Introduction
Agricultural activity is the earliest human’s activity on the natural ecosystem. It not only changes the local natural ecosystem but it also has a huge impact on the ecological environment. When many scholars trace back the historical roots of the problems of ecological environment, naturally they will be concern about the traditional mode of agricultural production, even back to the age when the foundation of traditional agricultural technology system was formed. Agricultural development for thousands of years both created a splendid civilization, but also accumulated a lot of environmental problems. The negative effects both affect the prevailing agricultural production and left some bad condition to future generations. In this paper, the whole process of the impact of human activities on natural ecology was discussed to provide more adequate historical basis for future environmental protection.
Impact on the ecological environment of ancient agriculture
In primitive societies, many forests were destroyed. People deforested to stave off the wild animals, develop farmlands and build houses. The disafforestation caused great damage to the forest and the animals inhabited there. Easter Island once had lots of forests. There are a lot of statues made by stone in Easter Island (Hughes, 102). Sculpture and transportation required a mass of mainpower and resources. Therefore, the subtropical forests in the island disappeared after deforestation. There were no raw materials for shipbuilding and transportation of the statues and no edible wild animals because of the extinction of tree species. In 1774, Europeans came to the island, kidnapped natives as slaves, brought infectious diseases such as smallpox and introduced shee...
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...ulgated in many countries, which play an important role on the protection of agricultural ecological environment. The "ecological agriculture" is a new type of agricultural production systems which is that the modernization of agriculture will go into a road with reasonable ecology and will achieve sustainable agricultural development. The "ecological agriculture" is the only way to promote the sustainable development of agriculture in modern world.
Works Cited
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Clive Ponting's The Green History of the World and Daniel Quinn's Ishmael both critique the dominant paradigms of modern human civilization-especially where its relationship with environment is concerned. Both feel strongly that we are in trouble. Neither are quite willing to make final connections and present us with a systematic method for getting out of our impending ecological crisis, but they both do spell out what has been wrong, what is wrong now, and what will happen should we choose not to take evasive action.
Goudie, Andrew. (2000) The Human Impact on the Natural Environment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 511 pp.
Agriculture is the science and practice of producing crops and livestock. The primary aim of agriculture is to use the land to produce more abundantly to feed and clothe the world at the same time protecting it from deterioration or misuse. Humans had to improve agriculture as they became more dependent on food, creating a solitary evolutionary connection between plants and animals (Campbell and Reece, 2001). In this day and age, so many people have forgotten the authentic premises of survival. It is easy for some to believe that the grocery stores produce food and clothing is produced by shopping centers. These inaccurate presumptions are being made due to the lack of knowledge of how agriculture truly works. There are also significant differences in the levels of understanding between rural and urban communities.
Morris, D., 2009. Feeding China. In: T. O. University, ed. U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world, Block 5, 'Changing China'. Milton Keynes: The Open University.
Agriculture is one of the most ancient forms of art and science that ties human development and well-being to natural resources and ecosystems. (Fritz J. Häni, 2007) Sustainable Agriculture is the production of food, fibre, plant and animal products using farming techniques that protect the environment, public health, human communities and animal welfare. (Sustainable Agriculture - The Basics, 2015) Sustainable agriculture is an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a site – specific application that over the long term will:
Redclift, Michael, Ted Benton, Ed. "Sociology and the Environment." Social Theory and the Global Environment. London: Routledge, 1994. 55.
Agriculture is quite possibly the most important advancement and discovery that humanity has made. It produces the one thing that we need the most: food. It has been around since 9500 BC, and can be the oldest sign of mankind’s acumen and the development and evolving of our minds and creations. Agriculture has been mastered throughout hundreds of years and is one of our most important resources on Earth, along with water and fossil fuels. Although the older farming methods from ancient times seem somewhat mediocre and barbaric, they were very ingenious and advanced for that time period. Over thousands of years, we have improved the way agriculture is used, how land is cultivated, the various techniques of farming and irrigation, and the tools and mechanics used. Numerous things that we see as aboriginal today, such as using a hand plow, were extremely contemporary in ancient times, and played key roles in the development of man and society, since quick labor was not abundant before this time. We are now extremely advanced in agriculture and irrigation and the tools used to farm and grow and harvest crops. We have learned from our past and ancestors how to grow and evolve in our methods and have advanced forward greatly.
Organic agriculture is the oldest type of agriculture there is. Many people don't know exactly what has to be done to say that you are farming organically, these days. Organic Agriculture has been increasing in size over the past few years as more people worry about what they are eating. Many people donít know what it exactly means to be farming organically.
To understand why is agriculture important in the world of today, then first of all we must know what agriculture is? Agriculture is the basic material production of society, the use of land for agriculture and livestock, mining plants and animals as raw materials and labor to produce mainly food and some raw materials for industry. Agriculture is a major industry, covering many disciplines: planting, breeding and processing of agricultural products; in the broadest sense, also including forestry and fisheries. Agriculture is an important economic sector in the economy of many countries, especially in the past century , when the industry has not yet developed. Since the dawn of history, agriculture has been one of the importance means of producing
Sustainable agriculture integrates three main goals--environmental health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity. A variety of philosophies, policies and practices have contributed to these goals. People in many different capacities, from farmers to consumers, have shared this vision and contributed to it.
Agriculture has been a fundamental component of human societies for centuries. It is so fundamental in fact that it is often forgotten by those dependent on its products, but not directly involved in the production. As we enter the 21st century, agriculture is beginning to receive more attention from the general public as the implications of farming are realized and the problem of potential world wide food shortage is addressed. With the future in focus, much of agricultural establishment uses words like biotech, and high-tech to describe their goals for U.S. agriculture. With few exceptions, traditional agriculturalists see a continuing trend of industrial agricultural practices that continue to drive production to fewer, larger, and more specialized production units which are virtually responsible for all stages of the production globally. This increased specialization is dependent on new biological technologies and information technologies at all levels from farms on which the food is produced to the markets where it is distributed.
Ponting, Clive. A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Social ecology observes humans as the main cause of the destroyed earth, by overpopulating it. The world is made up of numerous people, with different races and religions, it’s because of the bad habits men and women have created which have lead to a polluted earth (Carlson, Felton, 2001). Mur...
Today agriculture is the livelihood of most poor underdeveloped nations. This communal life blood provides a majority of the population with a source of employment, nourishment and income. It is considered to be an invaluable skill, that is taught down from generation to generation along with a sense of respect for the environment. However as a nation begins to undergo development, so do their food production systems. The country's newfound development causes significant restructuring of their agricultural production practices. This restructuring leads to poor environmental practices, and adverse agriculture methods. Increased economic development/production negatively affects a country's environmental and agricultural health.
As a distinctive critical approach to literature, ecocriticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1980s in the USA. ‘Green Studies’ is an alternative term for ecocriticism in the UK where this new approach to literature began in the early 1990s. It is appropriate here to stress that though ecocriticism as a separate discipline emerged in the 1990s, it is a fact that the relation between man and his physical environment had always been intriguing to literary critics. This interest can be explained in two ways.1.Man could realize in the last decade of the 20th century that the greatest problem of the 21st century would be the survival of the earth with all her living and non-living beings. 2. It is within some physical environment that man always exists and there can not be ‘is’ without ‘where’ as Lawrence Buell has put it. In fact man feels threatened in the ecologically degraded world. The last decade of 20th century clearly showed that man should do something to help the earth survive. Ecocriticism ...