Humans and the Environment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Humans and the Environment - Essay ExampleThe irony of it all is that even the human beings themselves atomic number 18 threatened by their own actions. In agriculture for instance, human beings have embraced technological developments in farming some of which have devastating effects on the soil. Developments such as the drill of modern engineered pesticides have proved cost-efficient in dealing with pests but the resultant effect on the survival of the otherwise organisms in the soil is rarely taken into consideration. The pesticides end up killing the worms in the soil which play a very crucial role in ensuring that the soil is well aerated. This development in modes of farming has a short-lived benefit on the farming practice since it may result in ameliorate farming of a given crop species in a given season but in the long flux results in the depletion of soil fictitious character (Berry, 2002). There has also been an improvement in farming by producing genetically engine ered crops which flourish well during cultivation but most of them cannot produce viable seeds for replanting. This thusly means that the crop generation is limited to one since it can only be planted once. The genetically engineered crops have been recommended as one of the most efficient ways of attaining food sufficiency in countries faced with the food shortage as a result of small farming lands available or collectable to unfavorable climatic conditions in the countries affected. It has been claimed that the genetically engineered crops are responsible fro the many cancers reported in most people nowadays. In some countries where genetically special products have been allowed on large scale such as in South Africa there was a substantial increase of cancer cases reported a few years afterwards. The human beings activities in the energy sector are one of the major causes of pollution in the world. In the 19th century the use of horses and oxen to produce power was common. The horses would then be fed and would then be ready to be used another day. This represented a fundamental description of renewable energy. It is from this that the term horsepower was coined. Human beings have through time developed machines that no longer require the power of the horse to run but instead they rely on the petroleum related fuels which are fossil fuels. Petroleum results after a process that takes millions of years. The rate of use is and then higher than the rate of regeneration which renders petroleum as one of the sources of non-renewable energy. In addition the exploration of petroleum results into fields of land that is not suitable for bucolic activities. This is contrary to the use of horses as sources of energy since horses produce cow dung that can be used as manure for cultivating agricultural crops in the farms. In addition horses used to graze on abandoned fields that were not being used for any agricultural activities (Courteau, 2007). In order to minim ize on the land pollution associated with the exploration of the fossil fuels, some countries have embarked on trying to use other sources of the fuel from what previously used to be considered as petroleum waste. In Canada for example, there are massive investments in place to try and process petroleum fuel from the tar sands (Kolbert, 2007). The other invalidating aspect of the fossil fuels is the poisonous emissions associated with their use. These fuels produce a lot of carbon while undergoing combustion which in turn