Introduction
Imagine slowly starving, in the boiling sun. No fresh water, no food, and nothing can shield you from the heat. Slowly your eyes close, and then everything turns black…
If we run out of resources, it can mean the end of us. This article is going to be about the three resources we need for us to survive, and what we can do about the amount we have.
Food
Talking about food, that is my second topic. Food and Agriculture Organization says that of all the food produced every year, roughly one third of it, about 1.3 billion tonnes, is wasted. If you were to feed people like the average american for one year with this food, you could feed around 650,000 people. This food instead is tossed away into landfills and other places where it will never be recycled. Food is one of the key things we need to have because if there was no food left in the world, agriculture would die, which would mean no meat, which means no humans. According to Business Insider Singapore, the human body can only last about 3 weeks without food, so it would not be long before we were of the planet.
Here is a short video conducted by BuzzFeed to show how much food the world eats everyday.
Water
There is 338,168,194 Cubic Miles of water in the world. But not all of this water is drinkable. Only 8,454,204.85 Cubic Miles of water is drinkable. According to National Geographic, “Freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet. While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” This explains although there is 8,454,204.85 Cubic Miles of fresh water, not all of it can be drunk right away. Another problem is the amount of water we waste. National Geographic says that the average hamburger takes 2,400 liters of water, which is extremely wasteful.
Shelter
My final point is about shelter, which is one of the key things we need to survive. If there was no shelter in the world, that means we would be cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. Deforestation is one of the main problems of our wood supply. Roughly 18 million acres of forest, which is roughly the size of the country of Panama, is lost each and year according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Wood is constantly being illegally chopped down, for different reasons as well as housing, for example for land space, and as fuel, coal. If there was no trees left in the world, wildlife living in those areas would have to move somewhere else or slowly die off.
