Desertification of the arid lands of the world has been proceeding--sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly-- for more than a thousand years. It has caused untold misery among those most directly caught in it's path, yet environmental destruction continues. Until recently, few if any lessons seemed to have been learned from the past, in part because the problem went unrecognized in it's early stages or was seen as a local one only affecting a small population, and in part because new lands were always available
Land Degradation in the Dominican Republic Deforestation in the Dominican Republic has involved burning trees to remove them from the land as opposed to using methods that are more sustainable (Alscher, 2011, p. 14). It is activities like those that had many unexpected damaging effects in the Dominican Republic. One of those effects was land degradation. Land degradation occurs when the land is extremely damaged due to human activity. Damaging the land decreases its productivity and can have very
Overpopulation and Environmental Degradation At the time of the agricultural revolution, nearly ten thousand years ago, the population of the globe was no more than ten million. Today the world population is estimated at over six billion. In the last hundred years the population has more than tripled. With the population rising at an enormous rate of 1.7 million a week, the world as a whole is being drained of its resources. (Southwick, 1996) Different theories have prevailed on what will occur
Overpopulation, Industrialization, and the Degradation of the Environment The overall growth of the human population in the last 2000 years has been a J-shaped growth. This can also be expressed as an exponential growth. A big question that can only be answered in time is how this population growth will slow down or stop. The planet can only handle so many humans before the effects of overpopulation send the environment into an unrecoverable tailspin of degradation. So the question is will the overall
comparison, they saw that, materially, they had less. And in that knowledge, they believed that they, as a people, were less. In this essay, I will examine third world communities and the relationship between technological development and environmental degradation. I will look first at the way in which development occurred in the South, and the reason it happened the way that it did. From there, I will show how these methods of development proceeded to eventually cause widespread environmental damage and
Enviromnetal Degradation as a Result of Overpopulation Introduction There are simply too many people on our planet, and the population is not showing any signs of slowing down. This is having disastrous effects on our environment. There are too many implications and interrelationships to discuss in this paper, but the three substances that our earth consists of: land, water and air, are being destroyed. Our forests are being cut down at an alarming rate, bearing enormous impacts on the health
The Degradation of Women in American Scholar In "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson characterizes the nature of the American scholar in three categories: nature, books, and action. The scholar is one who nature mystifies, because one must be engrossed with nature before he can appreciate it. In nature, man learns to tie things together; trees sprout from roots, leaves grow on trees, and so on. Man learns how to classify the things in nature, which simplifies things in his mind (section
Imagine you and your family are at a nice restaurant, waiting to enjoy a great meal, or so you think. As you lean in to take that first bite, a puff of smoke surrounds you, your family, and your food. How pleasant is this? A big topic being brought to attention these days is whether or not smoking should be banned from all restaurants and other public areas. Smoking in public areas should be taken into close consideration. There are many reasons of why this is brought to attention. These include
The Degradation of Music for Mass Consumption From the very first time that someone decided to experiment with a musical tradition, the cry has gone out that "true," "pure," and "good" music is dead to society, and that music itself is on a perpetual slide to oblivion. All apostrophe aside, this is a serious matter to consider. Music inhabits a significant place in all cultures. Musical style is very much a function of the Zeitgeist, reflecting the prevalent tone of the dynamics and pulse of
The Degradation of Character of Macbeth The tragedy, Macbeth, was written by William Shakespeare in 1606. Over the course of the play the main character, Macbeth, undergoes a continuous degradation of moral character. This change of character from good to evil significantly impacts Macbeth's attitude towards the other characters, Duncan, Banquo, Lady Macbeth, and the witches. The first of the four characters is Duncan. Since Macbeth interacts with Duncan only a minimal amount before Duncan's
