History has come across disasters a thousand times. All of them were unexpected, destructive, brought people sickness and death, destroyed homes, destroyed crops. But only the cause of those disasters were natural phenomena. And today we are also threatened by environmental disasters.
Date 04/26/1984 made the whole world shudder. The date when humanity was more afraid of itself than volcanoes, earthquakes, floods ... The whole world was in a panic: a terrible explosion spread the radiation, as it was claimed, to 100,000 square kilometers. Now environmentalists suggest that the entire planet has been affected. Hundreds of people died immediately after elimination, thousands - in the next three years. No one will tell you the exact statistics. But diseases caused by the action of radiation will echo longly on our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And if the explosion happens again? After all, the probability is very, very high. No one undertakes to predict what is happening now under the sarcophagus. Experts unanimously agree that ongoing reactions are capable of producing a new, more powerful release. And here we can only hope. A miracle created by man called the nuclear power plant, which gives us heat and light, can rebel at any second, destroying humanity with its own weapons. But we continue to use this "miracle", building new nuclear power plants ...
Ecological catastrophes of the world are the result of human deeds. They are much more dangerous and worse than natural ones. They cannot be predicted, they cannot be controlled.
We slowly and inevitably lead to death, polluting the environment, arranging the burial of radioactive waste, bringing the soil to erosion through our intervention, depleting non-renewable mineral resources ... How long and terrible this list is! ..
Just imagine: one centimeter of chernozem accumulates naturally for 300 years, and we destroy one centimeter in three years! Chemical, metallurgical, oil refineries daily dump hundreds of thousands of tons of waste into rivers that become (and some have long become) dead. Oil production has caused huge oil spills in the ocean, not to mention accidents and simply spills of "excess" oil by ships transporting liquid fuel.
And here are examples of other "innocent" human interventions: thirty years ago, Polesie gave 220 centners of Valerian root per year, today - no more than five; from 47 rare medicinal plants of Polesie (some grew only there), "thanks to" the uncontrolled and barbaric attitude when collecting herbs, no more than 10 remained; the collection area of healing cranberries from 80 ha decreased to 20 ha ...
Dry rivers, seas ...
Is this environmental disaster?
In large cities, the concentration of various harmful substances exceeds the permissible rate several times, and sometimes tens of times. And acid rains with nitric oxide and sulfur dioxide, burning out foliage and grass, have long ceased to amaze.
The construction of mines, open pits, airports, highways, powerful power lines, tunnels, canals, sludge dumps, dumps - all this is not as harmless as it seems: the natural landscape is changing, and with it the natural ecological balance is disturbed . Animals or birds leave or die, plants disappear. And while this is hardly noticeable within the framework of the construction of one object, the aggregate scale is incredibly huge.
No matter how messy it may look, but some environmental disasters lead others. A chain in which links are getting darker and harder. One can not talk about what environmental disasters of the 21st century will lead to.
But the point now is not the complete list of these problems. The main thing is that environmental disasters quickly and inevitably kill the planet, and with it humanity, which still has a chance to save and preserve that small part of nature that still managed to survive. But for this it is necessary to rethink the causes of such disasters and identify ways to resolve them.
The sphere of life on our Earth can only be preserved by a person who is so actively engaged in destruction today. The solution to the problem is the exchange of experience and information, international cooperation, the adoption of new and more stringent laws on environmental protection, taking into account the accumulated knowledge, the introduction of the latest developments in this field.