If you're interested in environmental or green issues, you probably know all about things like sustainable design and energy conservation. You have a decent understanding of the effects man's actions can have on the planet, including issues like deforestation and global warming. But you may not know about one very important effect of the deforestation currently spreading all over the globe: desertification.
Desertification is one of the first truly visible consequences of the effects of man's disregard for the health of the planet; many consider it to be a sign of what our children and our children's children will soon come to face.
But what is it? Desertification is the name given to the process which turns a normal, healthy ecosystem into a desert-- a desert that wouldn't have appeared if nature were allowed to take her natural course. The term doesn't include the natural deserts that have existed for thousands of years. Natural deserts develop over time due to a low amount of rainfall or a difficult climate, making a particular swath of land unable to support animal or vegetable life easily. The "artificial" deserts included in the term desertification are unintentionally created by man.
Desertification is the result of one or several man-caused events, including acid rain (which results from manmade pollution), the overgrazing of cattle, intentional and unintentional manmade fires, and, of course, the cutting of trees for the production of paper products and for wood.
What Happens During Desertification
In some areas, only one of the above factors might come into play to encourage desertification. In other areas, you may see a combination of all four. When a piece of land has been sufficiently affected by man in order for the desertification process to start, the land slowly transforms from a rich habitat into an unnatural and often completely uninhabitable desert.
In an unnatural desert, different species of animal life living in the area begin to die. The local plants disappear gradually-- or sometimes all at once. When the vegetation begins to die off, the desertification process begins to speed up. With the loss of plant life comes the loss of oxygen and other valuable resources that feed an area-- and the whole planet.
With desertification, a whole ecosystem can die-- and remove from the planet all of the much-needed natural resources that ecosystem used to provide. And it's a problem that doesn't simply affect some animal in plant life in one small area; desertification also affects man in several key ways. And one of the most important is flooding.
Trees do more than create oxygen and feed ecosystems; their roots also anchor the soil into place, keeping it firmly where it belongs. But when trees and their roots begin to die, catastrophic flooding and mudslides become much more common. These floods kill people and damage ecosystems in the here and now; this isn't something that we can let future generations worry about, because it is affecting mankind every day. If that's not enough, the lower levels of oxygen brought about by the process of desertification also speed up the progression of global warming.
Desertification isn't a simple problem, and because it's caused by many factors no one solution will fix it. But there are things that the environmentally conscious among us can do to help prevent future desertification. One is using and encouraging the use of less paper in day-to-day life. Recycle paper and do what you can to live paper-free in your home and office. Another is working to pass legislation that will control the amount of wood that can be taken from any one area, or the amount of cattle that can graze in an area.
Huge issues like global warming require huge --and difficult-- solutions. But desertification, though complex, takes place locally, and on a smaller scale than something like global warming. And while this makes desertification receive less attention than it deserves, it also means that your efforts can make a difference in your area.
Author Resource:-
This article was written by Shawn Wilson, a member of the customer support team at Datepad, where internet dating is always free. Datepad has a massive directory of informative dating articles along with a great list of dating site reviews on their dating blog.
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