The Degradation of Wives in the Victorian Period The degradation of the married woman in the Victorian era existed not only in that she was stripped of all her legal rights but also that no obligations were placed in her realm. Upon marriage, Victorian brides relinquished all rights to property and personal wealth to their husbands. Women were, under the law, “legally incompetent and irresponsible.” A married woman was entitled to no legal recourse in any matter, unless it was sponsored and
How much disintegration can a culture endure before it reaches the point of irreversible decay? The degree of disintegration and destruction that our own culture has experienced is probably not yet fully known, but mid-to late-Nineteenth Century Russian culture is another matter. The vicious nature of the attacks upon the "old forms" of Russian culture, especially those waged by the Nihilists of the late 1860s, provides ample material for exploring this important question. Fortunately, for those
The Degradation of the Character of Macbeth Shakespeare's tragic play, Macbeth explores the decline of the central character, Macbeth from a respectable warrior to a murdering and lying fiend. This change in character is a direct result of Macbeth’s unbridled ambition and greed. In act 1 scene 2 Macbeth is described as "brave", "valiant" and "heroic" and everyone admires him. King Duncan and his court receive news from the wounded Captain that the battle against the traitor and the rebel
The Degradation of Communication on the Internet Talking on the Internet, people regress. It's that simple. It can be one-to-one talk on e-mail or many-to-many talk on one of the LISTs or newsgroups. People regress, expressing sex and aggression as they never would face to face. Think about it. Current estimates say 23 million people communicate on the Internet from most of the nations on the globe, and that number is increasing at 12% a month. And all this just grew like Topsy, with no one
The Degradation of Women in On The Road An argument can be made that the women in Jack Kerouac's On The Road are not as characteristically well developed as the men. Through Sal and Dean's interactions with women, the reader sees that there exist two types of females in this novel - the benevolent virgin/mother figure or the whore. Women are constantly referred to in a negative way or blatantly degraded and insulted by numerous characters. However, Kerouac (through the character of Sal) exhibits
Abercrombie and Fitch and the Moral Degradation of America This past month I made my last visit to the popular teenage/college student retail store Abercrombie and Fitch. Finishing up some back to school shopping, I was on a quest for jeans, and I knew the place to get them. My last two favorite pairs were from Abercrombie and Fitch, and I was planning on buying the same kind once again. Happy and relieved that I would not spend the afternoon ransacking the mall for one pair of jeans, I
In the language of economists, “willingness to pay” describes the amount of money a person would sacrifice in order to obtain an additional unit of utility. In environmental economics, specifically, WTP is used to reflect the maximum amount a person would give up in exchange for an increase in an environmental “good” (for example, a one-unit increase in the cleanliness of a lake) or the minimum amount a person would accept in exchange for an environmental “bad” (for example, a one-unit increase
catastrophe in the early 1930's when vast areas of the Midwestern and Western farm lands of America became wastelands. This occurred due to a series of dry years which coincided with the extension of agriculture in unsuitable lands. Droughts and dust storms caused by poor tillage practices devastated farms and ranches of the Great Plains; therefore, causing a great exodus of its inhabitants to other, more fertile, lands. The problem had become so great that a nation wide effort was made to resolve the
Leave No Trace is philosophy of seven concepts that help minimize human recreational impact on wild lands. As wilderness recreation has become more popular, and the National Wilderness Preservation System has increased its wilderness lands from 9.1 million acres in 54 wildernesses in 1964 to 104 million acres in 628 wildernesses in 19991, the need for guidelines to help reduce degradation of these lands has become increasingly important. In 1979 Jim Bradley wrote about the need for an educational approach
kilometers of inhabited land increasing the already high level of salinity and worsening the environmental situation. Where is the Aral Sea located? The Aral Sea is in the very heart of the Central Asia. Central Asia, an area of 1.7 millions km2 in total, lies in the middle of the Eurasian continent. It is at the crossroads of the old caravan routes that ran from Europe to Asia and the Middle East to the Far East. The whole region consists of vast deserts and semi-arid lands (See Attachment 2