Environmental Problems and Human’s Responsibility to the Biosphere
The improvement of people’s living standard owes too much to the rapid development of science and technology. The higher the living standard of humans, the higher the needs of human to the environment. In order to meet the demand of technological development, humans obtain natural resources from the environment continuously. It is impossible to give up economic development because of environmental conservation because the world must be progressing every day in modern society. Some people claim that the damage to environment is an inevitable consequence of economic development. In my opinion, this is only an excuse for the ignorance of environmental protection. In the following paragraphs, how humans damage the environment, the consequences brought about by environmental damages and whether damage of the environment is an inevitable consequence of worldwide improvements in the standard of living will be discussed.
Some human activities are causing everyday damages to the environment, this is worth concerning, one of which is deforestation. For the establishment of factories, industries and due to urbanization in the world, trees are cut on a large scale without any adequate efforts to plant new trees. According to the data achieved from World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF),
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12-15 million hectares of forest are lost each year, the equivalent of 36 football fields per minute. By the statistics on Global Rates of Rainforest Destruction, the rainforest destruct 214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) per day which equals to an area larger than New York City; also 78 million acres (31 million hectares) per year which equals to an area larger than Poland. On average, there are 137 species become extinct everyday (50,000 each year). Between 1960 and 1990, most of the deforestation occurred globally, with an increasing trend every...