Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 23

Promoting the vital need to develop a deeper awareness of our relationship with the environment and assisting students to make informed decisions for action are the ultimate objectives of this book. While there is mounting concern over the ways anthropogenic environmental change is putting human health at risk, the specific rationale for this volume is the inadequate consideration given to the special risk of ecocrises interaction in the existing environmental literature.

The following chapters trace the history of that risk, beginning with the sweeping environmental and social changes launched by the Industrial Revolution. These changes were so immense that many environmental scientists see them as constituting a new geological epoch, one that highlights the dominant role now played by human activity in shaping the very geology and ecology of Earth. Referred to as the Anthropocene, it was triggered in the late eighteenth century with the invention of the steam engine, followed in relatively short order by the production and use of fossil fuels, which contributed to an intense rise in the amount of carbon dioxide and other pollutants in the atmosphere and the oceans. Industrial production, in turn, contributed to an array of other environmental crises, including fuel spills, waste dumping and leakages (Fig. 1.4), deforestation, the spread of infectious diseases, loss of biodiversity, and the devastation of marine life.

Fig. 1.4 Toxic waste barrel.

Source: EliasSch/Pixabay.

But how did all of this come about? What steps along the way pushed our arrival at this troublesome destination? Having come to this point, how can we avoid catastrophe? To adequately address these urgent questions, it is necessary to tease apart and rigorously examine a linked set of environmental, biological, social, political, and economic issues in historic context. This is the approach taken in explicating the health perils of ecocrises interaction in this volume.