Environmental Chaos

4 Pages 968 Words

“Environmental Chaos”

For years man has succumbed to his primordial desire of acquiring riches, which has plagued society since biblical times. The natural man’s attitude is an enemy of the environment and will continue to be so as long as man continues to be lead by the pursuit of wealth. This so called pursuit of wealth threatens to destroy the integrity of the environment and mankind as we know it. Greed has instilled an irresistible desire to own and control everything. We are content to stop at nothing to achieve our goals and dreams. But what man doesn’t understand is that this type of attitude brings heavy consequences to bare. Our blatant disregard and disrespect for the environment will have resounding effects for future generations.
The challenge of living in harmony with the earth is as old as society itself. This relationship changed dramatically a little more than two centuries ago with the Industrial Revolution. Using the new technology of the steam engine in the early 19th century, and the recent use of the internal combustion engine, society has found itself able to exploit the energy locked in such fossil fuels as coal, oil and gas. At the same time, dramatic gains in agricultural productivity made possible by mechanized farming, fertilizers and more efficient water use pushed people from farms into factories and cities. The result has been a revolution in our standard of living that the most of the world has never seen or knows nothing about (Beyond the Horizon 1).

The effects of this revolution to the environment and ecology are astounding. On a daily basis we continue to dump contaminates and pollutants into the atmosphere that will remain in the air for years to come. Sadly enough, most of us don’t even know about this pollution because the effects are not immediately visible. For instance, a latency period of as much as thirty years after exposure to a toxic agent has been observed b...