Ecological crisis on a planetary scale - myth or reality? Environmental problems arise, from time to time, for many centuries in a row, each time becoming more and more menacing. But since the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the total industrialization of society, they have become aggravated many times. Over the past hundred years, about two-thirds of all the forests that have grown on our planet have been cut down, about a quarter of the fertile land has become unusable. And today, thanks to the mismanagement of huge agricultural holdings, growing for several years in a row in one place such depleting crops as corn, and indiscriminately etching the fields of peasants and surrounding forests, this process has significantly accelerated.
Every ten years, the world loses seven percent of the area of fertile soil. From the fields of our planet annually carried up to twenty-six billion tons of fertile layer. There are all signs that a global environmental crisis is coming. In essence, this problem has acquired in fact already since the late fifties and early sixties of the last, twentieth century.
The current environmental crisis is developing rapidly in every country in the world, on every continent. The scale of the impact of mankind on nature is so great that there is a real threat of imbalance of large biogeocenoses, which can lead to serious problems in the future both for the species diversity of nature and for the existence of mankind in the form that we are used to lately. In fact, the environmental crisis means the transition of all mankind to a new level of its dependence on a gradually, but steadily impoverishing, natural environment.
How are events supposed to unfold in the near future?
The traditional areas in which the environmental crisis is developing:
- Removing an ever-increasing land area from agricultural land use due to significant abuse of chemical fertilizers, water and wind erosion, and soil salinity.
- The increasing chemical effect on water, livestock and crop products, the very environment in which a person lives, the destruction of forests and the like - all this can not but affect the health and life of a person, not to mention the direct threat of loss of self-reproduction ability natural environment.
- The increase in atmospheric emissions of various pollutants - hundreds of thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and the like. These substances gradually destroy the protective ozone layer around the planet, and the prospects for the elimination of this layer are unpredictable.
- Significant areas of land are transformed into landfills for household and industrial waste, which means that not only the area of land suitable for agriculture is reduced, but also foci of increased danger of chemical pollution and soils, and the atmosphere, and groundwater.
- All new nuclear power plants are under construction. And although their creators assure people of the safety of their offspring, we have already seen the scenario of events at such an object using the example of the Chernobyl disaster. Many people died, two cities were completely empty, forests, waters, lands contaminated with radioactive isotopes, radiation rains fell on villages and cities located thousands of kilometers from the scene of the accident.
Compounding the environmental crisis and local military conflicts. Laos, Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Central America, Africa - as a result of these wars, gigantic expanses of forests that have remained untouched for centuries have been burned, thousands of warships, training and fighting, have thrown into the ocean a wide variety of ammunition and poured a huge amount of oil products. Humanity urgently needs to reconsider its attitude to nature, otherwise its response will be all-devastating and will sweep away most people from the face of the Earth.