Purple_Lavender

The world's population has been booming for year, the world population reached 6 billion on October 12, 1999, and is expected to reach 9.3 billion by 2050! The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities or area's carrying capacity.


You can see from this graph of world population growth the incredible extra burden we are putting on the earth’s carrying capacity, especially in Asia and the Pacific.



Overpopulation has been disastrous for the planet. It occurs when its population can't be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources and without degrading the capacity of the environment to support the population. Greater populations have polluted and consumed more, ruining the environment and creating a variety of problems. Also, with the food supply limited, increases in population make shortages in many parts of the world even worse.

Nature is a balance of existence. In order to coincide with nature, we must balance the saving and extending of lives with the number of lives which we produce. We mustn't use resources any faster than they can be reproduced. We need to respect ourselves by learning to respect the environment which we rely upon for our own existence.

According to a research, each Malaysian generates an average of 1.7kg of solid waste daily, especially in major cities. If the solid wastes were collect daily, it is estimated to be more than 15000 tonnes, which is the same height of 4 times KL tower!!! Can you imagine how much waste we generated? That is sick and disgusting. We should be ashamed. So how do we get ourselves out of this mess?

Firstly, when you are at the fast food restaurant, don't take handfuls of ketchup packets and napkins that you will not use. What happens is you end up leaving it on your tray and then the restaurant has to throw it out... Those people handing out flyers, don't take one unless you really want it. Don't take it because you feel sorry for the person handing them out only to throw it on the floor or in the garbage 20 feet away.

We must all get in the habit of separating your garbage from the recyclables. This will greatly reduce our trash output. I have recycling bins in my house. When they get full we carry them to the government recycle bin and deposit them in there. It's simple and easy so just do it.



Like I said there are many ways we can help this problem but the key thing is that it has to start with our own mentality shift. We have to think about how to make things better if we want to make things better and simple little things that you as an individual can do will help a lot.

Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area. But they were estimated completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation. Trees play a critical role in absorbing the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Fewer forests means larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and increased speed and severity of global warming.

Forests are cut down for many reasons, but most of them are related to profits or other uses. The biggest driver of deforestation is agriculture. Farmers cut down forests to provide more room for planting crops. Often many small farmers will each clear a few acres to feed their families by cutting down trees and burning them in a process known as “slash and burn” agriculture.

The world's growing population has been a primary cause of rain forest destruction. More people need land to live on and wood products to consume. Limiting population growth may be the first in a series of steps that would limit the destruction of the rain forests.

We must realize is that the paper products we use daily could have been a part of a forest. By wasting paper products, we are wasting forests. The only way to ensure that we will not encounter any of the consequences of deforestation is to stop destroying the forests all together. We should stop cutting down all trees, no matter what our needs were.

Acid rain is very harmful to the environment. Acid rain affects the life in the water as well as the life on land. It is almost worse in water than on land because the fish and aquatic plant that are survive in the water need the water for respiration. Acid rain also leaves a lot of aluminum in the soil, which can be harmful to the trees that grow in forest. The acid rain dissolve waxy protective coating of leaves, damaging them and preventing them from being able to photosynthesise properly.

Very strong acids will burn if they touch your skin and can even destroy metals. Acid rain is much, much weaker than this...As, it is never acidic enough to burn your skin. Normal rainwater has a pH of 5.6. When the pH level of rainwater goes below 5.6, it is considered acid rain.

How to reduce the damage caused by acid rain? Lakes and rivers can have powdered limestone added to them to neutralise the water - this is called "liming". Liming, however, is expensive and its effects are only temporary - it needs to be continued until the acid rain stops.

Water pollution can be found everywhere, for example, when you approach any river in Malaysia, you can sense disgusting smell along with many wastes float on river. Even in my house that I rent nearby to my college, UCSI University, I can know how serious our water polluted. Sometimes, I would collect the dirty brownish water which flow out from the pipes and bring them to boil and drink them. But the hot water seem to be not effective to reduce the brownish water to transparent colour. I'm pretty worry about the quality of water that I drink into my stomach. That is why we prefer to buy mineral water from stores rather than drinking the brownish water.



So, lets talk about the water pollution in Malaysia. Water pollution is a serious problem in Malaysia, as it reduces total water availability and the polluted waters are not treatable for consumption. Causes of pollution including fertilizers that contain nitrates and phosphates. When the fertilizers used too much, they will stimulate the growth of algae which will act as competitor of aquatic plant. The algae will use the dissolved oxygen as they decompose, and block light which prevent aquatic plant undergo photosynthesis process, leading to aquatic plant die.

The development in Malaysia is the main factor that cause water pollution too. This occur since our country is developing in tourism industry, more and more hotels and resorts were built. As a result, many of the forests surrounding the river areas have been chopped down. The surrounding soil have no roots to hold on and the soil flow into the rivers when rain. This cause rivers become murky and block sunlight from reaching the aquatic life in the rivers.

I have shown 2 simple ways to save the water in two previous blogs. Such as, conserve water by collect the cold water in a bucket instead of letting it flow away and also try to reduce the use of soap.

Soaps are emulsifying agents commonly used for cleaning. They have long been made from lye and fat.Despite their usefulness, I think soap and detergents going down the drain put a huge strain on our water quality and water treatment plants. If we can avoid it, sometimes I think not even using too much soap would be good.

This is because I remember I read a news paper reported that many years ago that a layer of inch-thick white dust was found in the bottom of the North Sea by some Norwegian scientists during an exploration. And what they discovered eventually was that this thick layer....actually came from our modern society! They found it was the residual material of the stuff found in pills people took as medicine...which then passed through bodies and sewage treatment and somehow found itself in the bottom of the sea.



If we stop soap foam usage it would cut down both on the use of plastic and pressure on such rubbish building up on landfill sites and in our precious water supply. If you think of people in the old days before the consumer society of now, they still can survive without using any soap...so I think we must can do the same thing.

We must face the fact that the world's resources are decreasing, global warming is happening and if you don't living green now you have to start soon. So I decided to show one way to go green. If you take cold showers then this way doesn't apply to you.

It is a fact that cannot be denied, oil is on it's way to running out, the world's oil supply could very well be depleted in as soon as 20 years. But drinkable water could become the next serious issue, so saving water is very important. My house has a central water heating system which causes the hot water move long distance through the pipes into the shower machine. It takes about 5 minutes for the hot water to come through and thus wasting a whole lot of water. So, I'm always collect the cold water in a bucket to prevent wasting of water.



It's a really simple solution to solving a water waste problem. If you having same problem as mine, please don't hesitate to try out this simple way.