Environment Research Paper

aes067
Nov 9, 2016
4 min read

How Do People Affect The Environment?

By Abigail

You as a person probably live in a house, in an environment, in a state, in a country, in a continent, on a planet, in a galaxy, in the universe. Our environment is changing. We are taking away animals habitats. We are wasting resources. Got that?

Yes, I get it
No, I think your speaking Japanese

I checked yes for you (you’re welcome ). Well anyway, you may have seen two movies called The Lorax and Wall-E. These “fictional” movies actually kind of happened in real life. Once you’ve finished reading this paper you’ll understand what I’m saying.

It was April in 1935 and it hadn’t rained in a while. Farmers had recently pulled up all the prairie grasses and replaced them with wheat. In the Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas area there was usually a lot of dust storms. But this one was different. Animals were panicking. The wind was blowing at 60+ mph. “Get inside!!” Most people were prepared. They had their cloths to protect themselves from the dust. They had a flour and water mixture to plaster on the windows so the windows stay in. In the end, houses were buried, animals died, crops were lost. Farmers learned that their plants had not been strong enough to hold the dust, and laws were passed to prevent this from happening again. The Dust Bowl was very bad because it takes forever for soil to form. After this catastrophe most people went to California.

Soil is formed when a parent material, or rock (as you earthlings like to call it) erodes over millions of years. Ways a parent material can a erode is by wind, rain, water, plants, and other types of weather. If you have strong rooted plants, it keeps the soil firm on the ground. Plants like these are called cover crops. They keep topsoil on the ground. Soil usually takes 1,000-10,000 years to form at least 1 centimeter of soil! If you have a compost pile near your house then you probably know what organic material is. Organic material is material, like soil, made from once living organisms. All of this talk about soil reminds me of the Dust Bowl, and how they took up all of the strong rooted plants and replaced it with wheat. They lost all of the topsoil and it was impossible to grow plants without topsoil.

Yay, time for another story! It was April (again!) in 2010. Oil was going through a pipe into a tanker with 126 workers aboard. Inside the tanker people realized something was wrong. Off the coast of Louisiana people saw a tanker in flames. This tanker was The Deepwater Horizon. This was one of the worst oil spills in history. 11 of the 126 workers died. The oil leak was from too deep down to fix. This leads to the Offshore Drilling Debate. The Offshore Drilling Debate is a debate on whether we should drill in water or not.

Pros to drilling

Cons to drilling

We make our own money

Oil spills can hurt wildlife

We are not dependent on other countries.

Oil spills can hurt the economy

They are hard to clean up

In my introduction I talked about two movies; The Lorax and Wall-E. In both movies the main characters land was destroyed. In Wall-E there was trash everywhere. In The Lorax all the trees were cut down and there was pollution. Now if you didn’t see the connection before, I’ll explain how all these topics connect. All of these topics I talked about connect because their environment was being used improperly. If I were to make a sequel to these movies/books, here’s what I would fix.

Lorax

Deepwater Horizon

Wall-E

Dust Bowl

Replace all of the trees that were cut down.

Have the pipes not go as deep.

Have people start recycling.

Use strong plants to keep the topsoil firm.

Have you heard of Easter Island? And no, the Easter Bunny does not live there. On Easter Island there are no trees, and this is why. On Easter Island there were a lot of statues representing gods the islanders built. They used logs of trees to move them. The islanders ended up using the last bit of their resources. Birds flew away because there were no trees left. Predators of birds started disappearing. There were no boats or tools to fish. Islanders started to turn on their gods and knocked down all the statues. Then, they left.

The lesson that can be learned from these topics is that if you don’t use the environment wisely, there are consequences. In all of the books and movies the environment was not used wisely and bad things happened. So, now that you know about other people’s effect on the environment; what will your effect be?