Hanan Ahmed Ali - Ecological Imprint by Wendell Berry

When I first saw the speech I was like "Uhh, another boring speech on environment!" But after watching the speech to the end, I loved it because it gave us solutions on how to improve our environment. However, I started linking the advices that Berry gave in his speech to my practical life as well, which was very helpful. In Berry’s speech, he first gave a comparison between a humming bird to a human by saying that despite the low capabilities of a bird, it can still reach its goal if it aims at it, even if it has to travel miles and miles. 

After the comparison, he says “For humans, local adaptation is not work for a few financiers, and a few intellectual and political hotshots. This is work for everybody, requiring everybody’s intelligence. It is work inherently democratic.” I personally believe that this sentence is the most important sentence in his whole speech because it highlights the purpose of this speech. Followed by seven important advices for solving the environmental problem or we could link it to any other problem. Two of them, I find very important and started applying them. The first one was that it is very important to learn about the sources and the cost of our economic lives. For instance, water, if we know how valuable it is to us as humans, and that our body is 75% water. In one of the websites I found out that only under 900 million people across the world have access to clean, purified water and 4,500 children across the world die daily from water diseases which is even more than from HIV-AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. So coming back to Berry's speech, if we know how important this source is and how many children die from water pollution, we will not even think of polluting water, because every time we will think of throwing waste in water, it will come to our thoughts on how many children will die just because we could not put the waste in its right place. Another important factor that was mentioned in Berry's speech is that we have to solve our own problems and not depend on any expert, political leader or co-operation. Linking this point to water pollution again, if we throw waste in water and pollute it saying that it will get cleaned, environmental experts will look into cleaning it, but again, until when will they keep on cleaning the water? The planet covers over 70.78% of water; will the experts clean all of it? A better solution to this is that we stop polluting it so work can be less for the experts and water can get cleaner where mothers do not have to their children because our carelessness. Finally, I hope that sharing my personal thoughts was enjoyable.

Refrences
http://pulitzercenter.org/downstream?gclid=CL-_wuuwmqkCFUEb4Qodg17uuw
http://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/search.html?st=Wendell+Berry+-+On+mankind&submit=Submit+Query
http://www.enotes.com/science-fact-finder/earth/how-much-earths-surface-land-how-much-water