Any time a public figure promotes a sense of complacency in regards to the environment, they are deliberately ignoring the numerous environmental disasters that happen every day and the public would do well to examine their motives. The simple and sobering truth of the matter is that while some of the environmental damage our population has caused can be reversed, we are running out of time in which to do so. A quick glance at recent environmental disasters and their effects serves as an extremely effective wake-up call.

hungry child

  • Each day, between 50 and 100 plant and animal species go extinct as a result of human interference.
  • Desertification is slowly destroying agricultural land; global grain production has been steadily declining since 1985 despite modern farming technologies. For example, 220 miles of farmland in Mali have become desert in the last 20 years. There are techniques that can combat desertification, including planting trees and practicing rotational farming. However, local governments are focused on short-term gains as opposed to long-term investments, and very few have committed themselves to fight desertification of farmland. Combined with our explosive population growth, this is likely to cause severe famine in the not-too-distant future.
  • Each year, Americans consume 50 million tons of paper-based products. This is the equivalent of 850 million trees.
  • 40,000 children die each day from preventable diseases that are directly related to environmental pollution.
  • By 2100, it is estimated that the world’s human population will have almost tripled.
  • The recent Somalian pirate crisis has been provoked by overfishing, which is a major global crisis. Waters have been polluted and overfished to the point that major world powers like the United States have had to reach as far as Somalia and its surrounding areas to find viable fish populations. The Somalis, whose traditional source of food is fish, have now been robbed of their legal right to fish in their own backyards and are dying of starvation in huge numbers. More than 90% of Somalian males are unemployed, and in their desperation to feed their large families they have turned to piracy as their only means of survival. This is one example of human suffering and death that is directly caused by pollution.

Other instances of environmental disaster constitute little-known historical landmarks in the process of world pollution. In school we are taught history in a general sense, but few teachers ever go into detail or even mention events when it comes to environmental disasters and the huge role they play in our current lives. It may be unpleasant to realize, but these are the environmental facts;

  • The Great Smog of 1952, which killed 4,000 people in London. The smog was caused entirely by air pollution.
  • The great Japanese mercury poisoning of the 1950’s and 60’s, otherwise known as Minimata disease. The Chisso Corporation in Japan had been dumping methyl mercury into the nearby ocean and infected the fish and shellfish eaten by the local population. It is estimated that 1,784 people died over a period of 30 years before the government took any action whatsoever.
  • Severe cases of mercury poisoning, or Minimata disease, also cropped up in Ontario, Canada in 1970. These cases arose from the ingestion of mercury-polluted fish and also from direct consequences of an illegal industrial chemical waste dump.
  • The TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash flurry spill—this is the long and wordy name given to what many environmentalists consider to be the worst documented mass contamination ever caused in the United States. It happened a few minutes before 1:00 a.m. on December 22, 2008. Kingston Fossil Plant’s ash dike in Tennessee suddenly ruptured, shooting 1.1 billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry into Tennessee’s waterways. The flood of black sludge crushed homes and toppled trees as it went. Afterwards it was estimated that the sludge eventually covered 5.4 million cubic yards of land with up to six feet of ash slurry. This massive wave of pollution also completely destroyed a road, destroyed a main gas line, broke one of the area’s water mains, and destroyed several power lines. The sheer volume of pollution released in this spill was 50 times the amount of the epic 1989 Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill. As of this writing, only 3% of the pollution has been removed.