her family’s land in 1998, bulldozed the historic pisé homestead into the creek, threw out the collection of Aboriginal artefacts, and continues to deny Alice’s writings have any historical authenticity. Yet her books were respected in the native title process and were crucial to the Mithaka in their fight to regain access to Country.

It was very moving to be present this year when Alice’s descendants and Moses’ people met for the first time. It was not just a social and symbolic occasion: we had come together as researchers and we had work to do. Across a weekend we pored over maps and talked through evidence, combining legend, memory, oral history, letters and manuscripts, published books, archaeological studies, surveyors’ records, and even recent drone footage of the remote terrain, all with the purpose of retrieving and reactivating knowledge, recovering language and reanimating Country. We could literally map Alice’s stories back onto features of the land, with the aim of bringing it under caring attention again.

This process is going on in beloved places right across the continent. Grace Karskens and Kim Mahood write beautifully in GR63 about similar quests, and of their hope written words dredged from the archive “might again be spoken as part of living language and shared geographies.”

Earthspeaking and thinking like a planet are profoundly linked. As the Indigenous speaker at the Melbourne Climate Strike said, “We stand for you when we stand for Country.” In these frightening and challenging times, we need radical storytelling and scholarly histories, narratives that weave together humans and nature, history and natural history, that move from Earth systems to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely, living planet spinning through space to the intimately known and beloved local worlds over which we might, if we are lucky, exert some benevolent influence.

We need them not only because they help us to better understand our predicament, but also because they might enable us to act, with intelligence and grace.

This essay was adapted from the Showcase Lecture, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Queensland, Wednesday, 9 October 2019

• Climate change
• Anthropocene
• Friday essay
• Environmental history
• Greta Thunberg
• Extinction Rebellion
• Extinction crisis

Biocloud Project Manager - Australian Biocommons

Director, Defence and Security

Opportunities with the new CIEHF

School of Social Sciences – Public Policy and International Relations opportunities

Deputy Editor - Technology

Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature Essay

Introduction, population size.

The rate at which the current environmental crisis has escalated is attributed to the interplay between human activities and nature. There are many explanations that have been provided for the environmental crisis, but most of them fail to directly place the blame on people. For instance, scientists and government institutions have developed a culture of blaming global warming on the manufacturing and transportation industry.

It is apparent that people have strived to steer off the blame for the environmental crisis that the world is facing, but they are the primary instigators of the problem. The ability of the earth to sustain humanity is gradually depleting because of the competition that man has mounted against nature. While some of the activities that man has been doing on nature are inevitable, it is possible to control the destruction of natural resources to strike an equilibrium between human needs and their natural supplies.

The progress recorded by humanity over the past century has been a result of exploiting what nature has to offer. However, over the past several decades, it has become apparent that people have over-exploited nature, leading to an environmental crisis. This paper looks at the current environmental crisis, with a close focus on people’s relationship with nature.

Human activities are the main reasons that there has been an increase of different types of pollution. The current environmental crisis is a function of the changes in climatic conditions in different parts of the world. Global warming has affected the environment adversely by causing unpredictable climatic conditions in different parts of the world. Global warming is a concept that humans have overly attributed to the use of oil-based fuel in the manufacturing and transport industry.

It is apparent that air pollution would be reduced to a significant low if humans did not contribute to it. The carbon footprint of every individual contributes to global warming.This footprint can be calculated by evaluating the consumption behaviour of individuals on an annual basis. This should include the air pollution factors of transportation, food, and other products that an individual consumes annually. The average per capita emissions in the U.K. is 9.4 tonnes ( Individual Level , 2015).

Water pollution is a significant cause of the current environmental crisis. The rate of water pollution has escalated over the years, and it is evidenced by the diminishing number of water organisms in some parts of the world. For instance, in countries that are involved in horticulture, their waste water from the farms is directed to natural water sources like rivers and lakes. This has led to the extinction of some plant and animal species. Pollution of large water bodies like oceans has also been witnessed over the past decade.

For instance, the BP deepwater horizon oil spill is one of the recent human-caused disasters that led to an extensive destruction of the flora and fauna in the region ( Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill , 2015). Many species, including microscopic organisms were affected by the oil spill, and the environment in the neighbouring regions was also compromised. In a time when humans should be focusing on conserving water, pollution seems to take the centre stage in the relationship between people and the environment (Clark, 1992).

The global population has increased tremendously over the 19 th century owing to the enhancement of health care services, and the availability of natural resources to support life (Chiras, 1991). The increasing population has resulted in the need for the development of settlement lands. The population increase has also resulted in the need for the cultivation of more food crops and raising higher numbers of domestic animals.

These activities require large pieces of land, which has led to the clearing of vast areas of land originally covered by natural vegetation (Leach & Mearns, 2013). Extensive deforestation is one of the results of population increase. Human economic activities have also led to the development of roads and other infrastructure for transportation purposes. The quest for economic superiority among nations has led to the destruction of natural vegetation, and this is one of the factors that are linked to global warming and climate change (Adams & Mulligan, 2012).

The relationship between people and nature needs to be at equilibrium for the earth to effectively sustain the global population. Over the past century, people have overly exploited the available natural resources; thus, shifting the equilibrium. This has led to an environmental crisis that is threatening the future of humanity. Pollution and clearing of natural vegetation are some of the human activities that have ruined the relationship between people and the environment.

It is apparent that this relationship can only be brought back to equilibrium through the integration of efforts to conserve the environment. People should look at reducing their individual carbon footprints, and they should refrain from destroying natural vegetation and wildlife. People should look into better ways of relating with nature to enhance the chances of survival for future generations.

Adams, W. M., & Mulligan, M. (2012). Decolonizing nature: strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era . London: Earthscan.

Chiras, D. D. (1991). Environmental Science-Action for a sustainable future . San Fransisco: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company.

Clark, R. B. (1992). Marine pollution , 3 rd edition. Oxford: Clarendon.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill . (2015).

Individual Level: Self-help . (2015).

Leach, G., & Mearns, R. (2013). Beyond the woodfuel crisis: people, land and trees in Africa . London: Routledge.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 30). Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-crisis-peoples-relationship-with-nature/

"Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature." IvyPanda , 30 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-crisis-peoples-relationship-with-nature/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature'. 30 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-crisis-peoples-relationship-with-nature/.

1. IvyPanda . "Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-crisis-peoples-relationship-with-nature/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Environmental Crisis: People’s Relationship With Nature." November 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/environmental-crisis-peoples-relationship-with-nature/.

• Water Pollution: OIL Spills Aspects
• Irrigation Water and Carbon Footprint
• Carbon Footprint Agenda and Its Impacts
• Carbon Footprints and Transportation of Construction Materials
• Effect of Oil Spills on Seafood
• Ecological Footprint and Its Impact on Human Life
• Carbon Footprint Reduction: Developments and Opportunities
• Ecological Footprint Analysis
• Carbon Footprint and Renewable Energy
• Effects of BP Oil Spill
• Vehicle Impacts on Environmental Safety in Dubai
• Environment: Tropical Deforestation Causes in Indonesia
• Water Related Conflicts in Africa
• Adapting Wilderness Stewardship
• Environmental Issues of Energy Innovations

Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environment Problems — Environmental Issues

Essays on Environmental Issues

Environmental issues are a crucial topic for essays, as they address some of the most pressing challenges facing our planet today. When choosing an environmental issues essay topic, it's important to consider the significance of the subject matter and the potential for impactful discussions. This article will offer advice on selecting a compelling topic and provide a diverse list of recommended essay topics, divided by category.

The Importance of Environmental Issues Essay Topics

Environmental issues encompass a wide range of challenges, including climate change, pollution, deforestation, and endangered species. These topics are critical because they directly impact the health of our planet and all its inhabitants. By addressing environmental issues in essays, students can raise awareness, promote solutions, and contribute to the global conversation about sustainability and conservation.

When choosing a topic for an environmental issues essay, it's essential to consider your interests, the current relevance of the issue, and the potential for generating thought-provoking discussions. You should also take into account the availability of credible sources and data to support your arguments. Additionally, choosing a specific aspect of a broader environmental issue can help narrow the focus of your essay and make your arguments more compelling.

Recommended Environmental Issues Essay Topics

• Climate Change
• The impact of climate change on global food security
• Policy responses to climate change in developing countries
• The role of renewable energy in mitigating climate change
• Climate change adaptation strategies for vulnerable communities
• Carbon pricing and its effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions
• The impact of climate change on wildlife
• Strategies to mitigate climate change
• The role of renewable energy in combating climate change
• Climate change and its effect on agriculture
• The importance of international cooperation in addressing climate change
• Plastic pollution in the world's oceans
• The health effects of air pollution in urban areas
• Regulatory approaches to controlling industrial pollution
• The impact of electronic waste on the environment
• Strategies for reducing water pollution in agricultural areas
• The effects of air pollution on human health
• Ways to reduce water pollution
• The role of government regulations in controlling pollution
• The impact of industrial pollution on the environment
• Deforestation
• The effects of deforestation on biodiversity in tropical rainforests
• Community-based forest management as a solution to deforestation
• The role of corporate responsibility in combating deforestation
• The impact of deforestation on indigenous communities
• Reforestation efforts and their impact on climate change mitigation

Endangered Species

• The ethical implications of captive breeding for endangered species conservation
• The impact of illegal wildlife trade on endangered species populations
• Conservation strategies for protecting endangered marine species
• The role of ecotourism in supporting endangered species conservation
• The potential for de-extinction in preserving endangered species

Sustainable Development

• Challenges and opportunities for sustainable urban development
• The role of sustainable agriculture in addressing food insecurity
• The impact of consumer behavior on sustainable development goals
• Corporate sustainability initiatives and their impact on the environment
• The role of education in promoting sustainable development practices

Environmental Policy

• The effectiveness of international agreements in addressing environmental issues
• The role of government regulation in promoting environmental conservation
• The impact of environmental lobbying on policy-making decisions
• The potential for market-based solutions in environmental policy
• The influence of public opinion on environmental policy development

Water Scarcity

• The causes of water scarcity in developing countries
• Technological solutions to address water scarcity
• The impact of water scarcity on agriculture
• Strategies for sustainable water management
• The role of government policies in addressing water scarcity

Biodiversity Loss

• The importance of preserving biodiversity
• The impact of habitat destruction on biodiversity
• Strategies for conserving endangered species
• The role of ecotourism in promoting biodiversity conservation
• The ethical implications of biodiversity loss

Waste Management

• The challenges of e-waste disposal
• Strategies for promoting recycling and composting
• The impact of waste management on public health
• The role of circular economy in reducing waste
• The economic benefits of effective waste management

These environmental issues essay topics provide a wide range of options for students to explore and analyze. By choosing a compelling environmental issues essay topic, students can engage in meaningful discussions and contribute to the ongoing efforts to address the challenges facing our planet. It's climate change, pollution, deforestation, endangered species, sustainable development, or environmental policy - there are countless opportunities to explore and raise awareness about important environmental issues through essays.

