ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM AND CHALLENGES

Environmental Problem and Challenges

Environmental Problem and Challenges

Introduction

Worse environmental conditions have always been a critical problem throughout the history. Currently, the environmental problem is the biggest problem in the world which is not being considered. Also in United States, water pollution and atmospheric air has become the serious issues. Environmentalists and scientists have analyzed several additional problems related to environmental pollutions from pesticide contagion to affected wildlife population. Ecologists note that the environment provides many “goods and services” for human beings, but we can simplify these into three general functions that it performs for human populations and all other species. The environment provides us with the resources necessary for life, from clean air and water to food and shelter, as well as the natural resources used in industrial economies. In providing what ecologists term the “sustenance base” for human societies, the environment is serving a “supply depot” function. It supplies us with both renewable and non-renewable resources: overuse of the former (e.g., water) may result in shortages and overuse of the latter (e.g., fossil fuels) in potential scarcities.

Discussion

More recently, in U.S problems are stemming from functional incompatibilities at larger geographical scales have become common. The quest for living space, agricultural land, and timber leads to tropical deforestation and loss of biodiversity, while use of the atmosphere as a waste site for aerosols and greenhouse gases produces ozone depletion and climate change. Global warming, in turn, threatens to make some land areas (particularly coastal zones) less habitable or agriculturally productive while also producing changes in ocean temperature that are harmful to invaluable coral reefs and fish populations on which humans depend.

Human overuse leading to potential ecosystem collapse can be observed in the near death of the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union resulting from the combination of industrial pollution and diversion of water for agriculture. Similar processes plus urbanization pose an increasingly serious threat to the survival of the Florida Everglades. More ominously, ecologists and climatologists are concerned that growing use of fossil fuels as our prime energy source will generate via increased greenhouse gas (especially CO2) emissions climate change throughout the global ecosystem that may lead to unforeseeable and irreversible ecological consequences that will prove harmful to humans and other species (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005).

Like all other species, humans should furthermore have a location to reside, and the environment provides our “habitat” where we reside, work, play, and journey (e.g., dwellings, manufacturers, buying shopping centers, transport schemes, and recreational areas). Thus, the third function of the natural environment is to supply “living space” for human populations. When we overuse a granted dwelling space - from a town to the whole Earth - overcrowding and/or overpopulation occur. In addition, when humans overuse an environment's proficiency to fulfill any lone function, “environmental problems” in the pattern of contamination, asset shortages, and overcrowding and/or overpopulation are the result.

Yet, not only should the natural environment assist all three purposes, when a granted natural environment is utilized for one function, ...