Technology has given humans numerous advantages. One advantage, in particular, is the improvement in the way we think that results in a change in the way we learn. Although this advantage is very helpful in today’s world, there is a downside in its effect on the environment and our future. When militaries started occupying land, they began to enforce their own culture upon that land. This included using the military’s technology to advance civilization. Even though technology has made significant advancements and improvements in life, one must also consider how technology has hurt the environment.
In the article “Which Species Will Live? ” Michelle Nijhuis explains how technology has led to the important moral issue of whether or not to focus on saving one species at the cost of ignoring another and let it fall victim to extinction. David Foster Wallace’s article “Consider the Lobster” deals with the Maine Lobster Festival and shows how technology has led to a detrimental danger to the environment by connecting it to the brutal killing of lobsters for people’s pleasure.
Finally, Annie Leonard’s script from her video “The Story of Bottled Water” describes how the producers of bottled water have taken over the market for water and have skewed the public’s perception of tap water in order to sell their product. Each of these pieces of work connects technology with a way in which it harms the environment. When militaries occupy land, they open up new ways for people to affect the environment in negative ways.
One way that humans have affected the environment in a negative way as a result of militaries that occupy land is that they have asserted their inherent call to protect Earth and are deciding the fate of animals. In Nijhuis’ article ‘Which Species Will Live? ” she unveils how the sharing of ideas has resulted in the problem of deciding whether to let entire species go extinct, without doing anything to help them survive.
Nijhuis states “As budgets shrink, environmental stresses grow, and politicians and regulators increasingly favor helping the economy over helping the planet, many scientists have come to acknowledge the need for triage” (565). This quote demonstrates the apparent obligation that humans feel to help protect the environment. Humans feel obligated to protect species in the first place, but this has resulted in humans losing resources to help them. As a result, humans are now deciding which species should survive based on which species they think will be the best for the environment.
One of the ways to determine which species is best is by prioritizing “threatened species with a unique job… before those with a so-called redundant role” (Nijhuis 566). The problem with this system of determining which species has a unique job is that it only works when the ecosystem is well understood and you can properly determine if the species is important. When humans control which species survive and which species become extinct, this creates the problem that now the natural order of the Earth is being disrupted. Whole ecosystems could be permanently affected because the natural way of life becomes disturbed.
This would not be a problem if humans did not feel the obligation to control other species. As militaries occupy land the need to control results in a negative effect on the environment. It is important to understand that humans have a natural tendency to want to control other species. In order to understand why humans have the desire to control, we must first examine an example of how humans exert their control. The brutal treatment of lobsters at the Maine Lobster Festival exhibited in Wallace’s article, “Consider the Lobster,” reveals how humans are wired to want to control other species.
Wallace describes the process of cooking lobster by describing how one can hear “the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around” and that the lobster “behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water” (704). By using the descriptive language and creating an image of torture and pain in the reader’s head, Wallace exemplifies how humans take control of a lobster just so they can enjoy the taste of its meat. It is not necessary for someone who wants lobster to brutally place a live creature in boiling water, but humans do this because we are controlling by nature.
Wallace proposes one reason why humans have this natural tendency to control animals when he informs his readers that “even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals” (703). He is implying that the reason humans attempt to control nature is because animals cannot communicate with us.
We have the mindset that because we are so much m advanced than animals we have the right to dominate and manipulate animals. This same mindset is what leads us to our inclination to decide which species will live. This idea that we are more powerful than animals is what leads us to also feel the need to take control of the natural occurrences of ecosystems. When we decide to prevent a species from becoming extinct while ignoring another species that is also becoming extinct, we are being detrimental to the environment.
Preventing natural events from happening in the wild, like animal extinction, could affect other species’ lives and their ability to survive, leading to a domino effect of detrimental problems. Not only is it a problem that humans are preventing natural events from happening, but humans are using technology to aid in this alteration of the environment. The example of how bottled water companies are using advertisements to persuade consumers to drink bottled water over tap water in Leonard’s script “The Story of Bottled Water” demonstrates how humans have the power to assert their ominance in order to achieve their own goals.
Leonard states that “companies manufacture demand so we feel we need ever more and ever newer clothes, cars, toasters, furniture, shoes… everything” (205). This is what bottled water companies are doing to persuade people to buy their water rather than drink it from the tap. Leonard also states, “The main tool to promote manufactured demand is advertising” (205). Humans are using technology to achieve their own goals while disregarding how it affects the environment.
In the case of the bottled water companies, they are manufacturing a demand so that more people will buy their bottled water. The companies want to sell their product, even if it means using propaganda to negatively portray tap water, resulting in an unnecessary production of plastic bottles. With the excessive amount of plastic bottles, landfills are being overcrowded with bottles that are not decomposable which has contributed to toxic pollution and polluted public water. As a result of humans asserting their dominance in order to achieve their own goals, the environment is now at risk.
If the technology did not exist, then humans would not have this ability to easily change the minds of other humans to do something that is so detrimental to society. A challenge to humans is our obligation to exert our power in order to protect the Earth. This can be seen in “Which Species Will Live” as Nijhuis gives the example of how humans are deciding the fate of animals because they feel that they are actually helping to protect the Earth, when in reality, they are disrupting the natural way of life. The reason that humans feel the obligation to protect the Earth is because we have the natural tendency to want to control other species.
As Wallace discovered in “Consider the Lobster,” humans reveal this controlling behavior when they prepare lobster for their pleasure. Finally, in “The Story of Bottled Water,” Leonard reveals how there are things that influence humans to negatively affect the environment, like technology. When militaries occupy land, human’s obligation to protect the environment can cause harm to the environment. In conclusion, humans must identify this plight and take action to prevent further destruction of the Earth’s ecosystem.
