LIFESTYLES: PAST AND PRESENT

OH MY GOD! MY NINTENDO IS BROKEN!

DARLING, COME HERE, I’M GOING TO TELL YOU

SOMETHING.

Juanito, when I was a child, we didn’t have TV,

dishwasher or microwave… and our mothers had to do everything by

hand. And we didn’t have computers,

videogames… If we wanted to have fun, we went and played in the street with our friends. We just

played hide and seek, marbles or just raced each other. Those were

wonderful times!

Environment is largely affected by the needs of human beings.

In the past vast natural spaces provided plenty of fresh air. However, due to the increase in population and the industrial revolutions, green areas have been destroyed to build towns and industrial areas.

Industries and cities have polluted the rivers, the oceans and the atmosphere.

Excessive use of plastic and pesticides together with an inappropriate disposal of waste have added to the problem.

We should look back into the past and see what has gone wrong with our lifestyles.

Transport, years ago

How did our grandparents go to school or to work?

Transport, nowadaysWe can travel in modern comfortable vehicles.

How do we go to school or to work?

Do we use modern means of transport in a reasonable way?

Vehicles powered by petrol or diesel engines pollute a lot. They release carbon dioxide which is the cause of the greenhouse effect.

Scientists are working on cleaner means of transport but in the meanwhile we have to take advantage of public transport and walk or cycle whenever it’s possible.

Appliances, years ago

In the past most housework was done by hand, they didn’t use much electricity or fossil fuels. It was a

very hard life for women who used to do these tasks.

Moreover food didn’t use to have much packaging and was usually transported in baskets, cloth bags, cardboard boxes, etc.

Modern appliances

These wonderful inventionsmake life comfortable and much more pleasant.

Nowadays we use very modern washing machines and driers.

We wash the dishes in the dishwasher and have ovens and microwave ovens to make cooking quicker.

We keep the food in powerful fridges and freezers.

Food comes in lots of different kinds of packaging: glass, metal and lots of plastic.

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All those things have a big impact on the environment.

Electrical devices make our lives easier, but they use a lot of energy and become expensive to recycle waste.

Plastics take hundreds of years to disintegrate, and their manufacturing process pollutes a lot.

We can avoid excesses in the use of electrical devices, and plenty of products have unnecessary plastic packaging.

Farming was very hard work and it was the occupation of the poorest part of the population.

FARMING WORK

Nowadays, farming has become much more productive so that it can feed the growing population and it has also become lighter work for farmers. But modern machines use a lot fuel.

Free Time, years ago

Our grandparents’ and parents’ games:

Spinnig top

Marbles

Hoop Skipping ropehopscotch

Free Time, nowadays

Nowadays children often play videogames and watch too much television.

These means that children sometimes live a sedentary life and also we generate tons of

electronic waste

School

years ago

Our grandparents’ schools were very different to the ones that we have today.

They had quite simple school material

They used little blackboards instead of using notebooks.

Books were reused and kept in families or schools for years to be used by different generations of students.

Our high schools, have computers and digital blackboards. These make learning much nicer.Our books are constantly changing because they write nicer looking new editions.We sometimes discard stationary from last year and buy new one we don’t need.It’s possible to reuse materials and choose ecological options.

Our lifestyle is in part responsible for many environmental problems:•Acid rain.•Greenhouse effect.•Extinction of some species.

However there are also good news. In the last years lots of advances have taken place in the field of “clean” energies. We are already getting some of our energy from renewable sources:

•Wind power•Sun power •Hydraulic power, •Geothermal power

Our current way of life has changed a lot thanks to technological advances. Life is much more comfortable, we live longer thanks to modern medicine, we have plenty of possibilities of travelling and having fun. But we have to stop and think how much energy we can afford if we want to preserve our planet. We have also to think about how much we need to consume or when it is possible to avoid creating waste rather than only recycling it.

Will we achieve the balance?