The Human Impact on Climate Change: Evidences and Solutions

The lorax: a call to action for environmental conservation, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Wildfires: a Growing Threat to Our Environment

"let's save our planet" or the problem of environmental pollution, the impact of plastic consumption on our life, ocean in crisis: climate change, invasive species, overfishing, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

A Topic of Climate Change: What People Must Do

The impact of human selfishness on nature, water pollution: what we can expect, why plastic bags should be banned, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

Environmental Problems: Challenges and Solutions

Air pollution: causes, effects, and solutions, environmental issues: the problem of climate change, the environmental issues of littering and deforestation, the main factors of adapting to a new environment, the power of change: how you can change the world, different types and sources of pollution, the ecological footprint caused by human activities, geography's role in addressing global environmental risks, water pollution, its factors, and ways to reduce, human – the significant wellspring of global warming, climate change as the one of the biggest threats to humanity now, the long term effects of littering and pollution on the environment, a research on the relationship between the global economy and the environmental protection issues, the environment hazard of plastics, deforestation and the ways to overcome it, global warming and what people can do to save earth, we are causing environmental problems and we are suffering from them, the impact of china's progress on the environment, air pollution its causes and damaging effects, relevant topics.

• Global Warming
• Invasive Species
• Ocean Pollution
• Fast Fashion
• Air Pollution

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Bibliography

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Resilience in Papal Rome, 1656-1870 pp 131–164 Cite as

Environmental Crisis

• Marina Formica 3 &
• Donatella Strangio 4  
• First Online: 24 September 2023

37 Accesses

Why does this work include a chapter on the environment? How does the environment relate to crisis, resilience, tradition, innovation, and the interweaving of the old and new in the “Urbe”? Can we speak of crisis and resilience in this context? Did pandemics, such as the mid-seventeenth-century plague, bring innovations and greater attention to environmental issues?

Although the work is the result of constant joint collaboration, this chapter is by Donatella Strangio.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

There exists a wide-ranging literature on the economic and social function of corporations, and for deeper analysis, Travaglini ( 1999 ) (specifically with regard to Rome) is recommended. For a more general understanding, Mocarelli, 2008 (including the reference list), Epstein and Prak ( 2008 ), Ogilvie ( 2011 ), and Cerrito ( 2015 , pp. 225–249), are also useful resources.

SAR, Presidenza dell’Annona, b. 1980, fasc.1.

SAR, Camerale II, Commercio and Industria, b. 9 and Camerale II, Molini, b. 35.

The measured level refers to the “Ripetta zero,” which corresponds (with some approximation) to sea level.

SAR, Camerale III, Comunità di Terracina b. 2311 sd.

SAR, Camerale III, Comunità di Terracina b. 2309; SAR, Bandi bb. 53, 92.

SAR, Buon Governo, series I, b. 158.

SAR, Bandi, Editti b. 147.

In Renaissance Rome, the capital of Christianity and a centre of international economy, a Sienese merchant-banker accredited at the papal court showed a spirit of industrial capitalism previously unknown. As the sole person responsible for granting the production and commercialization of Tolfa alum, he implemented a centralized managerial system whose strengths lay in its sense of responsibility, attention to the production process, and desire for perfection. As a demanding and determined master, he imposed specific work times and sought new mines to increase the productive capacity of the alum mines and maximize profits, showing keen attention and care in managing the workforce (Ait and Modigliani, 2022, p. vii; see also Ait, 2014 ). Between the centre of Tolfa and the present-day hamlet of La Bianca, an old road connection was already in use, which can be identified as the modern-day Via Annibal Caro 7. Along this route, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Sughera and Cibona churches were built with their adjacent convents (Passigli, 2022 , p. 22).

Sources and References

Sources from archive.

State Archives of Rome = SAR

Google Scholar  

SAR, Bandi, Editti bb. 53, 92, 147

SAR, Buon Governo serie I, bb. 158, 159

SAR, Camerale II Tevere, bb. 1,7

SAR, Camerale III, Comunità di Terracina bb. 12,301, 2304, 2306, 2307, 2309, 2311, 2316

SAR, Camerale II, Commercio e industria, b. 9

SAR, Camerale II, Molini, b. 35

SAR, Congregazione delle acque b. 257 fasc. 674

SAR, Presidenza dell’Annona, b. 1980, fasc.1

SAR, Presidenza delle Ripe, serie II, b. 19

SAR, Presidenza generale del censo, catasto gregoriano mappa 89

Printed Sources (National Library Vittorio Emanuele III)

Andrea, Chiesa and Bernardo Gambarini. (1746). Delle cagioni e’ de rimedi delle inondazioni del Tevere. Della somma difficoltà d’introdurre una felice, e stabile navigazione da Ponte Nuovo sotto Perugia sino alla foce della Nera nel Tevere, e del modo di renderlo navigabile dentro . Rome: Stamp. di A. de’ Rossi

Bernardini, Bernardino. (1744). Descrizione del nuovo ripartimento de’ rioni di Roma fatto per ordine di N.S. papa Benedetto XIV. Con la notizia di quanto in essi si contiene. Opera del conte Bernardino Bernardini patrizio romano . Rome: per Generoso Salomone, presso S. Eustachio

Brioschi, Francesco. (1876). Le inondazioni del Tevere in Roma . Rome: Salviucci

Canevari, Raffaele. (1872). Tavola delle principali inondazioni del Tevere in Roma dalla sua fondazione sino ai giorni nostri. In Atti della Commissione istituita con decreto del Ministero dei lavori pubblici I gennaio 1871 per studiare e proporre i mezzi di rendere le piene del Tevere innocue alla città di Roma , 278–87. Rome: Ministero dei lavori pubblici

Carcani, Michele. (1875). Il Tevere e le sue inondazioni dall’origine di Roma fino ai giorni nostri . Rome: Tipografia Romana

Celani, Enrico. (1895). Alcune iscrizioni sulle inondazioni del Tevere, Bullettino della Commissione archeologica municipale di Roma , s. IV, 23: 283–300

Grifi, A. (1837). Il fiume Tevere e le sue più memorabili inondazioni, L’Album , IV, 1 April: 29–32

Grifi, A. (1838). Il fiume Tevere e le sue più memorabili inondazioni, L’Album , IV, 10 February: 390–92

Gregorovius, Ferdinando. (edition 1876 (1995). Sulla storia delle inondazioni del Tevere, in Il Buonarroti , s. II, v. XI, quad. XI, October: 345–55

Perkins, Marsh George. (1864). Man and Nature . London: S. Low, Son and Marston

Abel Wilhelm. (1976). Congiuntura agraria e crisi agraria: storia dell'agricoltura e della produzione alimentare nell'Europa centrale dal XIII secolo all'eta' industriale. Turin, Einaudi

Ait, Ivana. (2014). Dal governo signorile al governo del capitale mercantile: i Monti della Tolfa e ‘le lumere’ del papa, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome. Moyen Áge , 126 (1): 1–17 (open edition: https://doi.org/10.4000/mefrm.1964 )

Ait, Ivana and Didier Boisseuil. (2021). Gli attori del commercio dell’allume in Mediterraneo alla fine del Quattrocento. In Le marché des matières premières dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge , edited by Didier Boisseuil, Christian Rico, and Sauro Gelichi, 423–45. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome

Ait, Ivana and Anna Modigliani. (2022a). Agostino Chigi e l’allume dei papi: alle origini del capitalismo industriale. In Agostino Chigi. Lettere a Tolfa (1504–1505). L’imprenditore dell’allume dei papi , edited by Ait Ivana and Anna Modigliani, 1–60. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo

Ait, Ivana and Anna Modigliani. (2022b). Agostino Chigi. Lettere a Tolfa (1504–1505). L’imprenditore dell’allume dei papi. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo

Alfani Guido, Mocarelli, Luca, Alfani Guido, Matteo Di Tullio, (2012). Edited by Storia economica e ambiente italiano (ca. 1450–1850) . Milan, FrancoAngeli

Allen, Robert C. (2003). Was there a Timber Crisis in Early Modern Europe? In Economia e energia. Secc. XIII-XVIII , edited by Cavaciocchi Simonetta. Atti della XXXIV settimana di studi, 15–19 aprile 2002, 469–82. Florence: Le Monnier

Antinori, Aloisio. (2008). Introduzione. Roma Moderna e Contemporanea . XVI (2): 227–30, edited byAloisio Antinori, Le reti dell’acqua dal tardo Cinquecento al Settecento

Aristone, Ottavia and Anna Laura Palazzzo. (2012). Roma e il suo “contado lineare”. L’approvvigionamento urbano attraverso il Tevere nel primo trentennio dell’Ottocento. In Storia economica e ambiente italiano (ca. 1400–1850) , edited by Guido Alfani, Matteo Di Tullio, and Luca Mocarelli, 346–62. Milan: FrancoAngeli.

