HUMN 221-09 Group 4:
Every year, human beings around the world waste a large portion of our parents natural resources. The earth contains enough natural resources to sustain the life of the 7.125 billion people that live here. Instead of taking care of our planet, we destroy and abuse it because it is in our human nature to bite off more than we can chew, and we end up wasting our now depleting natural resources. Section 31 of John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government explains how “nothing was made by God to spoil and destroy” which correlates to passage 22 of Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si'” and explains how these problems are related to us living in a “throwaway culture”.
“Nothing was made by God to spoil and destroy” Locke stated. This insinuates the planet’s resources were created for us to use , not abuse. The earth is our home and should be treated with the upmost care and be a hospitable environment for every creature who inhabits it. No living thing should take more than they need, doing so can result in heavy consequences.
Pope Francis states in passage 22 of the encyclical: “These problems are closely linked to a throwaway culture…:”. This is connected to Locke’s statement in describing humans as wasteful.
We are very quickly running out of resources, and although we have made continued advances in technology and man made alternatives, these can never match and never replace that of the original resources of the earth.