Global
warming isn't the only thing to worry about. Overpopulation, pollution,
poaching and mining are just a few of mankind's other harms that are
leaving the Earth scorched and ruined.
However,
the devastating effects of the digital age, demanding food production
and melting glaciers are something most people don't see every day.
In order to raise awareness of the issues threatening life as we know it on this planet, the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Population Media Center have released a collection of sobering pictures, showing the widespread destruction of land, skies and seas.
One picture
shows the street grid of Los Angeles at night, a city known for its
infamous rush hour traffic. The exhaust from cars and airplanes are
thought to be one of the major contributing factors to global warming,
and the effects are seen in pictures of a melting glacier in Norway and a
devastating wildfire in Colorado.
Some
of the pictures show the pileup of waste across the world, from piles
of tires in the Nevada desert to burning mounds of computer parts in
Accra,Ghana.
While most
of the Western world has systems in place for waste disposal, that's not
necessarily the case in places like the island nation of Java where
locals are forced to dump their garbage into local rivers and streams.
One picture shows a surfer gliding through a wave darted with plastic
packaging and other refuse.
With
the increasing demand for wood for home building, the old growth
forests of the Pacific Northwest are being turned into barren wastelands
thanks to logging. One of the pictures shows a hill on Vancouver Island
in Canada turned bald thanks to logging, while stumps litter a
reservoir in Oregon's Willamette National Forest after clear cutting.
Forests are
also going to waste in the Amazon, where one picture shows the jungle
burning so that grazing cows can move in and feed the world's
ever-growing population.
Overpopulation
is especially evidence in aerial views of crammed New Dehli, India and
Mexico City, Mexico - two of the most densely populated cities in the
world.
Not
seen in the pictures is the 10,000-year-old Larsen B Ice Shelf in
Antarctica, which according to a new NASA study, won't exist by the end
of the decade.
The
new study estimates that the ice shelf will 'disintegrate completely'
before 2020 thanks to a series of warm summers that have reduced the
shelf from 4,445-square-miles in 1995 to just 618 today.
Luckily,
world leaders are planning a meeting in September to address these very
serious concerns, developing environmental goals to be followed through
2030. And in December, the United Nations will meet in Paris in an
attempt to set limits on pollution.
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