Changes In The Earths Environment Essay -- essays research papers

Changes in the Earths EnvironmentThe 20th century, especially in the back half, has been one of rapidchange in the Earths milieu. The impact of humans on the physical form andfunctioning of the Earth have reached levels that are global in character, andhave done so at an increasely mounting speed. 20 years ago the environment wasseen as posing a nemesis to the approaching of humanity as death rates from naturalhazards had increased dramatically since the turn of the century. The Earththough has always been plagued by natural disasters. Now, with the world population growing at a rapid rate more people are living in hazard prone areas.Events which may have foregone unnoticed previously, only become hazards when thereis intervention with humans and their lifestyle. With the discovery of the ozonehole in the 1980s attention was now more focused on the threat humans wereposing to the environment. With scientific evidence to back up pessimisticpredictions of our future, most people, through media coverage, politicalpressures and general concern now see the environment as being truly threatenedby human progress and in desperate need of help.Natural hazards have been defined as ...extreme geophysical events greatlyexceeding normal human expectations in terms of their magnitude or frequency andcausing significant damage to man and his works with accomplishable loss of life.(Heathcote,1979,p.3.). A natural hazard occurs when there is an interaction amongst a system of human resource management and extreme or archaic naturalphenomena (Chapman,1994). As McCall, Laming and Scott (1991) argue, strictlyspeaking there is no hazard unless humans are affected in some way. Yet the linebetween natural and human-make hazards is a finely drawn one and usuallyoverlapping. Doornkamp ( cited in McCall et al, 1992) argues that many hazardsare human induced or at least made worse by the intervention of humans.In the 1970s, natural hazards were an important subject of topical stu dy,as the nature of their impact on human populations and what they valued wasincreasing in frequency at quite a rapid rate (Burton, Kates, White, 1978).During the 75 years after 1900 the population of the earth increased by astaggering 2.25 billion people. People who needed land on which to live and work.As the population rose people were dispersed in more places and in largernumb... ...cote and B.G. Thom (eds) Natural Hazards in Australia. 3-12, AustralianAcademy of Science, Canberra.Kevies, D.J. (1992). Some Like it Hot. New York Review of Books. 3931-39.McCall, G.J.H. (1992). Natural and Man Made Hazards Their Increasing splendorin the End 20th Century World in G.J.H.McCall, D.J.C.Laming and S.C.Scott (eds)Geohazards Natural and Man Made. 1-4, Chapman and Hall, London.McKibben,B. (1990). The End of Nature. Penguin, Middlesex.Meyer, W.R. and Turner, B.L. (1995). The Earth Transformed Trends, Trajectoriesand Patterns in R.J. Johnson, P.J. Taylor and M.J.Watts (eds) Geographies o fGlobal Change. 302-317, Blackwell, Oxford.Pearce, D. (1995). Blueprint 4 Capturing Environmental Value. Oxford Uni. Press,New York.Perry,A.H. (1981). Environmental Hazards in the British Isles. Allen and Unwin.London.Schnieder, S.H. (1989). Global Warming Are We Entering The Greenhouse Century ?.Sierra Club Books, New York.Stow, D.A.V. (1992). antedate in G.J.H.McCall, D.J.C.Laming and S.C.Scott (eds)Geohazards Natural and Man Made. i-ii, Chapman and Hall, London.Suzuki,D. and Gordon, A. (1990). Its a Matter of Survival. Harvard Uni Press,Harvard.