Imagine a typical farmer tending his cattle and harvesting his crops, a harmless act. His land is green and fertile, and the beautiful view stretches on forever. Now, conceptualize that healthy land morphing into dehydrated sand...a desert. It is nearly impossible for vegetation and humans, such as this farmer, to survive and thrive on land that receives less than three inches of rainfall each year. Unfortunately, this is not a fiction scenario. Deserts are growing at about twenty thousand square miles every year (Roos). Is that hard to envision? This means some twenty thousand square miles of land is becoming dried up and unusable every single year. What is the cause of all this? The answer is desertification. What exactly is desertification? Desertification can be understood by knowing what it is, how it is caused, where it happens most around the world, and what can be done to prevent it.
In order to understand how desertification is in relation to the world, it must be defined first. To be completely clear, desertification is the process of fertile grasslands becoming unusable desert because of natural causes and poor land use (Collins). This is a widely recognized problem since it is happening so rapidly around the world, not to mention it affects so many people. The numbers are astonishing. Worldwide, two billion people suffer the consequences of desertification (Roos). Not only that, but according to Bogumil Terminski, “Desertification of soils appears to be one of the fundamental causes of hunger in many regions of the world” (Current Dynamics). More deserts equals less land area to plant crops and tend animals. This creates a problem with food shortages in certain areas of the world. Roughly twenty-fou...
... middle of paper ...
...ading, but it will always be present on earth. All in all, desertification is a controversial problem that occurs all over the world, and requires an immense amount of attention in order to be kept calm.
Works Cited
Collins, Jocelyn. “Desertification.” n.w. Enviro Facts: 1 Feb. 2001. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.
“Deforestation.” National Geographic. n.p. 2013. Web. 13 Jan. 2014.
Dunckel, Ramona, at al. “Desertification of the Sahel”. Cultural Geography . Manda Kalagayan.
South Carolina: BJU Press. 2008. Print. 13 Jan. 2014.
Roos, Dave. “How Desertification Works.” How Stuff Works. n.p. 30 Dec. 2008. Web. 12 Jan.
2014.
Terminsky, Bogumil. “Current Dynamics of Desertification in Africa, Facts and Statistics.” The
Nigerian Voice. n.p. 6 May 2012. Web. 12 Jan. 2014.
“What Areas Are Affected By Desertification?” Curiosity. Discovery Communications: 2011.
Web. 13 Jan. 2014.
Hess, D., McKnight, T. L., & Tasa, D. (2011). McKnight's physical geography (Custom ed. for California State University, Northridge ; 2nd Calif. ed.). New York: Learning Solutions.
Desert Solitaire aims to draw attention to the activities of a man voluntarily isolated in nature. It seeks to identify the strife that Abbey faces with modern day human’s treatment of his nature. As such, the argument that Abbey poses in one his earlier chapters Rocks is, that the Modern Day man is destructive and cannot be trusted to preserve nature as is.
A food desert is a location in which a wide variety of nutrition food is not generally available (Wrigley et al. 261). Food deserts exist in places such as inner cities and isolated rural areas (Morton and Blanchard 1). The purpose of the paper supported by this annotated bibliography is to argue that food deserts do not exist because of discrimination against the poor, but because of forces related to supply and demand. This hypothesis ought to be kept in mind when considering each of the sources (Just and Wansink; Wrigley, Warm and Margetts; Jetter and Cassady; Epstein et al.; Schafft, Jensen and Hinrichs; Bitler and Haider) described in the annotated bibliography.
Shaw, H. J. (2006), Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88: 231–247.
“Food Deserts” are arears where people have a hard time finding affordable, healthy food. These places are usually low-income neighborhoods that do not have any supermarkets nearby but have convenience stores that sell junk food and fast food places around them. Ron Finley, a guerrilla gardener, lives in a “food desert” in South Central Los Angeles. He plants fruit and vegetable gardens to help nourish his community with healthy eating. In the article “Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy It,” Margot Sanger-Katz states that “merely adding a grocery store to a poor neighborhood doesn’t make a very big difference” because the diets of the residents living in those neighborhoods did not change. I think “food deserts” are only a part of the bigger problem in America because obesity is everywhere, not just in low-income
The people affected by Desertification and climate change could move further south of Africa like Cameroon or Congo or other county's around that sort of area, We could do this by Transporting them all by bus, train or car if it is possible.
His expertise may attract an array of readers, both newcomers and old-timers. It seems that his intended audience might be those who share his love of the desert and also those who want to know more. The essay is quasi-organized like an educational brochure or an expert interview with an inveterate desert denizen. An unintended audience of course might include the fledgling environmental activists who were emerging in the 1960s to fight for the protection of wilderness. Because of its focus on natural history, the article and the anthology, Desert Solitaire, in which it was published, might...
Shaw, H. J. (2006), Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88: 231–247.
Traditional agriculture requires massive forest and grassland removal to obtain land necessary to farm on. Deforestation and overgrazing has caused erosion flooding, and enabled the expansion of deserts. But with drainage systems, leveling, and irrigation provided by the Green Rev, all this terra deforming will unlikely happen again. We can retain clean air and lessen the global warming effect caused by deforestation.Many people argue that a revamp in agriculture will be way too expensive and unrealistic especially for those poor farmers in third world countries. However many times, they exaggerate the price.
Nebel, Bernard J., and Richard T. Wright. Environmental Science. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998.
Take, for example, that livestock agriculture and the plant-based agriculture specifically used for feeding that livestock utilizes 30 percent of land on Earth. With crops in high demand to feed the many animals that are slaughtered or otherwise used by humans, it's been found that the soil has lost a great deal of its nutritional value and has eroded to the point that, in the United States, nearly 33 percent of topsoil is diminished.
Strahan, D. (2009, December 8). Have greens got it wrong about tar sands? The Ecologist.
Agriculture is the major farming activity. Agriculture's scale means not only that large area is directly affected, but that local and even regional climates can be affected. The draining of water from rivers and watersheds for irrigation leads to drier natural habitats. Those rivers that receive runoff from farmland are often poisoned by excessive nutrients and pesticides.
% 2F1998&_sk=999609997&view=c&wchp= dGLbVlz-zSkzV&md5=7d34d4ad0bd36d0a9c7db80a26e152db&ie=/sdarticle.pdf Pullen, S. (2004) The Desert biome, http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/gloss5/biome/deserts.html Carstanjen, H (1992) Managing fragile ecosystems: combating desertification and drought, http://www.unccd.entico.com/english/chapter12.htm#d Division for sustainable devt.
The Sahara Desert is the world’s largest desert area. The word Sahara comes from the Arabic word sahra’, meaning desert. It extends from the Africa’s Atlantic Ocean side to the Red Sea and consists of the countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan. It is about 5,200 miles long. Overall, the Sahara Desert covers 3,500,000 square miles. The geography of the desert is varied. In the west, the Sahara is rocky with varied elevation. It does contain underground rivers, which sometime penetrate the surface, resulting in oases. The central region of the Sahara has more elevation than the other areas, with peaks such as Emi Koussi and Tahat. Even though the area lacks rainfall, these peaks are snowcapped during the winter. The Eastern part of the Sahara, the Libyan Desert, is dry with very few oases.