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The Environment Portal

Devil's Punchbowl Waterfall, New Zealand.
The natural environment comprises all naturally-occurring surroundings and conditions in which living things grow and interact on Earth. These include complete landscape units that function as natural systems without major human intervention, as well as plants, animals, rocks, and natural phenomena occurring within their boundaries. They also include non-local or universal natural resources that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water and climate.

As human populations grow and evolve, their activity modifies the natural environment at a rapidly increasing rate, producing what is referred to as the built environment. The potential of the natural environment to sustain these anthropogenic changes while continuing to function as an ecosystem is an issue of major worldwide concern. Key environmental areas of interest include climate change, water supply and waste water, air pollution, waste management and hazardous waste, and land use issues such as deforestation, desertification, and urban sprawl.

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Advancing sand dunes
Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various climatic variations, but primarily from human activities. A major impact of desertification is biodiversity loss and loss of productive capacity, for example, by transition from grassland dominated by perennial grasses to one dominated by perennial shrubs.

A number of solutions have been tried in order to reduce the rate of desertification and regain lost land. Leguminous plants, which extract nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil, can be planted to restore fertility. Stones stacked around the base of trees collect morning dew and help retain soil moisture. Artificial grooves can be dug in the ground to retain rainfall and trap wind-blown seeds. Windbreaks made from trees and bushes to reduce soil erosion and evapotranspiration was widely encouraged by development agencies from the middle of the 1980s.

  

Did you know...

Chemical structure of carbon dioxide
Incandescent light bulb
  • ... that the concept of reduce, re-use, and recycle as three equal options, but they are instead meant to be a hierarchy, in order of importance?
  

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Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American visionary, designer, architect, poet, author, and inventor.

Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?" Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.

  

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Credit: Roke
Map of countries by population density.

Overpopulation is one of the reasons given for environmental impact as given by Paul R. Ehrlichs formula I = P x A x T where I is the impact, P is population A is affluence and T is technology. (See also:List of countries by population density.)

  

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Kofi Annan
All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.
  

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