The human population has exploded in the last 500 years. Technologies and infrastructure that have taken the world out of the Stone Age have progressed to the point where the average life span has increased by over fifty years. This explosion of growth has contributed heavily on the environment in which all humans live in. Because of the increasing amount of population and a need for continuing growth in infrastructure there will be a higher rise in environmental disasters. When these disasters affect an entire population center sometimes they cannot be contained which leads to areas such as superfund sites and brownfields. These environmental disasters are often preventable if the proper safeguards were put into place from the beginning.
Sustaining the human population requires three basic items. Access to clean water, food, and shelter sustain current life while creating new. However, when environmental disasters occur all three can be taken out of the equation. The most iconic environmental disaster in United States history is the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York. The love canal is considered a superfund site, which is an area that has been contaminated with toxic and hazardous materials and poses a danger to any population in its vicinity. The Love Canal is an area which was covered by chemical waste by the Hooker Chemical company. The land that the toxic waste was dumped on was then sold to the Niagara Falls School Board in order to handle Niagara Falls booming population growth. This was then used as development project to create homes. The Love Canal was used to dump over 20,000 tons of chemicals.
The seepage from this waste began to make its way into basements of the homes that were built atop of the dumpsite. This se...
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Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
As America tumbled skyward into the 1930s, the country also stumbled earthward into a cataclysmic depression. Farmers all across the country mewled out in agony as huge swarms of flinging dust particles flew amok and disfigured cropland. The dust squirmed itself into houses, barns, and the lungs of innocent people, infecting them with what came to be known as a dust pneumonia. Farmers suffered harshly from the annihilation of their farms due to the soil flying about. It impaired animals, crops, houses, and their families’ health. Horrifically timed, this explosion of catastrophic grime helped the Great Depression terminate America economically; proving the storm to be the wickedest environmental crisis to strike North America. This was the squall that gave the American 1930s the nickname the “Dirty Thirties”, the dust bowl had emerged was not to evaporate until about ten years later. The dust bowl is simplest described as an agricultural nightmare, wreaking havoc from 1930 to 1941on plantations of Midwest America. Ironically, the very people who suffered from the gale caused this calamity onto themselves. The cause of the bowl is blamed to be large scale famers overproducing too many crops, stripping the topsoil of farmland. Not all the weight of the blame rested on overproduction of course, but also a combination of drought, torrid temperatures, and trivial, yet vitally significant prairie fires also played roles in causing the bowl. These events caused the soil to become frail, loose, and subject to passing winds above the land, creating one colossal horde of dust. Clearly, the cause of the dust bowl was overproduction and various factors, resulting in demolished farmland all across North America, proved the dust bo...
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Imagine huge gusts of wind, tornadoes carrying dust throughout millions of acres and destroying everything in its path. Black blizzards destroying anything that lay in front of it, ranging from minor to major whirlwinds of particles that would reach every crevice of every house, person, and land. The dust would either be black, red, or grey. The Dust Bowl, an event that is known most prominently during the dirty thirty’s (1931-1939) to have brought on hardships, destruction, and sickness on all those within the American Southern Plains . During this time many families were farming on the land and trying to get through the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl enhanced the poverty and problems of families who chose to live and farm on the land in the Southern Plains. Its creation came from overworking the new, fragile, and untouched lands without any knowledge of the potential disaster that would occur. Anyone who lived in the five states knew how devastating a visit from the Dust Bowl would be, and their lifestyles had changed because of it. Families were constantly living in dust, attempting to restore the damage of their crops from the dust storms, and trying to get past the depression. Triggered by a changing environment and farmers of the 1930s, the agricultural disaster known as the Dust Bowl distressed the environment, economy, and made life even more difficult during the Great Depression for the citizens living in the Southern Plains.
The Information in “The Dust Bowl” suggest that When the economy plummeted during the 1920’s the price of wheat dropped to an all-time low, Since wheat became no longer profitable as is farmers decided to cultivate more to even the loss (3-4). This radical decision was done in an area that was not supposed to be used for mass farming practices.
The great plains of the united states were covered with dust. The ‘Dust Bowl’ refers to the area in the United States who suffered massive drought along with dust storms. High winds with dust damaged infrastructures, crops, and livestock in this region. The drought intensified the dropping of the economy. The disaster affected the food production. Many people are starving because they don’t have money to buy food and there was no food available. Families who are affected by the dust storm migrated to other areas desperate to find jobs and better living
Throughout this mining process a byproduct is created called chat. The chat is leftover rock and waste from mining that did not contained the desired materials. The chat was left on the site because the Bureau of Indian Affairs thought it could be of value to the Quapaw tribe (1). This chat contained high levels of toxic lead and other harmful chemicals. It is estimated that there are 75 Million tons (150 billion pounds) of chat piles remaining exposed to the environment as well as numerous flotation ponds that haven’t been taken into account (4).
The Love Canal story is essentially the story of the thousands of families who lived unknowingly amongst an abandoned toxic chemical waste dump. It wasn’t the first time in U.S history where this has happened, nor was it the worst, but it did grab the public’s attention.
Ganzel, Bill. "The Dust Bowl of the 1930s." Farming in the 1930s. The Wessels Living History Farm, 2003. Web. 26 Feb. 2011.
Overall, many humans and animals were impacted severely, even killed from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. This included several cattle, sheep, horses, chickens, and many other farm animals. The crops and farms all suffered a great loss and the homes and the people that lived inside of them also suffered a great upheaval of their familiar lives. This ruined many people’s jobs and ways to make a living. All together, this was a very traumatic experience for all of the people involved.
...ional Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 24 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
In Title I of NEPA, our government recognizes the immutable link between mankind's dealings and the impacts on the environment. People have an individual responsibility to the world around them. The Constitution assures us "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." However, "life" is undefined. We, as human beings, have the superiority to nurture and preserve all forms of life. Transitions in population growth (or decline), urban spread, industry expansions and technological advances are critical in determining and modifying the ever-changing needs of the environment. Extensive research and planning with State and local government allows NEPA to anticipate, possibly even predict, an environmental disaster before it occurs. These measures are to insure the most beneficial use of our natural resources, to preserve our Nation's history as well as encourage individuality, to search for improvements in recycling our resources and the discovery of new ones. These goals are sought after in a systematic manner to include the most recent available data that could promote or reject proposals for changes t...
Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said, “Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today” (“Population,” Internet). With the current statistics, Jacques could not be more accurate. Every second, 4.2 people are born and 1.8 people die, which would be a net gain of 2.4 people per second (“Population,” Internet). At this steady rate, the environmental health is spiraling downwards, and it is safe to assume humans are responsible for this. As the population increases, harmful effects on the land, water, and air also do.