Bevilacqua, Piero. (1996). Tra natura e storia. Ambiente, economia, risorse in Italia . Rome: Donzelli

Bevilacqua, Piero. (2006). La terra è finita . Rome-Bari: Laterza

Biasillo, Roberta and Bonan Giacomo. (2021). Storia ambientale e storia d’Italia: specificità e percorsi comuni, Italia Contemporanea , 197: 67–75

Bloch, Marc. (1931). Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française . Oslo and Paris: Les Belles Lettres

Braudel, Fernand. (1949). Mediterranée . Paris: Librairie Armand Colin

Braudel, Fernand. (1993). Civiltà materiale, economia e capitalismo. Le strutture del quotidiano (secoli XV–XVIII) . Turin: Einaudi

Buonora, Paolo. (1994). La Valle Umbra. Genesi e trasformazione di un sistema idraulico (secoli XVI–XIX) . Quaderni monografici di Proposte e ricerche, n. 17

Buonora, Paolo. (2001). Gli ingegneri e il Tevere: il percorso della teoria idraulica. In I rischi del Tevere: modelli di comportamento del fiume di Roma nella storia . Atti del seminario di studi (Roma, 23 aprile 1998), 103–23. Roma: CNR-GNDCI

Buonora, Paolo. (2008). Gli acquedotti del papa: restitutio o innovazione? Roma Moderna e Contemporanea , XVI (2): 323–34, Le reti dell’acqua dal tardo Cinquecento al Settecento , edited by Aloisio Antinori.

Buonora, Paolo, and Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro. (2008). Il sistema idraulico di Roma in età moderna: assetti di potere e dinamiche produttive. In La città e il fiume (secc. XIII-XIX) edited by Carlo Maria Travaglini (Atti del Convegno AISU, Roma, 24–26 maggio 2001), 147–68. Rome: École Française de Rome.

Caneva, Giulia, Carlo Maria Travaglini and Catherine Virlouvet (eds.). (2017). Roma, Tevere, Litorale. Ricerche tra passato e presente . Rome: Ècole française de Rome, Università di Roma Tre

Caracciolo, Alberto. (1988). L’ambiente come storia . Bologna: Il Mulino

Caracciolo, Alberto and Roberta Morelli. (1996). La cattura dell’energia. L’economia europea dalla protostoria al mondo moderno . Rome: Nis

Caravale, Mario. (1979). Giovanni di Castro. In Dizionario biografico degli italiani , XXII: 225. Rome: Treccani

Carson, Rachel. (1962). Silent Spring . Houghton: Mifflin Company.

Cavallini, Mauro. (2000). Le attività metallurgiche della Reverenda Camera Apostolica: metodi di produzione settecentesca di piombo e di ferro nei monti della Tolfa. In Metalli, miniere e risorse ambientali. Il territorio dei monti della Tolfa tra Medioevo ed età contemporanea , edited by Francesca Fedeli Bernardini, 109–116. Rome: Provincia di Roma

Cerrito, Elio. (2015). Corporazioni e crescita economica (secc. XI-XVIII). Tra divisione del lavoro e costruzione del mercato, Studi Storici , 56 (2): 225–49

Colzi, Francesco. (2006). Il Tevere e il commercio del legno a Roma nel XVIII secolo. In AaVv. Il Tevere: sistema idraulico e asse produttivo (XV–XIX). , 118–1. Rome: Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée

Commoner, Barry. (1972). The Closing Circle: The Environmental Crisis and Its Cure . London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Commoner, Barry. (1976). The Poverty of Power . New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House

Comune di Roma. Ufficio speciale Tevere e Litorale. (1986). Il Tevere e la città. L’antica magistrtura portuale nei secoli XVI–XIX . Rome: Multigrafica editrice.

Crouch, Dora P. (1993). Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities . New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

D’Errico, Rita, and Anna L. Palazzo. (2008). Il Tevere navigato e navigabile. Note sul trasporto fluviale tra restaurazione e Unità d’Italia. In La città e il fiume , edited by Carlo Maria Travaglini, Secc. XIII–XIX , 265–82. Rome: Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome

Delumeau, Jean. (1962). L’alun de Rome XV–XIX siécle . Paris: Ècole pratique des hautes ètudes

Di Marco, Fabrizio. (2008). Raguzzini, l’acqua Felice e il Campidoglio: “Cose fievoli ma molto laboriose”, Roma Moderna e Contemporanea , XVI (2): 293–306, Le reti dell’acqua dal tardo Cinquecento al Settecento , edited by Aloisio Antinori

Enzi, Silvia. (2006). Le inondazioni del Tevere a Roma tra il XVI e XVIII secolo nelle fonti bibliotecarie del tempo. Mélanges de l'École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée , 118 (1): 3–20

Epstein Stephen R. and Maarten Prak (eds.). (2008). Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Febvre, Lucien. (1922). La Terre et l'Évolution humaine. (Introduction géographique à l'Histoire). Paris: La Renaissance du Livre

Friz, Giuliano. (1972). La popolazione di Roma dal 1770 al 1900. In Archivio dell’unificazione italiana , II, XIX. Rome: Edindustria Editoriale

Friz, Giuliano. (1980). Consumi, tenore di vita e prezzi a Roma dal 1770 al 1900 . In A rchivio Economico dell’Unificazione Italiana , II, XXII. Rome: Edindustria

Frontino, Sesto Giulio. (2014). Gli acquedotti di Roma . Rome: ARGO

Frosini, Pietro. (1997). Il Tevere: le inondazioni a Roma e i provvedimenti presi dal governo italiano per evitarle . Rome: Accademia Naz. Dei Lincei

Immler, Hans. (1996). Economia della natura. Produzione e consumo dell’era ecologica . Rome: Donzelli Editore (original edition: Welche Wirtschaft braucht die Natur? Mit Ökonomie die Ökokrise lösen, 1993)

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. (1967). Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil . Paris: Flammarion

Liberati, Silverio, Anna Maria and Giuseppina Pisani Sartorio (eds.). (1986). Il trionfo dell’acqua . Atti del Convegno. Gli antichi acquedotti di Roma. Problemi di conoscenza, conservazione e tutela . Rome: Comune di Roma, Paleani Editrice.

Maffioli, Cesare S. (1994). Out of Galileo: The Science of Waters, 1628–1718 . Rotterdam, Erasmus.

Malanima, Paolo. (1996). Energia e crescita nell’Europa preindustriale . Rome: NIS.

Malanima Paolo. (2000). Crescita e ineguaglianza nell’Europa preindustriale, In Rivista di storia economica , XVI (2): 189–212

Mocarelli, Luca. (2008). Guilds Reappraised: Italy in the Early Modern Period. International Review of Social History , 53 (16): 159–78

Article   Google Scholar  

Morelli, Roberta. (1980). Sullo stato d’infanzia della siderurgia seicentesca: le ferriere e i forni di Follonica e Cornia (1640–1680), Ricerche Storiche , X: 479–517

Morelli, Roberta. (1996a). Alla ricerca della pietra luminosa: tecniche e uomini nelle cave di Tolfa (secc. XVIII–XIX). In La miniera, l’uomo e l’ambiente. Fonti e metodi a confronto per la storia delle attività minerarie e metallurgiche in Italia , edited by Fausto Piola Caselli and Paola Piana Agostinetti, 3–120. Florence: All’insegna del giglio

Morelli, Roberta. (1996b). Nel mondo dell’energia rinnovabile: boschi e siderurgia nell’Italia centrale secc. XV–XVI, In L’uomo e la foresta secoli XIII-XVIII , edited by Simonetta Cavaciocchi, 373–77. Milan: (Istituto Internazionale di storia economica Francesco Datini di Prato: Mondadori Education.

Morelli, Roberta, Sonnino Eugenio and Carlo Maria Travaglini (eds.). (2002). I territori di Roma. Storia, popolazioni, geografie . Rome: tipografia ABILGRAPH

Moreno Diego. (1986). Boschi, storia e archeologia. Riprese, continuità, attese. Quaderni Storici , 21 (62(2)). Agosto 1986, Aristocrazie europee dell'Ottocento, Boschi: storia e archeologia 2, pp. 435–444.

Moreno Diego, Pietro Piussi and Oliver Rackham (eds.). (1982). Boschi: storia e archeologia. Quaderni Storici , 4a (1): 7–163. Il Mulino, Bologna.

Morin, Edgar. (1977). La nature de la nature . Paris: Seuil

Mumford, Lewis. (1961). The City in the History . New York: Harcourt, Brace and World

Nardi, Carla. (1979). La Presidenza delle Ripe (secc. XVI-XIX). Archivio di Stato di Roma, Rassegna degli Archivi di Stato , XXXIX/1,2,3, 33–106

Ogilvie, Sheilagh. (2011). Institutions and European Trade. Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pagnotta, Grazia. (2001). Il valore del bosco. Vicende e tensioni intorno alle macchie di Tolfa nel XVII secolo , 18 February 2001. http://w3.uniroma1.it/dprs/sites/default/files/441.html

Pagnotta, Grazia. (2006). Il valore del bosco Vicende e tensioni intorno alle macchie di Tolfa nel XVIII. Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica . 1: 133–64

Pagnotta, Grazia. (2012). La macchia di Terracina tra valore economico e valore ecosistemico. Percezione, consapevolezza e realtà nel XVIII secolo . In Storia economica e ambiente italiano (ca. 1400–1850) , edited by Guido Alfani, Matteo Di Tullio, Luca Mocarelli, 221–34. Milan: FrancoAngeli

Pagnotta, Grazia. (2020). Prometeo a Fukushima. Storia dell’energia dall’antichità ad oggi . Turin: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi

Palermo, Luciano. (1995). Tra terra e mare: l’economia della comunità di Terracina nel Settecento. In Pio VI, la paludi pontine, Terracina , edited by Rocci Giovanni Rosario, 441–54. Gaeta: Nuova Poligrafica.

