Sustainable Environment

 Our cultural and religious doctrines deal with the environment and nature as a divine gift, and about humanity's need to protect it. People who love and respect their environment are considered capable of loving and respecting each other. Without a protected environment, people would not be healthy. The environment has become important over the last century. Industrialization and mineral extraction threatened wildlife, agriculture, land, and water. Urbanization also made people detached from the world of nature and its significance.

For man, the environment is the structure in which he lives, which contains soil, water, and air, along with what components each of these three elements contains like living creatures. This structure is also impacted by various aspects of weather, climate, wind, rain, gravity, magnetism, and other interrelationships.

The human being is considered the most important vital factor in bringing about environmental change and disruption to the natural biological system. Since existence, humans have been dealing with the components of the environment. The more years pass, the more control they gain over the environment, especially after the scientific and technological progresses, which have offered more opportunities for humans to make change in the environment according to their increasing need for food and clothing. Thus, man cuts down forest trees, transforms the deforested land into farms, factories, and houses, over-consumes pastures with intensive grazing, and resorts to the use of chemical fertilizers and agricultural pesticides of various kinds. All of these factors are vital in disrupting the ecosystem balance. For example, forests are environmental systems closely related to humans, and forests include about 28% of the continents’ land size, and therefore their degradation or removal causes serious repercussions in the ecosystem, especially in the required balance between the proportions of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air. Moreover, the unwise use of pastures leads to the deterioration of the natural vegetation, which is accompanied by a deterioration in the soil and climate. If the deterioration continues, the soil would be exposed to erosion and land sliding.

With regard to agricultural systems and unbalanced agriculture, man has transformed natural forests into agricultural lands, thus replacing the natural ecosystems with artificial ones. He has replaced normal food chains and the interrelationships between organisms and the distinctive elements of ecosystems with another type of relationship between the cultivated crops and their surrounding environment. He used fertilizers and pesticides to reach this goal. One of the major mistakes made by man in his understanding of the agricultural investment of the land is his belief that he can replace the complex natural relationships that exist between environmental factors and plants with simplified artificial factors. This contradicts with the organized set of nature's laws and thus it is creating imbalances and making agricultural systems cumbersome and volatile. In addition to this, irregular fishing and deterioration of vegetation cover, which leads to the exposure of a large number of wild plants and animals to extinction, and this contributes to further disturbing the ecological balance.

People in the face of environmental challenges:

Man is one of the living creatures on the earth, and he needs oxygen for his breathing and for his vital processes, and he also needs a continuous supply of energy that he extracts from his organic food, which he can only obtain from other living organisms, plants and animals. He also needs drinking water for a portion necessary to keep him alive. The continuity of his life clearly depends on finding urgent solutions to many major environmental problems, the most prominent of which are three problems that can be summarized as follows:

A. How to access sufficient sources of food to provide energy for its growing numbers.

B. How to dispose of the increasing volume of its waste and to improve the means – which must be reached - to dispose of its various wastes, especially non-biodegradable waste.

C. How to reach the appropriate rate of population growth, so that there is a balance between the number of population and the environment.

It is certain that the fate of man is linked to the biological balances and the food chains contained in the ecosystems, and that any disruption of these balances and chains is directly reflected on the human life. Therefore, the key success for the human being lies in maintaining the integrity of the ecosystems that secure a better life for him.