The Human Footprint
Everything you eat. Everything you drink. Everything you use. You entire life's consumption leaves the Earth leaves the lovely Earth a great quantity of "human footprint". Our human footprint doesn’t end after we buy and consume things; the final impact occurs when we discard items – and Americans discard four-fifths of a ton of trash per person, per year.
Oh we create tons of waste! Here are the numbers: Americans generated 251 million tons of trash in 2006, the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has data. Our per ca-pita trash disposal rate was 4.6 pounds per person, per day. Sixty-five percent came from residences, while 35 percent came from schools and commercial locations such as hospitals and businesses.
Does it sound scary?
There is still a lot of information that I can find in the Internet, or we can see in the movie called The human footprint by National Graphic Channel, showing how the human footprint has brought a very bad impact on our Earth including urbanization and transportation. In order to explain those above facts, we can see that the first consequence of urbanization is a modification of natural environments: economic development is usually accompanied by the concreting of surfaces (shopping centers, infrastructures, housing...), which is especially striking in coastal areas (Mediterranean...). Often rampant urbanization leads to an uncontrolled urban sprawl that is not harmonious (warehouses, estates...). This resulted in a reduction and fragmentation of natural areas. Also, urban life is the source of many forms of pollution: pollution of water, which is used, collected, treated and disposed of in the natural environment; pollution of air, by micro-particles, volatile organic compounds and greenhouse effect gases; noise, olfactory and visual pollution...
Talking about transportation, we are facing a big problem. It is undeniable that transport is 98% dependent on oil. It therefore easily becomes apparent that this sector is one of the main emitters of greenhouse effect gases (GHG) and pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides...) Every kinds of transportation such as air, marine, land always bring to people all kinds of pollution, which lead to negative consequences.
So what is our method to reduce the human footprint?
Written by Duc Vu
Reference: "Urbanization and transportation" from www.unanpourlaplanete.org
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