Palmerio, Giancarlo. (2008). Il reimpiego nella costruzione dell’Acquedotto Felice a Roma. In Il reimpiego in architettura. Recupero, trasformazione, uso , edited by Jean-François Bernard, Philippe Bernbardi, and Daniela Esposito, 373–93. Rome: Ecole Française de Rome.

Pasquali, Susanna. (1991). L’architetto del Popolo Romano. 1680–1750. In Urbe Architetectus: Modelli, Disegni Misure. La professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680–1750 , edited by Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio, 301–11. Rome: Argos.

Passigli, Susanna. (2022). I Luoghi nelle lettere di Agostino Chigi. In Agostino Chigi. Lettere a Tolfa (1504–1505). L’imprenditore dell’allume dei papi , edited by Ait Ivana and Anna Modigliani, 73–106. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo.

Rocci, Giovanni Rosario (ed.). (1995). Pio VI, la paludi pontine, Terracina. Gaeta: Nuova Poligrafica

Sansa, Renato. (1991). La pulizia delle strade a Roma nel XVII secolo. Un problema di storia ambientale, Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria , 114: 127–60

Sansa, Renato. (1994). Il bosco fra difesa degli usi consuetudinari e conflitti di mercato, Storia Urbana , 69: 133–49

Sansa, Renato. (1995). Bosco e dinamiche socio-economiche nello Stato Pontificio, Bollettino del diciannovesimo secolo , III (4): 24–28

Sansa, Renato. (1996). Interessi privati e bene pubblico. Le vicende di un tentativo di pianificazione dello sfruttamento forestale nell'area dell'alto Lazio nel XIX secolo, Rivista Storica del Lazio , 4: 141–62

Sansa, Renato. (1998). Istituzioni e politica dell’ambiente a Roma: dalle magistrature capitoline alla presidenza pontificia. In La legislatura medicea sull’ambiente . IV. Scritti per un comment , edited by Giovanni Cascio Pratilli and Luigi Zangheri, 209–24. Florence: Leo S. Olschki

Sansa, Renato. (2000). Tra capacità di previsione e crisi impreviste: il fabbisogno energetico della produzione d’allume nei monti della Tolfa nei secoli XVI–XVIII. In Metalli, miniere e risorse ambientali. Il territorio dei monti della Tolfa tra Medioevo ed età contemporanea , edited by F. Fedeli Bernardini, 39–48. Rome: Provincia di Roma

Sansa, Renato. (2001). Bosco e fiume: l’approvvigionamento energetico e gli equilibri idrogeologici. Note per uno studio sul prelevamento del legname nel bacino del Tevere durante il XVIII secolo. In I rischi del Tevere: modelli di comportamento del fiume di Roma nella storia , edited by Paolo Buonora, 53–74. Atti del seminario di studi, Roma, 23 aprile 1998 Rome: CNR-GNDCI

Sansa, Renato. (2003). L’oro verde: i boschi dello Stato pontificio tra il XVIII e il XIX secolo . Bolgna: Clueb

Sansa Renato. 2004. L’arbitro mancato. Istituzioni pontificie, comunità e mercanti di legname tra Sette e Ottocento. «Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica» , (1): 125–152

Sansa, Renato. (2006a). I rifiuti e la storia ambientale: un’introduzione, Storia Urbana , 112: 7–16

Sansa, Renato. (2006b). Le norme decorose e il lavoro sporco. L’igiene urbana in tre capitali europee: Londra, Parigi, Roma tra XVI e XVIII secolo, Storia Urbana , 112: 85–112

Sansa, Renato. (2006c). Strategie di prevenzione a confronto: l’igiene urbana durante la peste romana del 1656–57, Roma moderna e contemporanea , XIV (1–3): 93–109

Sansa, Renato. (2009). Agronomi o agrimensori? La percezione dei saperi contadini e delle pratiche locali nell’amministrazione pontificia tra settecento e Ottocento, Acta Historiae , 3: 399–410

Sansa, Renato (2012). Una risorsa molti significati: l’uso del bosco nelle regioni italiane in età preindustriale. In Storia economica e ambiente italiano (ca. 1400–1850), edited by Guido Alfani, Matteo Di Tullio, and Luca Mocarelli, 256–72. FrancoAngeli: Milan.

Sansa, Renato. (2013). Osservare e sperimentare: su due documenti realtivi al controllo dei consumi energetici dell’impresa dell’allume di Tolfa (secoli XVI–XVII). In Innumerevoli paesaggi. Scritti di storia economica per Roberta Morelli , edited by Daniela Felisini, Franco Salvatori, and Maria Giovanna Stasolla, 3–24. Bari: Cacucci editore

Sansa, Renato. (2019). Woodlands as a Source of Income Integration in Peasant Economies: the Pontifical State (18th-19th Centuries). In Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective . Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond , edited by Alexandre Panjek, J. Larsson, and Luca Mocarelli, 191–204. Primorka: University of Primorska Press.

Sansa, Renato. (2022). Ambiente urbano e società durante l’età moderna. Roma, Londra, Parigi. Catania: Università degli Studi di Catania

Schenk Winfrid. (1996). Forest Development司rpesin Central Germany in Pre-Industrial Times. A Contribution by Historical Geography to the Solution of a Forst History Argument about the “Wood Scarcity” in the 18 th Century. In Istituto internazionale di storia economica“E Datini” , edited by L 'uomo e la foresta secc. XIII–XVIII. Prato: pp. 201–223 (Serie 11-Atti delle “Settimane di Studi e a1tra Convegni 27).

Slicher Van Bath, Bernard H. (1972). Storia agraria dell'Europa Occidentale (500–1850) . Turin: Einaudi

Strangio, Donatella. (1999). Le peschiere della Palude Pontina. Un curioso esempio di acquacoltura nel Settecento. In 1999. Annali del dipartimento di studi geoeconomici statistici e storici per l’analisi regionale , 377–82. Bologna: Patron

Travaglini, Carlo Maria. (1999). «Ognuno per non pagare si fa povero». Il sistema delle corporazioni romane agli inizi del Settecento. In Corporazioni e gruppi professionali nell’Italia moderna , edited by Alberto Guenzi, Paola Massa, and Angelo Moioli, 277–305. Milan: FrancoAngeli

Travaglini, Carlo Maria. (2008). La città e il fiume (XIII–XIX). Rome: Collection de l’École française de Rome

Zifferero, Andrea. (1996). Problemi di archeologia mineraria nel Lazio: il caso dei monti della Tolfa, Archeologia medievale , XXIII: 739–53

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

Marina Formica

Faculty of Economics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

Donatella Strangio

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marina Formica .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cite this chapter.

Formica, M., Strangio, D. (2023). Environmental Crisis. In: Resilience in Papal Rome, 1656-1870. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41260-8_4

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41260-8_4

Published : 24 September 2023

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-41259-2

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-41260-8

eBook Packages : History History (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Novel & Dramas
• Non-Fiction Prose

Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis Cheryll Glotfelty--Ecocriticism | An Overview

You may like these posts

Post a comment, social plugin, search this blog, popular posts.

• June 2022 1
• August 2022 6
• November 2022 1
• April 2023 3
• June 2023 4
• July 2023 1
• November 2023 1
• January 2024 34
• February 2024 30
• March 2024 11

Hello, I am Parishmita Roy

Default Variables

Essay on Environmental Sustainability

Students are often asked to write an essay on Environmental Sustainability in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Environmental Sustainability

Understanding environmental sustainability.

Environmental sustainability is about making decisions that do not harm the environment. It’s about preserving nature for future generations.

Importance of Environmental Sustainability

Our survival depends on the environment. If we don’t sustain it, we risk losing resources like water and air. It’s crucial for our health and economy.

Ways to Achieve Sustainability

We can achieve sustainability by reducing waste, recycling, and using renewable energy. It’s about changing our lifestyles to protect the environment.

Environmental sustainability is crucial for our future. We all need to play our part to ensure our planet remains healthy.

Also check:

• Advantages and Disadvantages of Environmental Sustainability

250 Words Essay on Environmental Sustainability

Introduction to environmental sustainability.

Environmental sustainability is an integral aspect of our existence, intertwined with the notion of preserving the natural world for future generations. It encapsulates the concept of stewardship, wherein we are responsible for managing the Earth’s resources responsibly and efficiently.

The Imperative of Sustainable Practices

The current environmental crisis, characterized by climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, underscores the urgency of sustainable practices. These practices aim to minimize the environmental footprint by reducing waste, conserving energy, and promoting recycling. They are not merely an ethical obligation, but a necessity for human survival.

Role of Innovation in Sustainability

Innovation plays a pivotal role in environmental sustainability. Technological advancements like renewable energy, green architecture, and waste management systems pave the way for a sustainable future. They provide practical solutions to environmental problems, enabling us to balance economic growth with ecological preservation.

Individual Responsibility and Collective Action

Environmental sustainability demands individual responsibility and collective action. Each of us can contribute by adopting sustainable lifestyles, such as minimizing waste, conserving water, and reducing energy consumption. Collective action, on the other hand, involves policy changes, corporate responsibility, and international cooperation.

