How have humans managed to royally screw up the world? Let us count the ways. We already covered mammal extinction, the ocean dead zones, collapsing fish stock, destruction of the rainforest, polar sea ice loss, rising CO2 levels and the fact that there’s way too many of us in the first place. But those certainly aren’t the only pressing environmental problems facing the earth – here are seven more. And yes, most of them are our own damn fault.
Chemical Contamination
(image via: China.org.cn)
Heavy metals. Radioactive waste. Pesticides. Hormones. Pharmaceuticals. Industrial chemicals. The list goes on and on.
These substances – many of them toxic and carcinogenic – are present in our water, our food, our air and our bodies. They come from factories, improperly discarded electronics, ships, hospitals, vehicles and even human waste. They’re causing disease and deformities, creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs and causing fish to spontaneously switch genders. They’re killing animals and forever altering the ecology of the earth.
All of these years of progress are catching up to us. When these substances first came into use, few people questioned whether they might have adverse effects on human health or the environment. But decades later, federal health officials acknowledge that environmental carcinogens account for 55 to 60 percent of all U.S. cancer cases annually.
Despite the fact that scientists are now speaking out about the dangers of accumulating these substances in our bodies over a lifetime, the industries responsible for the contamination have largely gotten off scot-free thanks in large part to extremely persistent lobbying of federal agencies like the EPA.
Air Pollution
(image via: Flickr user Simone Ramella)
In some places, air pollution makes its presence known, billowing from power plants and vehicles and hovering above cities in giant, hazy brown clouds. In others, it’s an unseen enemy, damaging the ozone layer and building up in our lungs with every breath we take.
Some of the major pollutants in the air that are caused by human activity include sulfur oxides from industrial processes, nitrogen oxides from high temperature combustion, carbon monoxide from car exhaust and burning fuel, particulate matter, organic volatile compounds, toxic metals, chlorofluorocarbons, ammonia and radioactive pollutants. Many of these pollutants contribute to global warming and threaten the health of trees, lakes, crops, and animals.
In cities where air pollution is particularly excessive, such as New Delhi, India, there is a low birth rate and high possibility of children developing asthma, pneumonia and other respiratory infections. According to the World Health Organization, 2.4 million people die annually from causes that can be directly attributed to air pollution. In the Los Angeles Basin and San Joaquin Valley of Southern California alone, 3800 people die prematurely each year from exposure to high air pollution levels.
A recent study found that even minor improvements in air quality can tack up to 5 months onto the average person’s life expectancy.
Habitat Loss
(image via: MongaBay)
As our population has expanded, we’ve spread into the countryside, cutting down forests and driving out wildlife at an alarming pace. We’ve built cities, suburbs, highways, power plants, and farms and in the process, we have destroyed over half of the world’s forests. Even now, they’re being removed at a rate of ten times higher than any possible level of regrowth.
As a result, thousands of species have become extinct or endangered. Habitat loss is a main threat to 85% of all species on the IUCN ‘Red List’.
In 1992, “some 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, including the majority of the Nobel laureates in the sciences”, put forth this dire warning:
Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about…. WARNING we the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it, is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.
Things have only gotten much, much worse since then.
One quarter of all mammals, one third of amphibians and one eighth or birds are considered threatened or endangered. Recent news stories have noted the dire effects of habitat loss on creatures like butterflies, frogs, songbirds, apes and a variety of plants.
As each species dies, the earth suffers a loss to its rich biodiversity, which is needed for continued ecosystem survival. The complex and delicate tapestry of life within a given ecosystem contributes to nutrients and water cycling, soil formation and retention, pollination of plants, resistance against invasive species, regulation of climate and pest and pollution control. When some links in the chain go missing, the entire ecosystem is drastically affected.
Water Crisis
(image via: Wikimedia Commons)
Water: it’s essential for all life forms, and when there’s not enough of it, the suffering is acute. Crops fail. People die, both of thirst and of the violence that breaks out when there’s not enough to go around. Water wars are already happening in places like India, where people have been killed just trying to secure enough water to survive. It’s a worldwide problem, but it’s worse in third world countries and it’s going to escalate further with climate change.
Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water is readily accessible for human consumption. It’s a commodity, and one that is increasingly overconsumed in rich countries while the rest of the world goes without. A large contributing factor is the disproportionate pollution of drinking water supplies in third world countries where cleanup is too expensive to attempt. But even here in America, we’re slowly learning the value of an element that we’ve long taken for granted as populations in the arid Southwest live the reality of severe drought.
Approximately one in eight people in the world lack access to safe water supplies and at any given time, and 4,500 children die as a result every single day. Half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease like malaria and dysentery.
