Why Is Clearcutting Bad for the Environment?

Clearcutting, or clearfelling, is a logging practice which involves completely clearing an area of trees, regardless of their size and usability. Remaining scrub and brush are usually burnt in large burn piles that can cast a smoky haze over the area for several days. A clearcut area may be relatively small, or may span for miles, and is often clearly visible through the air, along with the scars of logging roads cut to access it. The abrupt removal of trees can have a serious environmental impact on the surrounding area.

The environmental effects of clearcutting are often cited by activists who are trying to put a stop to the practice. They include a range of negative results, from loss of habitat to an elevation in stream temperatures which can cause fish to die off, but all of them reflect major changes that can take decades to correct. Numerous activists have suggested more environmentally sustainable alternatives to clearcutting, such as selective logging, and hope that as more consumers become aware of the potential dangers of clearcutting, they will seek out sustainably-harvested timber.

Clearcutting may profoundly alter local rivers. If logging comes close to the banks of the river, as it often does, it eliminates the shady shield of trees, which can cause the temperature of the river to elevate. Even a few degrees can make a huge difference to native plants, fish, and amphibians, and can cause a significant population decrease. Numerous organizations monitor global rivers and have warned that extensive clearcutting could result in the extinction of some fish species, as they are driven out of their native habitats. Clearcutting also softens the banks of the river by enabling erosion, which can cause them to collapse into the water.

In addition to harming rivers, clearcutting also alters the water cycle in general. While trees are growing, they help to trap and retain water, along with precious topsoil. When trees are removed, water runs over the surface of the earth rather than filtering into the aquifer. The water runoff can cause flooding, and take valuable topsoil with it. As the water trickles downhill, it carries the topsoil into the river, turning it brown and muddy and carrying the useful nutrients out to sea. The excess of nutrients in the marine environment can be harmful to marine organisms, and cause further population damage, which can sometimes extend for several miles offshore.

Clearcutting also destroys habitat for a wide variety of animals, including many endangered species. Birds, reptiles, andmammals all face habitat destruction due to clearcutting. Many of these animals have difficulty seeking out new habitats because the surrounding areas may be clearcut or filled with human inhabitants. Some animals have adverse interactions with humans, especially large predator species and animals such as raccoons which adapt readily to human encroachment on their habitat. Others are simply incapable of adapting and quietly die off. The effects often extend into the surroundingecosystem as well, by removing a link in the local food chain.

The results of clearcutting are not only felt in the immediate area. Clearcutting also has an impact on the quality of the atmosphere, beginning when the trees are cut down. Trees help to filter pollutants from the air, and are also an important part of the carbon cycle. Removing trees has a direct impact on the environment, especially when combined with slash-and-burn practices which result in scorched earth and in a serious increase of environmental pollutants.

Environmental Pollution: The Harmful Effects of Plastic Bags

Every once in a while the government here passes out an order banning shop keepers from providing plastic bags to customers for carrying their purchases, with little lasting effect. Plastic bags are very popular with both retailers as well as consumers because they are cheap, strong, lightweight, functional, as well as a hygienic means of carrying food as well as other goods. Even though they are one of the modern conveniences that we seem to be unable to do without, they are responsible for causing pollution, killing wildlife, and using up the precious resources of the earth.

About a hundred billion plastic bags are used each year in the US alone. And then, when one considers the huge economies and populations of India, China, Europe, and other parts of the world, the numbers can be staggering. The problem is further exacerbated by the developed countries shipping off their plastic waste to developing countries like India.

Here are some of the harmful effects of plastic bags:

Plastic bags litter the landscape. Once they are used, most plastic bags go into landfill, or rubbish tips. Each year more and more plastic bags are ending up littering the environment. Once they become litter, plastic bags find their way into our waterways, parks, beaches, and streets. And, if they are burned, they infuse the air with toxic fumes.

Plastic bags kill animals. About 100,000 animals such as dolphins, turtles whales, penguins are killed every year due to plastic bags. Many animals ingest plastic bags, mistaking them for food, and therefore die. And worse, the ingested plastic bag remains intact even after the death and decomposition of the animal. Thus, it lies around in the landscape where another victim may ingest it. 

Plastic bags are non-biodegradable. And one of the worst environmental effects of plastic bags is that they are non-biodegradable. The decomposition of plastic bags takes about 1000 years.

