Me and My Environment

Sustainability is the ability to maintain a certain status or process in existing systems. The most frequent use of the term “sustainability” is connected to biological or human systems in the context of ecology. The ability of an ecosystem to function and maintain productivity for a prolonged period is also sustainability. Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Sustainability is important because all the choices we pursue and all the actions that we make today will affect everything in the future. We need to make sound decisions at present in order to avoid limiting the choices of generations to come.
For example, if you continue wasting water and polluting the dwindling supply of freshwater that we have today, we leave future generations with no other choice than to desalinate saltwater or treat contaminated water for their consumption and daily use. We can also be assured that, if that happens, all life that depends on clean freshwater will become extinct.
The same goes with the supply of soil that we currently have. Without proper care, our soils can easily lose quality enough that they will no longer be able to encourage growth and sustain life. If that happens, future civilizations will be void of crop and other natural sources of food. They will then have no other choice but to create man-made sources for nourishment and sustenance.
In the past, the entire human population was small and civilizations had very few needs. At that time, natural resources seemed infinite because the capacity of nature to regenerate was much higher than the rate at which human beings used up resources. Today, we are painfully beginning to learn that environmental resources are limited and are quite sensitive to everything that we do. We are starting to experience the effects of the actions of generations that came before us. To make sure that future generations will not experience