Ensuring Enviromental Sustainibility

The United Nation Millennium Development Goal that stood out to me was ensuring environmental sustainability.  I think this is an extremely important issue that is often overlooked because the impacts of ignoring the issue, while catastrophic, would be far into the future.  This goal actually encompasses many substantial goals within itself such as: improving fresh water accessibility and sanitation, decreasing biodiversity loss, and improving quality of life for those living in slums. 

While sanitation and fresh water are readily available in our community, there are still many things we can do to help our environment in virtually every other way outlined in this millennium goal.  There are the more obvious options of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by using hybrid cars, moving to biofuels, and generally just not using cars by riding bikes, walking, etc. 

Something equally important as these direct impacts on the environment is thinking about the indirect consequences of our actions.  Perhaps some of the most frightening situations are the deforestation in the amazon and the biodiversity loss associated with and without deforestation.  The world's growing demands is consequently putting pressure to clear more rainforest which houses some of the world's most important keystone species.  The world's growing demands have also caused overfishing and loss of biodiversity in the world's oceans.