Welcome back! Today, we will be talking more about pollution… one of the many buzzwords that are thrown around as environmental consciousness has started picking up as a hot topic for debate in the world. Before we delve further in, what exactly is pollution? As mentioned in our introductory post, pollution is referred to the introduction of harmful substances into the environment (National Geographic Society, 2012).
Although natural instances of environmental pollution are present, it is us humans who are the major contributors to the state of environmental pollution today. Humans have been responsible for the massive change of Earth, as well as the disruptive domination of ecosystems.
Figure 1 above shows the extent which humans have caused change in the Earth’s ecosystem, do keep in mind also that the above data was collated and published in 1997, no doubt in 2020 with increased industrial productivity, a rapidly growing population and many more anthropogenic influences, the impact is much higher.
Now in addition to understanding the “what”, we must also understand the “how” – how are these harmful substances introduced into our environment, and of course the “why” – why are we experiencing environmental pollution?
Pollutants are introduced into the environment through many different sources, much of it are linked to human processes like emissions from air, sea and land vehicles, chemical and petroleum refineries, manufacturing industries to name some (Hill, 2010). As no process is always 100% efficient, part and parcel or production is waste generation, just like in nature and even human bodies. In an increasingly industrialised world, manufacturing processes coupled with exacerbating factors like lack of prevention, proper technology, carelessness and so on multiplies the waste and pollution produced (Hill, 2010). To understand every aspect of the complex process of environmental pollution is out of the scope of this blog. It is simply too big of a topic, with too many constituent parts to cover. However, as outlined from our first post, we will be zooming into more detail on pollution in forests – this entails nature as a continuum (Myers et. al., 2004).
Till then, see you all!
References
Hill, M. K. (2010). Understanding environmental pollution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers, R., Botti, J., Anderson, C., Croft, S., & Shay, E. (2004, November 10). Earth’s Spheres. Retrieved August 31, 2020, from http://www.cotf.edu/ete/ESS/ESSspheres.html
National Geographic Society. (2012, October 09). Pollution. Retrieved August 24, 2020, from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/pollution/
Vitousek, P. M. (1997). Human domination of earth’s ecosystems. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 277(5325), 494-499. doi:10.1126/science.277.5325.494
Image source: https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_image_main/coal%20power%20shutterstock.jpg