Recently more and more attention has been focused on the problem of preserving the environment. Over the past 30 years or so the quality of many people’s lives has deteriorated in some respects because

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PRESERVING THE ENVIRONMENT

Recently more and more attention has been focused on the problem of preserving the environment. Over the past 30 years or so the quality of many people’s lives has deteriorated in some respects because of technological progress. Those people living near airports are constantly attacked by the noise of increasingly larger and more powerful jet aircraft taking off and landing. We have ugly buildings which have appeared in towns and cities. Some of these are blocks of flats-high-rise buildings built because of the high price of land.

The motor car has been responsible for many changes in the environment. On the one hand it has brought mobility to millions of people but on the other it has led to the construction of more noisy and dangerous roads and has polluted the atmosphere with exhaust fumes.

While towns and cities become larger and uglier and more densely populated, the rural areas have lost most of their population owing to the need for fewer workers in agriculture. The countryside has also been affected the large-scale use of insecticides. For one thing the killing of insects resulted in a loss of balance in the ecology. Insects, although a nuisance to farmers, provide food for birds. Many people are afraid that fruit and vegetables sprayed with chemicals may have some poisonous effect upon people who eat them.

Recently, however, certain counter measures against the destruction of the environment have been introduced. One of the first acts of Parliament to counter pollution was the Clean Air Act, which opened the way to smokeless zones in large towns and cities. This followed a bad winter in which many people with bronchial complaints became very ill through the effect of a mixture of smoke, fog and fumes known as ‘smog’. Rivers which are fouled up with industrial chemical waste are now being cleaned, and fish which could not live there a few years ago can be caught again.

The sharp increase in water pollution is alarming. The pollutants come mainly from municipal and industrial wastes and from agricultural land’s run-off. It is common knowledge that water pollution contributes greatly to an increase in the sickness rate among the population. A large majority of these cases are caused by the lack of clean water. Synthetic detergents present a great pollution danger. Unlike organic wastes they cannot be destroyed by bacterial action. As a result in some areas there is hardly a river or a lake which does not have a dangerous amount of detergents.

One cannot deny that environmental pollution is the most dangerous side effect of human activity. It is causing global changes in the environment and deterioration of the biosphere. The nature of the processes is not clear and the amount of damage is still uncertain because of the lack of sufficient information. The scientists who are now tackling the problem of the environmental protection represent such areas of knowledge as biology, ecology, chemistry, geography, physics, economics and the law.