Just as professor Henry Louis Grates Jr.'s word, human history is established by various outrageously crimes which might be totally acceptable and reasonable at that time for most of people, no mater whether they were aware of that or not. As an Environmental Science student, I immediately reminded of a lot of terrible destruction human beings did, or still doing, to our planet. Land reclamation, which I'm going to talk about here, is an emerging environmental concern.
This kind of environmental disruption I'm going to talk about is not about the pollution we produce now and then, but more about the process how human reconstruct the earth without enough knowledge and prudence.
For accommodating more and more people, for satisfying people's desire of space and for lots and lots of other reasons, we started reclaiming land by burning forest, filling marshes and foreshores and transforming hills long ago.
The environmental and ecological hazards of devastation primeval forest were quickly proved by degraded soil and ecotope. However, But it might be new to us that filling marshes and foreshores for land is even more harmful to the planet.
Marshes play a great role on the purification of water and air, so that, scientists call marshes "t,he kidney of the earth". The foreshores, besides, are actually extremely important to marine organism and water self-purification. But, different from forest degradation, the destructive impacts of marshes and foreshores reclamation are undetectable. Scientists started paying attention to them until the end of last century because the harm was disguised by off-shore exploration, such as urban and shipping pollution. According to their researches, the region created by reclaiming and its surrounding regions show horrible environmental crises such as pollutants accumulation, ecological degradation, eutrophication and so on.
Nowadays, fortunately,more and more countries, like Netherlands and Japan, have realized the appalling consequences of land-fill and have started to restore land form.
Alex Zhao
Jan 19, 2014
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