In conclusion, environmental sustainability is a multidimensional concept, involving the careful management of natural resources, innovative technologies, and concerted human effort. As stewards of the Earth, we must strive to ensure the sustainability of our planet for future generations.

500 Words Essay on Environmental Sustainability

Environmental sustainability is a concept that has grown in prominence as the world grapples with the effects of climate change. It refers to the practice of using resources in a way that preserves the environment for future generations. This includes reducing waste, promoting renewable energy, and maintaining biodiversity.

The Importance of Environmental Sustainability

The significance of environmental sustainability cannot be overstated. As the world’s population continues to grow, so does the demand for resources. This increased demand, coupled with unsustainable practices, has led to environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. By practicing environmental sustainability, we can help ensure that future generations inherit a planet that is as rich and diverse as the one we enjoy today.

Principles of Environmental Sustainability

Environmental sustainability is underpinned by several key principles. First, we must recognize the finite nature of our planet’s resources and strive to use them sparingly. Second, we must work towards reducing waste and promoting recycling. Third, we must strive to reduce our carbon footprint and promote renewable energy. Lastly, we must value and protect our biodiversity, recognizing the intrinsic worth of all living things.

Challenges to Environmental Sustainability

Despite its importance, achieving environmental sustainability is not without its challenges. There is often a conflict between economic development and environmental protection, with many arguing that the latter hampers the former. Additionally, there is a lack of awareness and understanding about environmental issues, leading to apathy and inaction. Lastly, there is a lack of political will to implement and enforce environmental regulations.

Role of Individuals and Institutions in Promoting Environmental Sustainability

Individuals and institutions have a crucial role to play in promoting environmental sustainability. Individuals can make a difference by making sustainable choices in their daily lives, such as reducing waste, recycling, and choosing renewable energy. Institutions, on the other hand, can implement sustainable practices in their operations and advocate for environmental sustainability at the policy level.

In conclusion, environmental sustainability is not just a buzzword; it is a necessity for our survival and the survival of future generations. It requires a collective effort from individuals, institutions, and governments alike. By understanding the importance of environmental sustainability and the principles that underpin it, we can all play a part in preserving our planet for future generations.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Environmental Issues
• Essay on Environmental Hygiene
• Essay on Environmental Hazards

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Environment
• Information Science
• Social Issues
• Argumentative
• Cause and Effect
• Classification
• Compare and Contrast
• Descriptive
• Exemplification
• Informative
• Controversial
• Exploratory
• What Is an Essay
• Length of an Essay
• Generate Ideas
• Types of Essays
• Structuring an Essay
• Outline For Essay
• Essay Introduction
• Thesis Statement
• Body of an Essay
• Writing a Conclusion
• Essay Writing Tips
• Drafting an Essay
• Revision Process
• Fix a Broken Essay
• Format of an Essay
• Essay Examples
• Essay Checklist
• Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Research Paper
• Write My Research Paper
• Write My Essay
• Custom Essay Writing Service
• Admission Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Essay
• Academic Ghostwriting
• Write My Book Report
• Case Study Writing Service
• Dissertation Writing Service
• Coursework Writing Service
• Lab Report Writing Service
• Do My Assignment
• Buy College Papers
• Capstone Project Writing Service
• Buy Research Paper
• Custom Essays for Sale

Can’t find a perfect paper?

• Free Essay Samples
• Environment Problems

The Environmental Crisis

Updated 18 October 2023

Subject Environment Problems

Downloads 63

Category Environment ,  Science

Topic Global Warming

The environmental crisis

The environmental crisis is a term to capsulate the deprivation and degradation of the earth by human and natural activities. The use of the world environment has become a significant tool in the elaboration of the issues facing the existences people. The assignment seeks to summarize an essay that details the dynamics associated with the use of the word environment and the details of the ideology in describing the current global pollution situation.

Current global environmental trends

The current global environmental trends are characterized by people and organization focusing on the elements that detail the real situation of the earth. For example, the measure of air, water and land pollution provides factual data about the current status of the environment. Generalization of the environment as a single spectrum limits people from comprehending the gravity of the present earth situation by examining the pollution, biological conditions and the scarcity nature of resources. In schools, students are trained about the environment as a general concept instead of elements that impact the concept. Students and professionals in various fields barely understand the dynamics associated with the environment and the dimension that affect the progression of the idea. It is because of the disconnect and misinformation of people about the facts that describe the fundamental aspects of the environment. Such a situation raises concerns on the nature of information students to learn about the environment and how they will best protect and preserve it.

In conclusion, it is clear that misinformation creates a situation where people do not know about the details of the environment they occupy. Focusing on the specifics rather than a generalization of the term environment will enable people to become abreast of the current global situation in respect to the surrounding. The progress made in protecting and preserving the environment need proper documentation through the measurement of the specific aspects of the concept.

Deadline is approaching?

Wait no more. Let us write you an essay from scratch

Related Essays

Related topics.

Find Out the Cost of Your Paper

Type your email

By clicking “Submit”, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy policy. Sometimes you will receive account related emails.

Environmental Crisis

The environment is in crisis. The population is growing and the demand on resources is increasing. The environment cannot keep up with the demands of the population. The result is pollution, climate change, and dwindling resources.

The environment is in crisis because the population is growing. The world population has doubled in the last 50 years. It is projected to double again in the next 50 years. The environment cannot keep up with the demands of the population. The result is pollution, climate change, and dwindling resources.

The environment is in crisis because the population growth is not sustainable. The environment cannot keep up with the demands of the population. The result is pollution, climate change, and dwindling resources.

We need to find a way to sustain the environment. We need to find a way to reduce the population growth. We need to find a way to reduce the demand on resources. Otherwise, we will continue to pollute the environment, cause climate change, and deplete our resources.

An environmental emergency is a concern for people’s surroundings, such as the environment. A community crisis is an emergency that affects the world’s population. Population growth is approaching a turning point where the world’s environment can no longer sustain the amounts of people it holds. When human beings are unable to be motivated to repair the problems with their own environment that they have created, we have a crisis of indifference and inaction.

The environment has been in a state of crisis for many years now. The signs are all around us – melting ice caps, rising sea levels, more frequent and more intense natural disasters, pollution, species extinction. The list goes on. And yet, we have done very little to address the root causes of this crisis.

Population growth is one of the main drivers of environmental degradation. As the world population continues to grow, we are putting ever-increasing pressure on the planet’s resources. This is especially true in developing countries, where population growth rates are highest.

We are also consuming these resources at an unprecedented rate. According to one estimate, if everyone on the planet consumed resources at the same rate as the average person in the United States, we would need four Earths to sustain us.

In addition to population growth and overconsumption, there are a number of other significant contributors to the environmental crisis. These include industrialization, fossil fuel use, deforestation, and agricultural practices.

All of these factors have led to a situation that is now critical. The environment is deteriorating at an alarming rate, and we are running out of time to address the issue. The question now is whether we will act before it’s too late.

The argument that we have an ecological disaster because we have a people problem is correct since much of our environmental issues are due to population growth, which has resulted in apathy and inaction toward the wasteful consumption of resources.

The examples include the desertification of the Sahel in Africa, China’s one-child policy, and ocean mismanagement. The Sahel is a stretch of land that runs for more than 6,000 kilometers along the southern perimeter of the Sahara Desert. It runs from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Ethiopia and Somalia in the east. These countries are among the poorest on Earth.

Dryland degradation is the main environmental issue in the Sahel. The primary cause of this is population growth. In 1950, the population of the Sahel was around 32 million people. In 2010, it had grown to more than double that, to over 65 million people. This rapid population growth has placed immense pressure on natural resources.

The one child policy in China was a program designed to limit population growth in China through various means, including education, financial incentives, and coercive measures. The policy was introduced in 1978 and began to be phased out in 2015. It is estimated that the policy prevented 400 million births from 1980 to 2000. As a result of the policy, China’s population is now aging rapidly and the country faces a shrinking workforce. The one child policy has been credited with helping to improve China’s environment.

The oceans are a vital part of the Earth’s environment. They cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and contain 97% of the Earth’s water. The oceans play a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate and weather patterns. They also provide a home for a vast array of plant and animal life.

However, the oceans are under threat from human activity. One of the biggest threats is overfishing. Overfishing occurs when fish are caught at a rate that exceeds their ability to reproduce. This can lead to population declines and even extinction. It also disrupts the delicate balance of marine ecosystems. Another major threat to the oceans is pollution.

The villages are at risk of abandonment because they are located in a region where the people are subjected to social and biophysical stress as a result of their forced living; they are depleting the agricultural productivity. The excessive population increase and ever more intense land pressure have triggered a spread of desert-like conditions into the Sahel, known as desertification.

This environmental crisis is a result of the way people have chosen to live; it is not caused by drought or other natural factors. The environment in the Sahelian zone of Africa has been under stress for many years as a result of human activities.

The population has been growing at an alarming rate and this, coupled with the pressure on the land from farming, has resulted in the expansion of desert-like conditions – a process called desertification. This environmental crisis is a result of the way people have chosen to live; it is not caused by drought or other natural factors.

The Sahelian environment has always been fragile, but it was able to support a large population because people lived a traditional lifestyle which was in harmony with the environment. The population was spread thinly over a large area and they used traditional methods of farming which did not place too much pressure on the land.

However, in recent years, the population has begun to increase rapidly and this, coupled with the pressure on the land from modern farming methods, has resulted in desertification. The environment can no longer support the population and people are forced to live in conditions of poverty and insecurity.

The environmental crisis in the Sahel is a result of human activities and it is something that we can do something about. We need to find ways to reduce the pressure on the environment and to help people adapt to the changes that are taking place.

