WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION?

Imagine this: you’re standing in a field, all around you are tree stumps, as far as you can see and in every direction you look. There are no animals, no plants, just stumps. There are no parrots flying in the sky, no monkeys swinging from the trees. There is just silence. This is not a scene from the Lorax or some snippet from a dystopian world. This is the Amazon rainforest, or a part of what used to be the Amazon rainforest. This is the largest and most biologically diverse ecosystem in the world. According to Greenpeace.com “since the 1980s, roughly 18% of the Amazon Rainforest has been destroyed” (“Amazon Rainforest”). To put that in perspective that’s a land mass around the size of California. This is but one example of environmental destruction that occurs constantly on our planet.

I’m sure all of you have heard at some time “the earth is dying” or “save the polar bears” and so on; however, there is a lot more to environmental destruction than just that. So what is it? Environmental destruction is a byproduct of human reliance on the environment. It can take on many different forms, this includes overharvesting. A common example of this is overfishing of oceans, rivers and lakes. This form of overharvesting destabilizes ecosystems and upsets food chains by eliminating large populations of fish.  According to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, in 2013 there were over 93 tonnes of fish harvested (that’s about 200,000 pounds of fish). Worst of all, a consequence of overfishing is bycatch, which is “the incidental capture of non target species such as dolphins, marine turtles, and seagulls” (“Facts and Figures: The Cold Hard Facts about Overfishing”). These animals are not wanted and therefore are killed, sold, and very rarely, tossed back into the ocean. This form of overharvesting not only depletes populations of fish in large quantities at a time, but also inadvertently harms endangered species by destroying their food sources and killing them. Although it is necessary to fish for food, it is also wasteful; though beneficial to us, destructive for the fish.

Another example of overharvesting is deforestation. The biggest cause of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers need fields in order to cultivate crops, therefore they cut down trees to create more fields. This destroys countless plants, animals, and ecosystems.  Another push for deforestation is urbanization of developing countries. In many places there are countries that are clearing forests in order to accommodate their growing populations in rural areas (Michelle). This trend can be shown on this map. According to a study done by National Geographic, in 1993, just 27 percent of the land had no measurable human footprint. By 2009, that had grown by 9.3 percent, or 23 million square kilometers (“Human Impact Shown on a Map”). The most prominent areas are parts of the Amazon rainforest, the Gobi desert, and the Sahara Desert which are a bright red.

One of the biggest issues with deforestation is the cascade effect that it causes. What does this mean? Well, ecosystem destruction is only the first step in a list of environmental impacts brought on by deforestation. The cascade effect begins with a forest being decimated and turned into a grazing area for animals or a field with crops. Within a few years, the soil loses all of its nutrients and becomes useless. This is called desertification. Occuring at the same time is the erosion of nearby riverbanks and the extinction of animals that used to live in the forest.  The dead soil is swept into the river and essentially clogs it up. Coating the river with this unhealthy soil and destroying the river ecosystem. This now imbalanced water eventually makes its way to the end of the river and then into the ocean, where it adds to the currently rising acidification of the marine environment (“5 Human Impacts on the Environment: Crash Course Ecology #10”).

According to The World Counts, “In the past 60 years 60% of the Earth’s ecosystems have been degraded. To date we have extracted approx. 23 billion tons of resources from the earth” (“Impact of Environmental Destruction”).  This is too much. Environmental destruction is rapidly reducing the amount of ecosystems left in the world, and if it is not limited the environment will eventually be destroyed. If this does not happen in the near future, then the imaginative image of a treeless forest and an empty ocean may soon become a reality.  So when someone tells you “Save the Amazon” and “Protect the penguins,” just know that these can be prevented by stopping the problem at its source: overharvesting.

Bibliography

“Amazon Rainforest.” Greenpeace. 11 Nov. 2018. Web.

Provided me facts about the Amazon’s destruction and will help me give examples of deforestation and how it affects the rainforest. This will be used to prove a point about deforestation and explain how serious it is.

“Facts & Figures: The Cold Hard Facts about Overfishing.” Fish Forward (WWF),

11 Nov. 2018.

This source gave me facts about overfishing and introduced me to the idea of bycatch. Both of these ideas are very central to overharvesting and will help me in my speech.

Green, Hank. "5 Human Impacts on the Environment: Crash Course Ecology #10." YouTube.

Crash Course, 07 Jan. 2013. Web. 15 Oct. 2018.

This is a Crash Course video done by the ecology section of the video making channel. In this video Hank Green talks about the types of services nature provides the Earth and humans with and also goes into how humans have impacted each of these services. I think that this source can give me some good examples and a deeper understanding the relationship between humans and the environment. This source also introduced the Cascade Effect to me which I plan to discuss in my speech.

"Impact of Ecosystem Destruction." The World Counts. N.p., 7 June 2014. Web. 15 Oct. 2018.

This source talks about human impact through the scope of ecosystem destruction. It goes into detail about the effects to plants, animals, and even humans. This is a good source because it provided me with more examples of how humans and the environment are out of sync and it helped me understand how everything humans do to the environment comes back to hurt us.

Mason, Betsy. "Maps Show Humans' Growing Impact on the Planet." National Geographic.

National Geographic Society, 23 Aug. 2016. Web. 15 Oct. 2018.

This is a rather short article about a scientific endeavor that led to the mapping of the entire world to see how much humans impacted. The main reason I used this source is to show the map as a visual aid to show how much of the world humans have hurt. This source also provided me with some good facts about human impact in the past 100 years and analysis of the map.

Michelle, Meg. "The Kinds of Human Activities That Have Destroyed Ecosystems." Sciencing.

N.p. 24 Apr. 2017. Web. 15 Oct. 2018.

This source is about the different kind of activities that humans do that hurt the environment. This includes: deforestation, overfishing, pollution, etc. I believe that this source is helpful because it gives the broad impacts that humans have on the environment gives some examples on these topics.