Tuesday, September 28, 2010

How Humans affect the Environment

There are many things that are happening right now in the world. Much of this however is affecting the very environment we live in. Many of the forests are being taken down, the polar ice caps are melting, and also the pollution that most parts have are atrocious. Some people are also taking the time to try and prevent all this from happening. Humans are the source of good and bad things. When we do something bad we try to do something good to balance it out. Since some of these things are our fault we should all try and fix what we have done.


Deforestation

The world that we live in is 30% trees but yet it doesn't even look like that much. With the trees being taken down, all the Rainforest's could be gone in about hundred years at this rate. Most of the time trees are just cut down for money, which must stop. Some loggers even go illegally to cut down trees in order to make a few bucks. Trees are also cut down due to the city growing bigger and bigger which makes more people come to live there. Deforestation's also has a negative effect leading to the loss of habitats to the many species living there. Majority of the land and water animals live in the Rainforest and they could be close to extinction.



Polar Ice Caps

Since ice covered most of the Earth thousands of years ago, we consider the ice caps a biome. But due global warming, both of the Earth's ice caps are currently shrinking, causing the water level to become much higher. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the sea level has increased by 6-8 inches over the past hundred years. As the heat rises than this will make some floating icebergs melt which will also make the oceans rise. Big chunks also fall off the icebergs that fall into the ocean making it rise a little bit.



Pollution
In the US, factories release over 3 million tons of chemical waste in our air, water, land every year. This causes over 15 million acres of land to be lost every year. Pollution is not only caused by industrial waste, it is also caused by commercial waste. One of the biggest forms of pollution though is from transportation method. Pollution is mainly cause of human activities from anything that they do. Sometimes it can also be the cause of natural disasters that happen. The three main types of pollution are air pollution, land pollution, and water pollution.



Aftermath:
With all this happening right now, there will be many things that will happen to the Earth. Everything that we are doing now will affect the future in a different way. This decisions today could decide the fate of our future. We would also like to make a better future for the next generation ahead of us. We should try fix what we have done today, that way we will have a better tomorrow.

Sources:
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/deforestation-overview.html

 http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question473.htm

http://www.greenstudentu.com/encyclopedia/pollution

http://www.newsoffuture.com/about_the_future.html