One way to reduce the pressure on the environment is to reduce the population growth rate. This can be done through family planning and education programmes which help people to understand the need to control their fertility.

Another way to reduce the pressure on the environment is to improve the way we use the land. This means using more efficient farming methods and managing the land in a way that protects it from degradation. It also means planting trees and other plants which help to hold back the desert.

We also need to help people to adapt to the changes that are taking place in the environment. This means providing support to those who are most vulnerable, such as women and children. It also means helping people to find new ways of earning a living, such as through income-generating activities.

The environmental crisis in the Sahel is a result of human activities and it is something that we can do something about. We need to find ways to reduce the pressure on the environment and to help people adapt to the changes that are taking place. This will require a concerted effort from all those who are concerned about the future of the region.

More Essays

• Examples Of Environmental Injustice Essay
• Environmental Justice Examples Essay
• Mexico Tequila Crisis Analysis Research Paper
• Career Counseling Theories: Person-In-Environmental Analysis Essay
• Study of Environmental Issues Associated with Industrialization
• Essay about Plastic Affecting The Environment
• Overfishing Environmental Issues Essay
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Local Snail Population Case Study Essay

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

England’s sewage crisis: how polluted is your local river and which regions are worst hit?

Rivers in north of England among most polluted, shows new data. Search your postcode to see how sewage spills into your local river

Water companies in England face outrage over record sewage discharges

Rivers in the north of England are bearing the brunt of the sewage pollution crisis, analysis by the Guardian reveals, with the region’s waters experiencing the highest rates of waste discharge in the country.

Storm overflows around the Irwell valley, where the rivers Croal and Irwell run through to Manchester, discharged raw sewage 12,000 times in 2023 — the highest rate of all English rivers when accounting for length, at 95 spills per mile.

It comes as new data reveals that 2023 was the worst year on record for storm water pollution , with overflows spilling raw sewage into England’s rivers and seas for 3.6m hours. You can check your local rivers using the tool below, which shows spills across England’s river basins.

The Guardian’s analysis is based on Environment Agency data released on Wednesday, which details the number of times storm overflows discharged across England in 2023.

Overflows should only be used during exceptional weather events, such as major storms. But a lack of investment means there is a lack of capacity at treatment works and a failure to maintain assets, both of which contribute to the level of sewage discharges.

Regulators are investigating widespread suspected illegal sewage dumping, which takes place in breach of the permit conditions.

The River Irwell is a popular waterway for rowers and the scene of several regattas in summer — but the 2023 overflow data shows its waters and surrounding catchment area is now the worst sewage dumping ground in England.

Second worst for spills was the River Darwen, near Blackburn and Preston, where there were 3,145 sewage discharges from nearby overflows in 2023. Relative to the length of its waterways, this was equivalent to 83 spills per mile.

Just one river in the south of England features in the worst 10 rivers identified by the Guardian — the River Avon, as it makes its way through Bath and Bristol. The river suffered 6,573 sewage spills in 2023, or 74 spills per mile, making it the third most polluted in England.

Also worst for sewage spills was the River Calder near Halifax, the Aire near Bradford and the lower section of the Tyne around Newcastle and Sunderland, the Guardian’s analysis of Environment Agency data has found.

Water companies have faced a barrage of criticism in the wake of the data, which shows sewage spillages have more than doubled on 2022.

Several of the rivers highlighted by the Guardian have experienced large rises in sewage spills. Sewage spills rose from 7,168 in 2022 to 11,974 in 2023 on the Croal and Irwell and some of their nearby tributaries, while spills rose from 3,966 to 6,573 in the stretch of the River Avon that runs through Bath and Bristol.

Industry figures have pointed to the heavy rainfall over the autumn and winter that put huge pressure on the sewage system, and have stressed they are investing to upgrade the water network.

But campaigners say the use of the storm overflows has become routine after years of underinvestment, and that the levels of spilling far exceeds what might be expected from just relieving the strain of extreme weather.

Water UK, the trade association for water companies, said: “These results are unacceptable and demonstrate exactly why we urgently need regulatory approval to upgrade our system so it can better cope with the weather.

“We have a plan to sort this out by tripling investment which will cut spills by 40% by 2030 – more than double the government’s target.” We’d like to hear about your local river and the environmental issues affecting it. You can get in touch with us here .

Methodology

Storm overflow data is sourced from the Environment Agency’s (EA) event duration monitoring dataset and covers 2023. This data is collected by water companies using equipment attached to overflows and then submitted to the EA on an annual basis. It measures the number of times an overflow has discharged each year, though provides no indication of the volume of the discharge or its content.

River geographies and catchment areas sourced from the EA’s river catchment data explorer, produced from its work under the water framework directive. We have analysed rivers at an operational catchment level, which combines rivers and their tributaries into wider river basins. We have then used a geospatial analysis to locate all the overflow spills that lie within each of these basins, and summed up spills to produce a total for 2023.

River length figures have been calculated by the Guardian using the map information from EA’s catchment data, and are approximate only. We have used this estimation to calculate spills per mile for each river basins, which underpins our ranking of rivers.

• Water industry
• North of England

More on this story

Regulators urged to act over water companies’ record sewage discharge

People in the UK: tell us about your local river and the environmental issues affecting it

4m hours of raw sewage discharges in England in 2023, data expected to show

British and Irish rivers in desperate state from pollution, report reveals

Environment Agency failed to protect River Wye from chicken waste, court hears

Boat Race organisers warn rowers not to enter water after E coli discovery

Water firms’ profits in England and Wales almost double since 2019, find Lib Dems

England’s only three swimming rivers given ‘poor’ water quality status

England to diverge from EU water monitoring standards

Most viewed.

Advertisement

Supported by

Why the Solar Eclipse Will Not Leave People Without Power

Grid managers say they are well prepared to handle a sharp drop in the energy produced by solar panels as the eclipse darkens the sky in North America on April 8.

• Share full article

By Ivan Penn

Ivan Penn has covered the energy industry for more than 15 years.

When the sky darkens during next month’s solar eclipse, electricity production in some parts of the country will drop so sharply that it could theoretically leave tens of millions of homes in the dark. In practice, hardly anyone will notice a sudden loss of energy.

Electric utilities say they expect to see significant decreases in solar power production during the eclipse but have already lined up alternate sources of electricity, including large battery installations and natural gas power plants. Homeowners who rely on rooftop solar panels should also experience no loss of electricity because home batteries or the electric grid will kick in automatically as needed.

At 12:10 p.m. Central time on April 8, the solar eclipse will begin over southwestern Texas, the regional electrical system perhaps most affected by the event, and last three hours.

“I don’t think anything is as predictable as an eclipse,” said Pedro Pizarro, president and chief of executive of Edison International, a California power company, and the chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade organization. “You can prepare.”

This year’s solar eclipse will darken the sky as it passes over a swath of Mexico, the United States and Canada. That leaves solar energy systems — one of the nation’s fastest growing sources of electricity — vulnerable.

Although solar power produces only when the sun shines, forecasters can generally predict pretty well how much electricity panels will produce on any given day depending on the weather. That helps utility and grid managers make sure they have other sources of energy available to meet consumer needs.

Solar power accounted for nearly 6 percent of the electricity generated in the United States last year , up from less than 1 percent a decade earlier. Much of that energy was produced during the middle of the day, during the very hours that the eclipse will pass over the United States. Ramping up other temporary resources like power plants that typically run on natural gas can raise costs and increase greenhouse gas emissions, but energy experts said doing so for an eclipse will have minimal economic and environmental impact.

Electric grid managers regularly handle fluctuations in the supply of power because of bad weather and other events. They will be aided during this event by the timing of the eclipse, avoiding periods of high demand before people go to work and after they return home in the evening when electricity use generally peaks.

“There should be no disruption for customers if regulators plan appropriately,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “For Americans with solar on their home, it won’t be any different than a passing thunderstorm.”

One of the primary regulatory agencies that could be affected by the eclipse, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said it is prepared.

The council, which manages Texas’ grid, has been under scrutiny over the last few years following a collapse of the state’s electricity system during a winter storm and freeze in 2021. It has had to ask homeowners and businesses to reduce their electricity use during winter freezes and summer heat waves in recent years in order to avoid rolling blackouts.

A solar eclipse in October 2023 caused a dramatic drop in solar power production, forcing grid mangers to direct natural gas plants to ramp up production. That event prompted increased planning for the upcoming eclipse.

The Texas grid operator said it expected the April eclipse to reduce solar energy generation to “about 7.6 percent of its maximum clear sky output.”

It said it was “working on forecasting models to reflect reduced solar power production and does not expect any grid reliability concerns during the eclipse.”

Solar power has provided an increasingly large proportion of Texas’ electricity, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. More than a third of the solar additions in the United States this year are expected in the state — the most of any state — raising concern about the need for backup systems like batteries to ensure reliability of the grid during solar eclipses and extreme weather events.

The variable nature of solar power is increasingly one of the reasons consumers have been encouraged to add batteries to their rooftop solar systems. Solar homes that have batteries will see the least impact from the solar eclipse.

The eclipse “will have some very small impact,” said Mary Powell, chief executive of Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential solar company.

Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services. More about Ivan Penn

Hay grown for cattle consumes nearly half the water drawn from Colorado River, study finds

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

With chronic water shortages afflicting the Colorado River, discussions about how to cut usage have increasingly focused on a thirsty crop that consumes an especially large share of the river’s water: hay that is grown to feed cattle and produce beef and dairy products.

In a new study, researchers found that alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops consume 46% of the water that is diverted from the river, accounting for nearly two-thirds of agricultural water use. The research also shows that agriculture is the dominant user of Colorado River water, accounting for 74% of the water that is diverted — about three times the combined usage of all the cities that depend on the river.

