30-10-2012, 01:56 PM
WORLD POPULATION
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The first revolution was the evolutionary revolution, about 100,000 years ago during the Ice Age. These homosapiens had larger, more culturally elaborate communities than the earlier human forms. They hunted on a large scale, and as the food supply increased, so did their population. At the end of the Ice Age, there were about 5 million humans. The second revolution occurred around 8000 B.C. and was called the Agricultural Revolution. At this time, humans were able to have a reliable source of food at a location of their choice. This was when villages and towns had started to form, and were able to store more food they needed at the time. This caused birth rates to go up, and families to get larger. Up to this point, only 6,000 years after the discovery of farming, the population increased by at least 4000%. Each century afterwards the population grew a little faster, with certain setbacks like during the Black Death, an outbreak of the bubonic plague. This killed a quarter to a third of the people in Europe during the 14th century, but still in 1650, the world population had grown to 500 million. It was the third revolution, a century later, that really increased the population and hurt the environment. This was the Industrial Revolution. During this time coal, petroleum, natural gases, and other new energy sources started allowing the world to have factories, railroads, automobiles, chemical and plastic industries, and automated industries. It was also during this time that the death rate had been lowered, meaning people were able to live longer. This revolution introduced many positive things such as pest-control chemicals, modern sanitation, and medicine. These made life expectancy increase and infant mortality decrease. From 1750, when the Industrial Revolution started, to 1991, the life expectancy increased from 25 years to 65 years, and the infant mortality rate decreased from 400 to 68 per thousand births.
It was during this Industrial Revolution that environmental damage started to occur. In Greece, they had worried about soil erosion from too many trees being cut down in their mountainous region. Deforestation also caused water runoffs, flood, and droughts in China. In Rome, the air and water had been dangerously polluted. In addition it was at this time that negative things started to occur such as oil spills in sea, automobile exhaust making too much smog, and chloroflourocarbon gases that destroy the ozone layer being released into the atmosphere. The landfills were full and water sources polluted because of toxic waste from plastics and chemical manufacture. It was an increase of population that caused these things such as using up more landfill space, releasing more chloroflourocarbon gases, and more toxic waste to be dumped out in the ocean.
Acid rain is a direct result of air pollution which occurs when too many people are releasing toxins into the air. Fossil fuel that is burned is released into the air as a gas and reacts with sunlight, oxygen and moisture in the atmosphere. This changes compounds like sulfur dioxide into sulfuric acid, and nitrogen oxide into nitric oxide. It precipitates to the ground and pollutes water and the land, killing fish, damaging forests and crops, and corroding metals. Main causes of air pollution are the needs of too many people for the use of cars and industrial plants, both which release many harmful fumes into the air. An increasing population leads to more CFC's emitted into the air from the car's air conditioning. Also when the cars are not able to be used anymore, they are taken to the junk yard, and occupy more landfill space. Furthermore, cars have damaged terrain when vacationers go over more land with off-road vehicles (Bouvier, 51). Again, increased usage of energy produced by oil, coal and natural gas-fired power plants will have a negative effect on the world's air.
A larger population also increases usage of air conditioning when it becomes warmer. Air conditioners cause more carbon to be emitted, heat to be trapped in the atmosphere, and UV light to enter in. Likewise, if there are less people, less air conditioning is used, and global warming and a deteriorating ozone layer could be prevented. According to the United States Nations Population Fund, they predict the developing countries will double their carbon dioxide emissions by 2025. What the population is causing, air pollution, is harmful to them. With air pollution, humans, plants, and animals do not have clean air to breath. Air is one of the necessities to life, and the cleaner it is, the better. As well as the Earth's water and air, there is another part of the environment that is a threat of too many people. Overpopulation is destroying the land and therefore could end the life of all the creatures on Earth.