Man and Environment

What can we do?

Conserve water by turning off the tap. This helps prevent water shortages and reduces the amount of contaminated water that needs treatment. Be careful about what you throw down your sink or toilet. Don’t throw paints, oils or other forms of litter down the drain.

Don’t throw litter into rivers, lakes or oceans. Help clean up any litter you see on beaches or in rivers and lakes, make sure it is safe to collect the litter and put it in a nearby dustbin.

Other kinds of pollution are soil pollution, light pollution and noise pollution.

Deforestation

A different kind of problem connected with environment is deforestation, which is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a nonforest use. The overwhelming direct cause of deforestation is agriculture. Subsistence farming (self-sufficiency farming in which the farmers focus on growing enough food to feed themselves and their families) is responsible for 48% of deforestation. Commercial agriculture (a process of large-scale production of crops for sale) is responsible for 32% of deforestation. Logging is responsible for 14% of deforestation and fuel wood removals make up 5% of deforestation. Deforestation is a contributor to global warming, and is often cited as one of the major causes of the enhanced greenhouse effect. The water cycle is also affected by deforestation. Trees extract groundwater through their roots and release it into the atmosphere. When part of a forest is removed, the trees no longer evaporate away this water, resulting in a much drier climate. It has been estimated that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation, which equates to 50,000 species a year.

Endangered species

The activity of us humans (polluting air and water, cutting trees and producing waste) affects of course also animals. Many species are endangered because of the humans or the environmental change, which is almost always caused by the human kind. In my opinion the most outrageous ways for animals to die is when they are either hunted for skin or fur (such as seals, minks, foxes) so people can wear them and feel good and pretty or the animals are killed because a part of them is valuable (rhinos, sharks, bears, tigers). Some people believe that the horns of rhinos, gall of a bear and parts of a tiger have some kind of medical effect, but it has been scientifically proved that there are no effects. The only effect is that these animals are slaughtered and many of them suffer before dying. For example the fishers only cut the fin of the shark off and then throw it back into sea alive leaving it there to bleed to death. A large number of species faces extinction because humans constrain their natural environment (f.e. by cutting trees) or pollute it thereby making it impossible for the animals to live there.