The study presents the most detailed analysis of its kind to date, including extensive data on where the river’s water goes across seven Western states and northern Mexico. The research sheds new light on how the river’s water is used at a time when representatives of the federal government, states and tribes are seeking long-term solutions to reduce water use and adapt to climate change.

“It’s important to understand where all of the water goes,” said Brian Richter, a researcher who led the study. “This is the first complete and detailed accounting.”

Richter said he hopes the findings will provide vital information for ongoing talks that will determine “what we want the future of the Colorado River to look like.”

The study, which involved a team of 12 researchers and was published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, expands on previous research by including water use data for Mexico; the Gila River, a major tributary in Arizona; and supplies that are transported through canals and pipelines to areas outside the Colorado River Basin.

The researchers analyzed all water diversions for agriculture, communities and industries from 2000 to 2019, and calculated annual averages. They also included estimates of how much water evaporates from the river’s reservoirs, and the uptake of water by vegetation in wetlands and riparian areas along the river. Together, those account for 30% of overall consumption.

When additional losses that occur naturally along the river are factored in, agriculture accounts for 52% of overall consumption, including 32% of the total that goes toward irrigating alfalfa and other types of grass hay.

Cities — including municipal, commercial and industrial water use — account for the remaining 18% of overall water consumption.

The Colorado River supplies cities and farmlands in seven states from Wyoming to California, as well as 30 tribal nations. For decades, so much water has been diverted that the river has seldom met the sea and its once-vast wetlands in the river’s delta have dried up.

Climate & Environment

The Colorado River is overused and shrinking. Inside the crisis transforming the Southwest

The Colorado River is approaching a breaking point, its over-tapped reservoirs dropping. Years of drying have taken a toll at the river’s source in the Rockies.

Jan. 26, 2023

The river’s flow has declined dramatically since 2000, and research has shown that global warming worsened the long stretch of extremely dry years through 2022.

The river’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, remain at low levels despite a series of water-saving agreements, and the region’s water managers have been engaged in difficult negotiations on new rules for dealing with shortages after 2026, when the current rules expire.

“We need to move out of a reactive mode and into a proactive mode for the long term,” said Richter, who is president of the organization Sustainable Waters and senior freshwater fellow for the World Wildlife Fund.

Richter noted that with agriculture using much of the water, there has been increasing attention focused on ways of achieving reductions in usage, and he said the research can help by detailing how much is going to different crops, such as hay, wheat, cotton and vegetables.

Over the last two decades, many cities in the Colorado River Basin have made progress in conserving water . In another study , Richter surveyed 28 urban water utilities and found that total water use dropped by 18% between 2000 and 2020, even as the population grew by 24%.

“The cities that depend upon the Colorado River are doing a miraculous job of reducing their needs for that water, and we now need to see a commensurate reduction in agriculture’s use of the river,” Richter said.

“We need to get very serious about shifting to a different mixture of crops, and we need to reduce the overall footprint, the acreage of land, that is being used for farmland,” Richter said.

In California’s Imperial Valley, farmers brace for a future with less Colorado River water

As the federal government pushes states to reduce usage of dwindling Colorado River water, Imperial Valley farmers fear a “worst-case” scenario.

Jan. 27, 2023

Alfalfa and other types of hay are especially water-intensive crops. In one report , Richter and other researchers compared the estimated water demands of different crops and found that alfalfa requires significantly more water per acre than cotton, corn or wheat.

Richter said the purpose of the research isn’t to point fingers at farmers for the crops they choose to grow, but rather to show where opportunities lie for switching crops and transforming agriculture in the Southwest.

“It’s important to acknowledge that farmers are growing what people want and are willing to pay for. And the reason we’re using so much of the Colorado River water to feed cows is because of our demand for beef and dairy products,” he said. “And our demand for dairy, and specifically cheese, has been going up, which is causing expansion of dairies in a lot of the West and in the Colorado River Basin, and so that’s why they’re growing so much alfalfa.”

Richter said that as a scientist, he is reluctant to tell people what to eat, and thinks everyone should “act on their conscience.”

“Personally, once I started this research, I gave up beef consumption altogether,” Richter said.

The study found regional differences in the Colorado River Basin, where the water irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland and ranchland.

In the upper basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — cattle-feed crops consumed 90% of all water used by irrigated agriculture on average. In the lower basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada, hay accounted for 57% of agricultural water use, with more water going to crops such as wheat, cotton, oranges, lettuce and broccoli.

The researchers noted in the study that alfalfa is also attractive to growers for other reasons, including its hardiness and ability to survive with less water during droughts and then come back quickly once full irrigation resumes — functioning like a “shock absorber” for farmers dealing with unpredictable conditions.

Risks ease for Colorado River reservoirs after wet winter, but long-term challenges loom

Federal officials say short-term risks have eased on the Colorado River, providing ‘breathing room’ for talks on long-term plans to adapt to climate change.

March 6, 2024

Richter and other researchers have estimated that two-thirds of the alfalfa and other hay are used for beef cattle while the remaining third is used for dairy production.

Much of the hay is used to feed cows locally or in nearby states. But increasing amounts of hay have also been exported in recent years to countries such as China and Saudi Arabia. In one study , researchers at the University of Arizona examined crop data for seven Western states and estimated that 20% of the region’s total alfalfa production was exported in 2022.

Richter said he doesn’t think attempts at regulating crop types would work, but that creating financial incentives for growers to switch to less water-intensive crops can be effective. In a study last year, Richter and other scientists found that shifting from alfalfa to other types of hay, vegetable crops or wheat would save substantial amounts of water.

Reducing water use in agriculture, something that can come partly by growing a different mix of crops, is increasingly urgent as climate change continues to sap the river’s flow, Richter said.

Scientists have found that higher temperatures, driven by fossil fuel burning and rising levels of greenhouse gases, have reduced the river’s flow by about 10% so far, and the toll is projected to worsen as warming continues.

“There just simply isn’t enough water to continue growing what we’ve been growing for the last hundred years,” Richter said. “We need to find a way to help the farmers make the necessary transition and help protect them from going broke.”

Short-term efforts to cut water use in the region rely partly on payments of federal funds to agricultural landowners, water districts, tribes and cities that have agreed to reduce usage.

For example, growers in the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe, Calif., have been participating in a program in which they agree to leave some farmland dry and fallow in exchange for cash payments on a rotating basis.

Some efforts to cut water use have run into complications. California’s Imperial Irrigation District had been planning to start a conservation program next month that would pay farmers to temporarily stop watering some crops, but the start of the effort was put on hold after environmentalists raised concerns that dry irrigation drains could threaten endangered desert pupfish, which live along the shore of the Salton Sea and in nearby ponds.

Endangered desert pupfish delays Colorado River conservation plans for Imperial Valley

Concerns about the endangered desert pupfish delay Colorado River conservation plans in Imperial Valley

March 27, 2024

As the region’s water managers continue negotiating long-term approaches for reducing water use, Richter said it will be vital to create a fund with federal and state support to help farmers change crops or retire some cropland.

The researchers wrote in the study that they hope their accounting will provide a “useful informational foundation to the public [dialogue] and political negotiations over Colorado River Basin water allocations and cutbacks.”

They also said their new accounting shows “why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea,” estimating that from 2000 to 2019, an average of 19.3 million acre-feet of water was used up before the river reached its desiccated end in Mexico.

“More water needs to remain in the river system to prevent species extinctions and restore wetlands,” Richter said, pointing out that water diversions and dam operations have put at risk two-thirds of the native fish species in the Colorado River Basin, among them the Colorado pikeminnow and humpback chub.

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who oversaw management of the river under President Clinton, said the findings will help provide a solid factual base for discussions about the river’s future.

“The role of irrigated agriculture is now front and center, because if we’re going to find an agreement in the current negotiations, it is going to require significant agricultural reductions across the basin,” Babbitt said.

With severe drought, an urgent call to rework the Colorado River’s defining pact

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt says with climate change shrinking the Colorado River, Western states should renegotiate a key 1922 agreement.

May 19, 2022

He has suggested creating a long-term regionwide program that would provide funding to support cuts in agricultural water use through seasonal land-fallowing, with limits aimed at protecting farming communities.

“We’re going to have to begin setting up frameworks at the state and national level to get this process going, to come to a conclusion about how you put together voluntary programs that have incentives, that do not destroy local communities,” Babbitt said.

For the next three years, federal funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are supporting the water-saving efforts . Babbitt said one key question will be where the federal government can find money for a long-term program aimed at scaling back agricultural water use.

“The transition that we have to make in the next decade — reducing consumption to balance water availability and water use — is not going to be a catastrophic change,” Babbitt said.

He cited estimates that addressing the river’s chronic overuse will require reducing usage by 20% to 25%.

“It’s a crisis only if we do nothing, but if we set about doing it in a thoughtful way, it’s manageable,” Babbitt said.

As for the large acreages now growing alfalfa, Babbitt noted that the crop generates relatively low returns and is often the first one taken out of production when farmers agree to temporarily fallow fields. He said that makes the crop an obvious place to begin reducing water use.

“It is the most economical way, in the Colorado River Basin, of reducing consumption,” he said. “There are plenty of other areas in this country where there is more than adequate water to grow alfalfa and animal feed.”

Times staff writer Hayley Smith contributed to this report.

Toward a more sustainable California

Get Boiling Point, our newsletter exploring climate change, energy and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More to Read

‘We can do better’: Western states divided over long-term plans for Colorado River water

March 8, 2024

Letters to the Editor: Farms vs. cities is an outdated way of looking at California’s water crisis

Jan. 24, 2024

California water agencies announce conservation plans to ease strains on Colorado River

Dec. 14, 2023

Ian James is a reporter who focuses on water in California and the West. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2021, he was an environment reporter at the Arizona Republic and the Desert Sun. He previously worked for the Associated Press as a correspondent in the Caribbean and as bureau chief in Venezuela. He is originally from California.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion: California has to conserve water. Why is Sacramento dragging its heels?