Petroleum is required to produce plastic bags. As it is, petroleum products are diminishing and getting more expensive by the day, since we have been using this non-renewable resource increasingly. Petroleum is vital for our modern way of life. It is necessary for our energy requirements – for our factories, transport, heating, lighting, and so on. Without viable alternative sources of energy yet on the horizon, if the supply of petroleum were to be turned off, it would lead to practically the whole world grinding to a halt. Surely, this precious resource should not be wasted on producing plastic bags, should it?

So, What Can be Done about the Use of Plastic Bags?

Single-use plastic bags have become such a ubiquitous way of life that it seems as if we simply cannot do without them. However, if we have the will, we can start reducing their use in small ways.

• A tote bag can make a good substitute for holding the shopping. You can keep the bag with the cahier, and then put your purchases into it instead of the usual plastic bag.
• Recycling the plastic bags you already have is another good idea. These can come into use for various purposes, like holding your garbage, instead of purchasing new ones.

While governments may be working out ways to lessen the impact of plastic bags on the environment, however, each of us should shoulder some of the responsibility for this problem, which ultimately harms us.

New Smoking Threat

You’ve heard about the dangers of smoking and the problems posed by second-hand smoke. If that wasn’t enough, experts are now warning about third-hand exposure.

What does that mean, you might ask. Smoking involves deliberately drawing tobacco smoke into the lungs, but second-handsmoking is inadvertently breathing in the smoke while not directly smoking. Third-hand smoke goes another step – it includes all the residue from tobacco smoke that lingers in homes and other places.

There are hundreds of constituents in tobacco smoke, including known carcinogens, heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and cadmium, as well as chemicals like toluene and hydrogen cyanide. It is a pretty potent cocktail of nasty compounds. The risks to smokers are well-known, while 50,000 deaths in the US annually are linked to second-hand smoke. Third-hand smoke has been described recently and is yet another risk factor.

There’s nothing new about the fact that particles from smoke remain long after the smoke has dissipated. However, many people are not aware of the implications. A recent study in Pediatrics looked at parental attitudes toward forms of exposure. Overall, surveyed parents in the US were quite aware of second-hand risks but less informed about third-hand residues.

People often choose to smoke away from children – perhaps outside, in another room, or with the window open. However, these measures do not prevent toxic particles from sticking to hair, skin, clothing, furniture, carpets, and other surfaces. Contact with other people – hugging a grandchild, feeding a baby, cuddling with a girlfriend – shares the toxins with them. Even just entering the “smoking room” constitutes exposure, with no clear measures of how long the third-hand risks remain.

The present study was primarily concerned with risks for small children as they are likely to crawl around, encountering dust and other sources. Infants may breathe in twice as much dust compared to adults. Additionally, most objects are touched, tasted, or gummed by babies and toddlers, providing another route for exposure. Smaller size and more rapid breathing makes young children particularly sensitive.

For parents and grandparents who smoke, there are ways to reduce children’s exposure. Never smoke near children. Wear a designated jacket when smoking outside. Wash your hands afterwards. Keep all cigarettes and ashtrays away from children. Even better, try to cut down – or even stop – smoking.

How Smoking Affects our Environment

It is a common belief among cigarette smokers that they are only hurting themselves. In fact they are not only hurting themselves, but also the people who love them and the environment. I decided to investigate about the environmental impact of smoking.

These days everyone knows what smoking cigarettes does to our bodies, but the knowledge of what smoking does to the Earth is not as common. There are some things that every smoker who has any concern for environmental issues should know.

It is fairly obvious that smoking pollutes the air and quite often the ground. However, it is not always obvious how or how much smoking pollutes. Cigarettes contain over 4000 chemicals which are exhaled and released into the air and the atmosphere. Approximately 30% of North Americans are smokers, and the percentage goes much higher in developing countries, which means there is a massive amount of pollution being released into the air every day. Trees are often compared to the lungs in our bodies because they perform basically the same functions as our lungs do on a global scale. With all of the pollutants that the trees filter out for us already it seems almost crazy to add more to the air that doesn’t need to be added. We need to breathe, but no one needs to smoke.

The pollution caused by cigarettes does not stop in our bodies or the air; it also affects the land we live on and the water that we drink. Millions of cigarette butts are discarded onto the ground every day. Every year in California the state has a statewide cleanup and cigarette butts account for almost half of the waste that is collected. These are only the ones that are picked up in one state and millions more are never picked up. They end up in the rivers and lakes where fish and animals eat them by mistake and quite often die from it. The rest are left on the ground to decompose which will take an average of 25 years while all of the chemicals and additives leach into the ground and pollute the soil and the plants. If you are going to smoke please consider this information before your throw your cigarette butts on the ground. It looks unattractive, it is a major fire hazard in dry weather, and it is extremely harmful to the environment.

