The gradual proliferation of knowledge in human society gave rise to the present information society. The primary, secondary, and tertiary industrial sectors constitute the current information society. Primary sectors of industries are involved in the extraction and production of raw materials in society. Secondary sectors are manufacturing industries supporting the activities of the primary sectors. The tertiary services are service industries that include services rather than the production of physical materials. The problems due to the pollution had started in industrial society i.e. start of mass manufacturing using fossil fuels; however, sustainability was not an issue till some decades before.
The ecological footprint per capita has increased tremendously after the entry of the electronic age. As a result, an immense deficit of non-renewable resources has been created along with high-scale pollution. The problem has so much intensified that it has posed questions about the future of human society. The enormity of biodiversity loss reflects the dreadfulness of the emerging problems to the whole life system on the planet. The number of mammals, reptiles, and birds has decreased tremendously in a few decades. Not only large-sized vertebrates are being lost on the earth today, but the heavy population of small-sized insects is also reducing at the rate of 1% per year (Wagner et al., 2021), which signals the deterioration of life-sustaining conditions on the earth. The changes in the environment due to the mechanical ingenious of the human species are so huge that compositions of organisms in any part of the globe have been changed enormously including the rain forests and ice zones on the globe (Attenborough, 2021). The recent 100 years of changes have been so gigantic that a new term ‘Anthropocene’ has been started to denote this epoch on the geological timescale (Gibbard& Walker, 2013; Lewis & Maslin, 2015). Such changes are steepest in any specified period by a single species on the earth (Dasgupta, 2021).
The situations are devastating to humans themselves too. The condition of the environment is worsening and the human population is being heavily affected. 90% of the human population in the world has no option now but to live in unsafe air (World Health Organization, 2022). However, there are no climate policies yet in some cities in the world (Hsu, 2020). Human society has posed a danger to it by its uncontrolled growth and now needs to save itself from itself (Williams, 2021). The environmental cost of high-level living is very high and disgusting for the future. The use of natural resources by human society is more than the replenishment of such resources. The ecological footprint per person is very high in developed countries; and not less than 1 gha in developing countries also (Ewing et al., 2010).
The study by Miller et al. (2011) underlines limitations of the economic growth. The researchers found an inverted u-shaped relation between ecological footprint and economic growth clarifying that increasing ecological footprints has negative impacts on economic growth after a certain time; and underlines the need to reduce ecological footprints. Several essentialities on the earth for life processes have reached the zone of uncertainty (risk) and beyond uncertainty (high risk) due to disturbed intrinsic biophysical processes on the earth. It has reached such a position that external impacts on the Earth due to other solar planets may prove crucial to the degeneration of the life system on the earth (Stephen et al., 2015).
The agrarian societies did not have pollution as a by-product (Dasgupta, 2021). Most of such problems started with the utilization of fossil fuels as energy sources for mass production during industrial revolutions in industrial society. The post-industrial era could not solve the issues of pollution caused by burning such fuels but added many more pollutants including plastic and electronic wastes in this period with an immense increase in ecological footprints per capita. The depletion of the environment and natural resources intensified severely in this period. The situations have turned so problematic that now our outfits will prove insufficient to reverse the deteriorations made by us if proper steps are not taken within the present decade (United Nations, 2019). The United Nations has set seventeen goals to achieve by 2030, which include poverty eradication, women empowerment, and climate change (United Nations, 2023). Hence, the present time has a great need to think seriously on the issues of environmental preservation and sustainability.