Rapid Growth of Human Population
Today there are approximately 7.8 billion people (as of December 2019) living on planet earth. This number is growing every day at an alarming rate. We will need more food, clothing, housing, and transport vehicles in order to survive in this planet. As a result, we will exploit natural resources to get water, oil, wood, metals, and other minerals.
A few days ago, I visited a very big mall in Surabaya city of Indonesia. I saw various kinds of products that were offered by vendors in the mall. There are restaurants that sell foods of Chinese, Japanese, Western and Indonesian cuisines. There are also stores that offer clothes, leather goods, footwear, toys, tools, furniture, jewelry, and smartphones, watches and everything that we use every day.
Today there are approximately 7.8 billion people (as of December 2019) living on planet earth. This number is growing every day at an alarming rate. We will need more food, clothing, housing, and transport vehicles in order to survive in this planet. As a result, we will exploit natural resources to get water, oil, wood, metals, and other minerals.
A few days ago, I visited a very big mall in Surabaya city of Indonesia. I saw various kinds of products that were offered by vendors in the mall. There are restaurants that sell foods of Chinese, Japanese, Western and Indonesian cuisines. There are also stores that offer clothes, leather goods, footwear, toys, tools, furniture, jewelry, and smartphones, watches and everything that we use every day.
 |
| A Shopping Center |
Over Harvesting
Because our needs of food is high, we tend to harvest them directly from nature. Wild boars, snakes, fruit bats, and other wild animals from the forest are hunted on daily basis. At see giant fishing vessels, using trawl nets, catch huge amount of fish. In certains regions, we have over harvested our natural resources. We destroy the biodiversity.
Human need raw materials to manufacture all of them. We also need energy to transform them into products that can be sold in the shopping center. Fuel and electric energy are used to run machines and motorized vehicles. Most of the fuels that we use such as gasoline, diesel fuel, avtur are not renewable.
Because our needs of food is high, we tend to harvest them directly from nature. Wild boars, snakes, fruit bats, and other wild animals from the forest are hunted on daily basis. At see giant fishing vessels, using trawl nets, catch huge amount of fish. In certains regions, we have over harvested our natural resources. We destroy the biodiversity.
 |
| Traditional Market that sells hunted animals |
Even to build malls, building developers use sand, granite, marble, cement, steel, copper, aluminum, glass, and wood that are taken from nature.
Habitat Destructions
To supply all our needs, we tend to open more land for agriculture (meaning that more heterogenous forests are being cut to make way for monoculture farming) in order to produce rice, meat, egg, cooking oil, sugar, tea, coffee, cacao beans, and other commodities. We cut mountains and dig our soil to extract minerals. We deliberately destroy our environment.
Invasive Species
For the reason of economy of scale, we cut trees from tropical rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia to introduce sawit palm, cocoa plants, coffee seedlings, and rubber trees. These are not native plants from South-East Asia.
Pollution
From our use of the above products and materials, we release plastics, and other non-biodegradable wastes into our environment. They become polutants to our lands, rivers, and oceans.
Habitat Destructions
To supply all our needs, we tend to open more land for agriculture (meaning that more heterogenous forests are being cut to make way for monoculture farming) in order to produce rice, meat, egg, cooking oil, sugar, tea, coffee, cacao beans, and other commodities. We cut mountains and dig our soil to extract minerals. We deliberately destroy our environment.
Invasive Species
For the reason of economy of scale, we cut trees from tropical rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia to introduce sawit palm, cocoa plants, coffee seedlings, and rubber trees. These are not native plants from South-East Asia.
Pollution
From our use of the above products and materials, we release plastics, and other non-biodegradable wastes into our environment. They become polutants to our lands, rivers, and oceans.
All these human activities will have impacts on the environment. Deforestation, overfishing, destruction of nature occur everywhere. Our use of motorized vehicles from motorcycles, cars, trains, ships, airplanes have caused more polution to atmosphere. As more carbon dioxide and its equivalent gases are released into the air, the effect of global warming is increasing.
We need to do something to stop all these negative impacts of our activities on the environment. We need to act fast in order to restore it. Otherwise we will lose the biodiversity of our plants and animals forever. - written by Charles Roring
Also read:
Becak in the Era of GrabBike and Gojek
West Papua a little heaven on earth
Also read:
Becak in the Era of GrabBike and Gojek
West Papua a little heaven on earth
No comments:
Post a Comment