The first case study that I’ve chosen is from IRIN News and is about climate change and its possible effects on disease throughout the world. The article can be found at https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog030/node/355. The goal of this piece is to shed light on the fact that the world’s epidemics have been changing in ways that our healthcare might not be able to keep up with. These changes have ties to warmer temperatures and other changes that could be due to climate change. If humans are to blame for the climate changes that the Earth is experiencing, than the idea of sustainable development that isn’t compromising to future generations is already being forsaken. Major changes would have to be made to avoid some of the problems that have occurred in history. A farmed out piece of land is maybe just as bad as a disease infested wasteland. Changes in our current development may be able to curb the rising temperatures of the Earth, possibly avoiding some of the consequences that are being described and predicted in the article.

The second case can be found at http://earthjustice.org/features/the-case-of-the-vanishing-honey-bee#. I found this because I’m already familiar with the problems that the world’s bee population has been facing for the last 10 years, and some of the points in the article described above, draw very similar and parallel points with bees. The bee population in the world has dramatically decreased and this issue should be of concern to all. According to this article and many others like it, it’s estimated that every third bite of food in the world is made possible by the pollination of bees. This article draws specific attention to neonics used in plants today. Neonics are systemic when taken in by the plant and persist always, not like conventional pesticides that wear off at some point. This poses serious hazards to bees as these plants will poisonous to them for their entire lives. This again calls into question the absolute need for sustainable development, specifically in regards to agriculture.

California has been facing some of the most severe drought conditions in living memory. Many crops have already failed and many ecosystems have been forever changed because of this. Already, many farms in California rely almost solely on domesticated honey bees to pollinate their crops because there is not enough local and native pollinators available. If climate change persists and conditions do not improve California’s agriculture could suffer egregiously and could slip so far as to not recover. In regards to the first case study; what would happen if some new disease that effected insects proliferated and killed all of the local bees? Even if eventually moisture returned to the area you wouldn’t be able to get bee keepers to truck their bees in for fear of the new epidemic, effectively ending agriculture that relies on pollination in the state. Sustainable development applies to agriculture the same way as it does to burning fossil fuels. If our current practices are killing the world’s leading pollinator, we need to re-think them. If are current practices are altering the climate of the world, we need to re-think them.