Ok I know. Heres another idiot trying to protect the environment. Go ahead and laugh. But let’s see whose laughing after you is read this.
Once upon a time, before man discover something call technology, there was Earth. And a beautiful one it was, without any damages or scars. Everything was wonderful, be it the environment or atmosphere. But good things don’t last long. Since mankind and began to evolve, they change the Earth rapidly, causing many damages to it in every way you can think of.
The environment, I believe, is very important to us. We live around it, walk about it, and sleep on it. What will happen if everything is gone one day? Will you still be able to release stress by looking at those green trees? Will you still be able to breathe in those fresh airs? These things that you often take for granted, might be gone at one go if we don’t cherish it now. Let alone using paper to write notes, you might not even have the paper for toilet!
Now on a serious tone. Let’s not talk about those stuff you use in your daily lives. IF there is ever one day, that the environment is totally destroyed, we human, as well as all living things, would not survive. So, what was I trying to say? Protect the environment before is gone completely.
Need more convincing? There is more to come. The environment affects us greatly. Our mood, our concentration and many more. Let’s first talk about how it affects us. Every living thing lives in the environment and is being affected by it.
For example, when there is a storm, we often seek shelter until the rain stops. What would happen if the rain doesn’t stop for like 5 days? It would cause flooding and you sure won’t like it. This is what would happen if there is a great change in the water cycle affected by global warming.
There are many causes which the environment is now affected by us human. There are many causes like growing population, technology advances and higher living demand and standard. Firstly on the population growth part. The population on earth is ever rising. Thus, there is more demand of food and water. This demand of more food leads to intensive agriculture.
Intensive agriculture is a big problem for countries with limited land. Because they do not have the extra land need for agriculture, they might have to rely on that same piece of land continually for many batch of crops without letting the land to have the time to “rest” and regain back its minerals. So therefore to make sure the crops have enough nutrients, lots of fertilizers are added to it, and here comes the problem.
These fertilizers must be wash off thoroughly as it is in about one third of our food. If not when we eat these fertilizers, we would be very sick. This would affect the economics of the sales of the crops. People will not be able to trust the crops and might not buy these type of crops anymore.
Another problem with intensive farming, like the farming of pigs, is that their waste must be clean thoroughly. Their waste actually harms we human by causing us headaches and irritation and sometimes even mood swings. So indirectly, how we affect the environment is actually how we affect ourselves.
Mostly importantly, these fertilizers, if not totally absorbed by the plants, would be run off can cause pollution to the river. As the chemicals enter the river, it promotes the rapid growth of the alga and planktons. This would block the amount of sunlight entering the river and reaching the bottom of the river for the aquatic plants to photosynthesis and make food.
Without the plants photosynthesis, there would not be enough oxygen for the fish to life on. They might die due to lack of oxygen in this process. So when humans damage the environment, other living things feel the effects too.
Fertilizers can cause another problem. That is there might be seepage to reach underground water and pollute the sea. People who are using those polluted water for drinking or bathing might also be harmed by those chemical in those fertilizers.
Recreationally, I would say that the growing demand of food use up many plot of land, and thus they were not able to be converted to useful and more economic buildings like high rise building and parks.
The second point I will be touching on would be technology advances all around the world. As we can see, low rise building is currently replaced by high rise building. This means that we require more resources in order to build these high storey building. And I refers this as a problem during mining.
Firstly, the price of natural minerals like steel and nickel are currently rising at an alarming rate. Thus, more company doing mining is searching for every source of site they can find gets these resources. People had found this as a way for them to earn money.
This had cause a great environment impact on the earth. Firstly, those mining for oil or metals which was done on soil, leaves behind a large area of useless land. This land can only be reclaimed through adding a lot of chemicals. But however, like fertilizers, these chemical is also harmful to the river and have the similar damage to the environment.
But that’s not all, since there is short of oil for mining on land; people had now even proceeded to mining of oil under water. They build oil rigs and drain every bit of oil that the earth have. In the process of doing so, they actually dirty the sea as some of the oil is leak on to the seabed. This would harm the corals on the surface of the seabed.
But when u chose not to reclaim this land, it would become a waste land and might even lead to desertification. Thus, the land would be useless and cannot be use for recreational areas like turning it to a river for water sports.
That’s not all advancing technology does. It makes use of a lot of machinery which produce a lot of smog. This is transboundery pollution which affect neighboring also, not only the hot country. And also due to the fact that it is spread by the wind, it is hard to control and be resolved.
With this amount of smog floating to the ozone layer, it causes the green house effect! It traps heat in the atmosphere and cause global warming. This leads to the melting of the North and the South Poles, rising sea water level and cause flooding. If that is not enough to harm the environment, the flooding will destroy the natural habitat of the animals and also destroy plant which might have great medicine values in them.