Probably the most impacting aspect of cigarettes is actually producing them. There is the land used to grow the crops all over the world that could be put to better use by planting more trees or food for starving children in third world countries. These crops are also often sprayed with a lot of harmful pesticides and chemicals because tobacco is a very fragile plant and is likely to pick up disease. It also takes a lot of trees to produce and package cigarettes. Cigarette manufacturing uses four miles of paper an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes. One tree is wasted for every three hundred cigarettes produced. Those trees could be filtering out the pollutants already in the air instead of being chopped down for the cause of adding new ones. There is still the energy and water wasted in manufacturing cigarettes that needs to be considered and with soil depletion and chemical wastage added on top of that it becomes clear that manufacturing cigarettes has an enormous strain on the environment.

The tobacco industry is quite unwilling to use better technology to reduce the impact they are having on the environment because it would take up too much of their billions of dollars in profit every year. They are often trying to have more trees planted, but since they use trees to dry the tobacco and for rolling and packaging it is probably not concern for the environment, but concern for losing their wood sources that encourage them to do this. They do not care about polluting our bodies so it seems unlikely that they would think twice about polluting our environment. The only way to stop them from harming the environment is to stop buying their products. Quitting smoking is hard, but it can be done and it’s not only about the harm smokers are doing to their own bodies, it’s also about the harm they are doing to the earth and the pain that they are causing their friends and families.

Other Problems

• Global Warming (polar caps are melting, certain species struggle to survive under new conditions)

• Industrialization (factory smoke, car gas)

• Pollution (pesticides, CFCs, they enhance the greenhouse effect in which airborne carbon compounds retain heat from the sun and deplete the ozone layer, which is bad for humans in general because if the ozone layer is breached severely, ultraviolet rays will reach the earth and kill humans, also presently this causes skin cancer)

• Oil Spills (kills marine life, animals can't swim through oil, bird that hunt in a sea of oil get killed because they can't fly after they get oil on their feathers causing them to drown, btw nice thing you can do is donate hair to organizations that use it to clean oil since oil sticks to hair, so nexttime you get a haircut think about that)

• Overpopulation (human population increases exponentially, leading to increased waste, did you know by 2050 all our current landfills will be filled completely, where does our waste go then, disregarding the fact that much of it already goes in the ocean?)

• Deforestation (save the trees! and the owls! deforestation + erosion can lead to barren land, where you cant plant anything, not even grow new trees to reuse, so plant trees! NYC is working on the Million Trees project right now! help the trees in the city or your neighborhood grow. if the soil is hard, rake it out to soften it and airate the trees. afterwards add compost, which is decayed materials as fertilizer. then you should also add mulch on top of the compost around the tree so that it can retain water when watered and please do water your local trees. you can totally plant your own trees too! in fact theres an organization that you can request a free tree from, my english teacher actually got one! anyway, take care of the trees! fresh air! more oxygen! and a great environment for animals and people!)

• Radioactivity (nuclears research = bad, although nuclear power plants are nice for us and all, radioactivity causes cancer and other lethal illnesses! remember when america used that nuclear bomb back in WWII? there are still radioactive remnants of it where it landed! and it continues to cause death and illness. the water, in the country jordan, is highly radioactive! and thats clearly bad for the people and kills them just like lead poisoning. also, watch out for lead in water. keep your water clean! filter it! a lot of romans died from lead poisoning because they failed to keep their aqueducts clean. even i sometimes, although rarely find little black dots in my water, check your pipe systems! keeping the env. clean is also a part of keeping humans healthy.)

• Also, keep in mind, that most of our environmental problems can't be prevented, only slowed. For example, the greenhouse effect is natural and occurs with or without human pollution accelerating it. Possible solutions have been proposed, although, to protecting humans from ultraviolet rays. Some people believe that releasing debris into the atmosphere is a good idea because it will help cover the gaps int he ozone layer. 

• And recycling (by the way, compost is something you can make by yourself, keep a bin or pile in your backyard where you throw remains of vegetables or any organic trash you have, and overtime it will decay, give it some time, and eventually you've got your own fertilizer trees, nice and rich in nutrients) is helpful but can't prevent humans from making waste. So basically you can't expect to prevent environmental detriments, but only to gradually ease them.