The rapidly increasing human population will put an even bigger strain on water supplies, forcing us to stretch a finite resource between 40% – 50% more people.
Desertification
(image via: Walrus Magazine)
As we’ve expanded into areas of the world that can barely support a human population, we’ve stretched the land’s ability to provide for us to the breaking point. We have exhausted the soil through overcultivation and shortsighted agricultural methods. We have removed far too many trees, causing severe soil erosion and landslides. We have raised too many livestock animals and allowed them to overgraze on formerly green land that is now stripped and brown.
All of these things cause desertification, which, like many other environmental problems, is exacerbated by climate change. This destruction of the topsoil that we rely on to feed us causes staggering economic losses of more than $40 billion per year, and the starvation of millions of people.
Once arable land is converted to desert, conditions that intensify wildfires are created. Dust from these dry lands are blown across the world – from Africa to as far away as the United States – causing health problems and boosting death rates. And once desertification occurs, the change is permanent on a human time scale – as far as we’re concerned, that land will never support the same vegetation that it did in the past.
Ocean Acidification
(image via: Inventor Spot)
All around the world, from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the shallow waters of the Caribbean, something is happening to sea water that’s causing large-scale coral casualties and dramatically altering ocean ecology: acidification.
The world’s oceans absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making the water more acidic as the gas dissolves to create carbonic acid. The more CO2 is present in the atmosphere, the more acidic the oceans get. As a result, ocean chemistry is changing 100 times more rapidly than in the 650,000 years that preceded the modern industrial era.
So what exactly does that mean for sea life? Science Daily explains:
This increased acidity can hamper the ability of a wide variety of marine organisms ranging from coral to abalone to form calcium carbonate shells and skeletonal structures. Researchers believe that at crucial stages in the larval and juvenile stages in the lives of many marine invertebrates, ocean acidification inhibits calcification, and also appears to affect reproduction and growth in some organisms.
Scientists are still studying the impacts that acidification is having on ocean ecosystems, but some of the negative effects are already clear. Acidification has made some areas of the ocean unfriendly to many types of fish, but jellyfish still flourish – thus, the huge overpopulation of jellyfish in places like the Sea of Japan. It’s also eroding coral reefs at a disturbingly rapid pace.
“Ocean acidification is happening today and it’s happening on top of global warming, so we are in double trouble,” says Jelle Bijma, chair of the EuroCLIMATE programme Scientific Committee and a biogeochemist at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute Bremerhaven.
In February of 2009, more than 150 leading marine scientists from 26 countries called for immediate legislative action to reduce C02 emissions so that we could prevent this problem from getting even worse. Unfortunately, efforts to come to an international agreement about lowering greenhouse gas emissions – including the recent G8 summit in Rome – have thus far been unsuccessful.
Disposable Culture
(image via: Idiocracy/20th Century Fox)
The concept of a one-use item reportedly started back in 1892 when William Painter, founder of the Baltimore Bottle Seal Company, patented the disposable bottle cap. At the time, people thought the idea was strange: you take it off the bottle and throw it in the trash? Really? Surely there’s another use for it.
How times have changed. Now, entire store aisles are devoted to one-use items and even large goods like furniture, vehicles and electronics aren’t made to last. Just try to get your toaster fixed when it goes on the fritz and you’ll find that repair is more expensive and inconvenient than simply buying a new one. Manufacturers like it that way: it means we keep their assembly lines running and their pockets stuffed with cash. Why should they make products that will last a lifetime and beyond if they can give it a three-year lifespan and get paid for it again and again?
Of course, all of those broken and unwanted items are put to the curb never to be seen again, at least by their former owners. And the amount of stuff that we send to landfills every year is staggering. The average American discards seven and a half pounds of trash every day, for a collective total of over 255 million tons of household waste each and every year. Since 1980, total waste generation in the U.S. has more than doubled.
It’s not like this stuff ever goes away. We’re not dumping it into a black hole. We’re piling it up on land that could be used for a far better purpose, or merely throwing it into the ocean. At this rate, it wouldn’t be surprising if we covered the entire planet in trash within a century or two. For some reason, this doesn’t seem to bother most people – they’re content to let other people deal with it, like the poor communities that get saddled with all of our carcinogenic electronic waste, or our great-grandchildren.
And, despite the fact that 80% of what Americans throw away is recyclable, our actual recycling rate is only about 33%. Not that recycling is the answer to our problems. We’re producing way too much stuff to even be able to use all of it once it was turned into something else, and the process of recycling can be very energy-intensive.
The answer is in changing our mindset. We’ve been duped into selling the health of the planet for a moment’s convenience, convinced that doing things the old fashioned way is archaic and unnecessary. But what’s really unnecessary – and tragic – is our addiction to waste, and the consequences that are yet to come.