Furthermore, there will also be changes to the water cycle and the humidity of the air might also rises, causing more easier of forest fire to start in those hotter countries. Forest fire would destroy further more resources like timber for our use.
The last point, I will talk about how improving living standard and higher demand will cost us dearly from the environment. With higher living demand, we tend to change computers like every two or three years? Who can have the patient to wait the window to load slowly while you see your friends already hammering away at their computer games? This cost us a lot of new materials whenever we change them.
Also with better living standard, we would buy our own car and do not make use of those public transport. This is a big factor as cars mostly run on fuel and our supple of crude oil is running out very soon.
Not only that, remember enjoying the air-con while you’re snoring away in your dreams, the air-con you used actually produce CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). When these substances rise to the atmosphere level, they actually destroy the ozone molecules and allow more sunlight to enter earth. Thus the rate of people getting skin cancer is much higher nowadays. So while we enjoy ourselves, we are actually harming the environment.
For now, I would still say that the earth is healthy. Whenever we go, we still can see those lives of earth. (The trees) But I believe we must not wait any longer, if we wants to see these beautiful sceneries every morning, we would have to work on protecting the environment NOW!
The biggest threat of the environment I would say right now would be global warming as it can actually leads to many other nature problems like had mentions earlier above. Things would be much easier to solve if not for those few degrees that the earth’s temperature is rising every day.
For the restoration efforts, I believe every environmentalist in the world is cracking their heads just to find a solution for global warming. So in the mean time, I think we should help out them by doing simple but significant things like recycling our waste paper and not wasting energy when we don’t need to as every part that everyone played in, contribute to the great effort in helping to protect the environment and save the earth.
There are also many ways inventions have help in this process of saving energy and recycling. Like for example, there is now cars that runs on hydrogen which is good as it do not requires fuel. And also these cars run on hydrogen do not cause pollution. These days, there are also technologies to recycle our used concrete and make into another building this way, much resource would be saved and lesser mining is needed to be done.
Can the earth be saved? OF COURSE!
The earth is definitely worth saving. It is the place where we and all living things live in. Without it, all of us would be floating dead in space due to lack of oxygen. You might argue that we can simply move to a new planet to live in. But that means that we have to be on the move every few centuries. We would not have a home. Furthermore, are we be able to find a new planet that we can live in, every time we used up the resources of planet we moved to? Nothing can be confirmed.
But, if we stay on earth, everything will be different! We do not have to go through the trouble of finding a new planet every few centuries. We can have a place that we can strongly call home.
Also, for the environment, saving the earth is important. Remember I said that the environment affect our mood and concentration? This is how it goes. Firstly, where do think you prefer to study for exams? A quiet surrounding with the breeze of the wind blowing lightly on you, or a place where there is no trees to block the bright sunshine and the wind howling sand into your eyes? The quiet one I supposed? Therefore, the environment affects our mood very much.
What about concentration? Let me give you another example. Would you be able to study in a place with the construction hammering away next door? Or your house is located near the railways where the first train at 5am wakes you up every morning? With this noise pollution, there is no way we are able to do our things well.
Also, if we do not save the environment, there would be valuable medicine lost as those undiscovered plant is dies. They might be an important sources of medicine that might cure the next virus that hits us.
The biggest threat to the environment, needless to say, WE HUMANS. Due to the advance technology now, be it taking away food in a Styrofoam box, or switching on the air-con, these actions do not benefit the environment, but harm it. These boxes cannot be decomposed, furthermore, the contain lots of CFC which cause depletion of the ozone layer. If buried, they cause land wastage and pollution.
So how can the earth are saved? There are many ways which we can help out. Firstly, the government should educate the people about how important the environment is. People nowadays are taking the environment for granted. When they feel lazy to walk to the nearest dustbin, they just throw their litter on the floor. The first thing to do would be to make them step out of their comfort zone and participate in helping to save the environment. An effort of each person might seem very small. But if everyone is willing to contribute and help, great things can be done.
The second part is that we human should be responsible for what we do. We should destroy plants on mountain trips or diving. As we often hear people saying, take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints. Now this phrase really makes sense!
The industries should also contribute to help out in saving the earth. They should install air filters in their chimney to prevent those harmful gases to escape to the atmosphere and harm the people living around the area.
Farmers should clean away the waste properly, to prevent pollution. Also, limited fertilizers should also be used so that there won’t be water pollution and seepage of chemical of the underground. All these might seems simple but it takes time and patient to do it well.
Last but not least we human should try to recycle those used paper or materials those
belongs to us. Only when we all act as one and contribute to help, the earth can have a new hope for a better tomorrow!
So what are you waiting for? Take out your pen and write down how you can help the environment now! And also remember to recycle that piece of paper used. Have I convinced your that saving the earth is important? =) I told you would be the last one smiling.