Harmful Chemicals in our Environment

Over the past century humans have introduced a large number of chemical substances into the environment. Some are the waste from industrial and agricultural processes. Some have been designed as structural materials and others have been designed to perform various functions such as healing the sick or killing pests and weeds. Obviously some chemicals are useful but many are toxic and their harm to the environment and our health far outweighs their benefit to society. We need to manage the risks better by only using chemicals, which are safe.

The impact of human activities on the environment is complex and affects a chain of interconnecting ecosystems. The extinction of species all along the chain may mean the loss of useful genetic material or life saving cancer drugs or safer alternatives to the dangerous chemicals in use at the moment.

Conclusion


Potentially dangerous chemicals such as these are being introduced into the environment all the time. As in the case of PCBs their effect on living things may not be known until many years after their release. Hundreds of thousands of different chemicals are marketed worldwide. Of these 5000 are produced in quantities over 10 tonnes a year and 1500 are produced in quantities over 1000 tonnes year.
We do not have enough information about the environmental effects of these industrial chemicals and their effects on humans. The balance between human activity and ecological sustainability is wrong.

What you can do

·         Use biodegradable products. Make your own cleaning agent using safe materials. Dispose of chemical waste carefully. Do not put them down the sink. Be wise with home maintenance and in the garden. Do not burn plastics.

·         Avoid all organic chemicals that have "chloro" as part of their names including wood preservatives, herbicides and insecticides. Avoid chlorine bleach (sodium hypochlorite) and products containing it. Use oxygen bleach instead. Use unbleached paper products.Avoid "Permethrin" flea sprays for pets. Avoid products made of or packaged in polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Avoid cling flim plastic wraps unless they are clearly identified as non-chlorinated plastic.

·         To minimise your risk of dioxins accumulating in your body avoid all full-fat dairy products and fatty meats such as beef or pork. Wash all fruits and vegetables to remove chlorophenol pesticide residue. Avoid grapes and raisins unless they are clearly labelled as organically grown. Avoid soaps, toothpaste and deodorants containing "triclosan," a chlorophenol.

·         We can reduce the dioxins if we stop producing PVCs and other chlorinated chemicals. If your local government sends its waste to an incinerator, request that they stop burning plastics and introduce a comprehensive recycling service. Write to companies and ask them to use safe substitutes to chlorinated plastics. Ask your supermarket to sell Totally Chlorine Free (TCF) products. Join or form a local environmental group campaigning against hazardous chemicals.

·         People who work with cadmium should take care not to inhale cadmium-containing dust and should avoid carrying it home from work on their clothes, skin or hair. Eat from a wide range of foods to prevent the risk of ingesting toxic levels of cadmium.

What is the impact of human activity on the natural environment?

Humans are a part of the natural environment. Unfortunately, we have not yet learnt to moderate our activities in such a way as to help the environment. Human activities often lead to degradation of the environment. 
Impact of humans include:

• ·         pollution - land, freshwater creeks and rivers, seas and oceans, and air
• ·         deforestation and destruction of habitats
• ·         endangerment and extinction of flora and fauna species
• ·         introduction of invasive and parasitic fauna and flora species to new areas
• ·         increased desertification of land - this often occurs because, when humans try to increase fertile land in one area, they must divert needed resources from another area
• ·         altering natural waterways which can increase the risk of flooding
• ·         Interfering with the natural fire cycles of an area (one cause of increased bushfire problems in Australia)
• ·         overuse of natural resources, resulting in depletion of some of these resources
• ·         climate change and the development of extreme weather conditions: scientists continue to debate how much humans actually contribute to climate change and/or global warming, but there is evidence that our activities do contribute in some part
• ·         rising sea levels
• ·         increased erosion of land as a result of mining or agricultural activities
• ·         mining activities not only can destroy the vegetation of the area, but can contribute to instability in the earth's crust.

There can be some neutral impacts. Native people in many lands lived in harmony with their environment for thousands of years. The native Americans and Australian Aborigines, for example, used only what they needed, and did not pollute their environment or alter it negatively and permanently.

Fortunately, man is learning (a little too late) that there are activities he can undertake to improve land he has already degraded. This may involve:

• ·         conservation, monitoring of and captive breeding programmes for endangered species
• ·         restoring degraded ecosystems by planting trees specifically native to the area, and removing introduced species
• ·         removal of pollutant materials