Topic 11_ Help or harm the environment_Ngocphan

It is said that we do not inherit our earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. Being aware of that, what is the humans’ attitude towards the duty of protecting the environment? In my opinion, people are just doing so much harm to the environment. The writing is going to analyze this issue at three points as follows.

First and foremost, human beings are straining every nerve to exploit natural resources. There is a fact that people have much dependence on the nature. They need natural elements such as air, water and land to survive. They even need further things to satisfy their needs at higher levels. For examples, they destroy forest and develop minerals to make products or build constructions and natural gas or oil to use as fuels in the daily life. According to WWF, humans are consuming 20% more than the resources’ renewal rate and the people’s consuming rate of coal, oil and gas increased 700% between 1961 and 2000. As that process takes place day by day, natural resources - especially nonrenewable resources such as coal, metals, oil and so forth - are under threat to the edge of exhaustion.

Secondly, people discharge contaminants to the environment every day. Apart from environmental accidents that are out of people’s control like oil spills and nuclear explosions from which a lot of toxic chemicals are swept away to the oceans, people also do harm to the environment on purpose just to satisfy their needs and greed. Specifically, there are more and more companies’ scandals of discharging untreated wastewater every year. Besides, people toss trash and waste much of which is made up of one-time-use products and use plastics which are made from toxic chemicals and do not biodegrade. No matter they discharge the waste water and trash by chance or on purpose, their actions obviously pollute our lands, rivers, lakes and oceans a lot and make the pollution in an alarming state.

Finally, people have driven animals to the edge of extinction. It cannot be denied that most of animals are valuable, because they supply meat that is very healthy to humans. Some of their organs can be used as medicaments. Plus, people may tan furs from many kinds of wild animals like panthers and tigers to make leather which is a perfect material for making shoes, coats, gloves and the like. That is the motivation for people to directly kill animals. More notably, at present, people can kill wild animals in an indirect way. As mentioned above, people discharge poisonous waste to water resources and destroy forests where animals take up residence on. Since those animals do not have places to live, they cannot survive and as the result, many of them go to extinction.

To sum up, by exhausting natural resources, discharging contaminants to the environment and making wild animals gradually extinct, people have been seriously ruined the environment.