March 28, 2024

Yes, beavers can help stop wildfires. And more places in California are embracing them

March 26, 2024

The Klamath River’s dams are being removed. Inside the effort to restore a scarred watershed

March 24, 2024

California doubles State Water Project allocation thanks to February storms

March 23, 2024

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here .

S omething went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics : Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand , the Nordic countries , and beyond . By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less , having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens , and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May , OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound , but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction . Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now

Related Podcast

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play .

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults .

From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital ––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions–– exacerbated parental fears . Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting . In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for “engagement,” that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007 )—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent , and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns , even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average . The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they’re missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly,” and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s , and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media . Exercise declined , too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010 s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

Read: What happens when kids don’t see their peers for months

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied , meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous ; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication , or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit , so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly— one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer . This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “ Internet gaming disorder ,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that , from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind , writes ,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem . It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study , these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up .

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org , suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children’s friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

P arents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Please click here to see any active alerts .

• Headquarters | Air and Radiation (OAR)

Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money

Final standards will expand consumer choice in clean vehicles and build on historic progress in U.S. auto manufacturing under President Biden’s Investing in America agenda

March 20, 2024

WASHINGTON – Today, March 20, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced final national pollution standards for passenger cars, light-duty trucks, and medium-duty vehicles for model years 2027 through 2032 and beyond. These standards will avoid more than 7 billion tons of carbon emissions and provide nearly $100 billion of annual net benefits to society, including $13 billion of annual public health benefits due to improved air quality, and $62 billion in reduced annual fuel costs, and maintenance and repair costs for drivers. The final standards deliver on the significant pollution reductions outlined in the proposed rule, while accelerating the adoption of cleaner vehicle technologies. EPA is finalizing this rule as sales of clean vehicles, including plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles, hit record highs last year.

EPA projects an increase in U.S. auto manufacturing employment in response to these final standards, consistent with the broader Biden-Harris Administration commitment to create good-paying, union jobs leading the clean vehicle future. Strong standards have historically contributed to the U.S. leading the world in the supply of clean technologies, with corresponding benefits for American global competitiveness and domestic employment. Since President Biden took office, companies have announced more than $160 billion in investment in U.S. clean vehicle manufacturing and the U.S. auto manufacturing sector has added more than 100,000 jobs.

These standards will provide greater certainty for the auto industry, catalyzing private investment, creating good-paying union jobs, and invigorating and strengthening the U.S. auto industry. Over the next decade, the standards, paired with President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda and investments in U.S. manufacturing, will set the U.S. auto sector on a trajectory for sustained growth. Additionally, the final standards will lower costs for consumers. Once fully phased in, the standards will save the average American driver an estimated $6,000 in reduced fuel and maintenance over the life of a vehicle.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan will join President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi today at an event in Washington, DC to announce the final standards and how they build on President Biden’s historic climate and economic record. The event will be livestreamed starting at noon EDT.

“With transportation as the largest source of U.S. climate emissions, these strongest-ever pollution standards for cars solidify America’s leadership in building a clean transportation future and creating good-paying American jobs, all while advancing President Biden’s historic climate agenda,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan . “The standards will slash over 7 billion tons of climate pollution, improve air quality in overburdened communities, and give drivers more clean vehicle choices while saving them money. Under President Biden’s leadership, this Administration is pairing strong standards with historic investments to revitalize domestic manufacturing, strengthen domestic supply chains and create good-paying jobs.” 

“President Biden is investing in America, in our workers, and in the unions that built our middle class and established the U.S. auto sector as a leader in the world,” said President Biden’s National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi . “The President’s agenda is working. On factory floors across the nation, our autoworkers are making cars and trucks that give American drivers a choice – a way to get from point A to point B without having to fuel up at a gas station. From plug-in hybrids to fuel cells to fully electric, drivers have more choices today. Since 2021, sales of these vehicles have quadrupled and prices continue to come down. This growth means jobs, and it means we are moving faster and faster to take on the climate crisis – all thanks to the President’s leadership.”

Statement from United Automobile Workers : “The EPA has made significant progress on its final greenhouse gas emissions rule for light-duty vehicles. By taking seriously the concerns of workers and communities, the EPA has come a long way to create a more feasible emissions rule that protects workers building ICE vehicles, while providing a path forward for automakers to implement the full range of automotive technologies to reduce emissions.”

Light- and Medium-Duty Vehicle Final Standards

The final standards announced today, the “Multi Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles,” build on EPA’s existing emissions standards for passenger cars and light trucks for model years 2023 through 2026. The standards continue the technology-neutral and performance-based design of previous EPA standards for cars, pickups, and vans, and leverage advances in clean car technologies to further reduce both climate pollution and smog- and soot-forming emissions. EPA is finalizing the same standard proposed for MY 2032 while allowing additional time for the auto sector to scale up clean vehicle manufacturing supply chains in the first three years covered by the rule.

Annually, the net benefits to society for the light- and medium-duty final rule are estimated to be $99 billion. The final rule is expected to avoid 7.2 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055, roughly equal to four times the emissions of the entire transportation sector in 2021. It will also reduce fine particulate matter and ozone, preventing up to 2,500 premature deaths in 2055 as well as reducing heart attacks, respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, aggravated asthma, and decreased lung function.

EPA received extensive feedback on the proposed rule, including through written comments, testimony at public hearings, and other stakeholder engagements. The final standards were informed by the best available data in the public record and rigorous technical assessments. Like the proposal, EPA’s final rule gives manufacturers the flexibility to efficiently reduce emissions and meet the performance-based standards through the mix of technologies they decide is best for them and their customers. EPA’s analysis considers a broad suite of available emission control technologies, and projects that consumers will continue to have a wide range of vehicle choices under the final rule, including advanced gasoline vehicles, hybrids, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and full battery electric vehicles.

Compared to the existing MY 2026 standards, the final MY 2032 standards represent a nearly 50% reduction in projected fleet average GHG emissions levels for light-duty vehicles and 44% reductions for medium-duty vehicles. In addition, the standards are expected to reduce emissions of health-harming fine particulate matter from gasoline-powered vehicles by over 95%. This will improve air quality nationwide and especially for people who live near major roadways and have environmental justice concerns.

Investing in America’s Clean Transportation Future

The final rule reflects the significant investments in clean vehicle technologies that industry is already making domestically and abroad, as well as ongoing U.S. market shifts and increasing consumer interest in clean vehicles. The Biden-Harris Administration is also directly supporting communities across America in moving towards a cleaner transportation future, including by building a national network of EV chargers and alternative-fuel stations; ensuring domestic manufacturers have the critical minerals and materials they need to make EV batteries; and funding clean transit and clean school buses, with priority for underserved communities. President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is focused on growing the American economy from the bottom up and the middle out – from rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, to creating a manufacturing and innovation boom, to building a clean-energy economy that will combat climate change and make our communities more resilient.

Here's what leaders are saying about the final rule:

“I’ve always said Michigan automakers are the best in the world. And this is their moment,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow (MI) . “I appreciate EPA’s commitment to engaging with our automakers and autoworkers to develop an ambitious but achievable final rule. It represents an opportunity for union workers to continue to build the vehicles of the future right here in the U.S. and tackle the climate crisis.”

“My priority will always be to protect American jobs and our environment, keep the United States at the forefront of automotive manufacturing, technology, and innovation, and keep our domestic industry strong and competitive,” said Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (MI-06) . “The EPA has worked with all stakeholders to reach this final rule that includes hybrid and electric vehicles, and ensure these goals are achievable. It’s important to protect vehicle choice – the number of available models has doubled in the last three years, and in the last year sticker prices are down 20%. We need to continue to work on making sure that these vehicles are affordable to everyone, that we have the infrastructure in place to make them accessible and practical for consumers, and bring jobs back to the U.S. The bottom line is that the future of the industry must be created in America and driven by American workers, and we are all committed to working together toward that future.”

“The future is electric. Automakers are committed to the EV transition – investing enormous amounts of capital and building cutting edge battery electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, traditional hybrids and fuel cell vehicles that drive efficiency and convert petroleum miles to electric miles,” said John Bozzella, President and CEO, Alliance for Automotive Innovation . “Consumers have tons of choices. But pace matters. Moderating the pace of EV adoption in 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030 was the right call because it prioritizes more reasonable electrification targets in the next few (very critical) years of the EV transition. These adjusted EV targets – still a stretch goal – should give the market and supply chains a chance to catch up. It buys some time for more public charging to come online, and the industrial incentives and policies of the Inflation Reduction Act to do their thing. And the big one? The rules are mindful of the importance of choice to drivers and preserves their ability to choose the vehicle that’s right for them.”

“This is a day to celebrate American achievement. The step EPA is taking today will slash climate pollution and air pollution,” said Amanda Leland, Executive Director of Environmental Defense Fund . “It will bring more jobs for workers, more choices and more savings for consumers, and a healthier future for our children. The U.S. has leapt forward in the global race to invest in clean vehicles, with $188 billion and nearly 200,000 jobs on the way. Jobs in communities across the country, in places like Michigan, Nevada, and Kentucky. These clean car standards will help supercharge economic expansion and make America stronger.”

“These standards make clear that securing America’s global leadership in manufacturing and securing a better future are 100% aligned,” said Albert Gore, Executive Director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association . “We have everything we need today to meet and exceed this standard, and that means more of the vehicles sold in America will be made in America.”

Learn more information about the final rule .