Happy Earth Day!! I feel it is appropriate to talk about respecting and loving nature today. Below I talk about three points which emphasize why we should not try to fight or fix nature's "problems." Instead we should embrace natural solutions.
A common theme throughout my studies in college has been that nature knows best and nature will always win. As I briefly mentioned in my previous post about Silent Spring, Rachel Carson mentions that natural controls are the best way to deal with pests. If we use chemicals to control insect and weed pests, we are introducing harmful chemicals into the environment and speeding up the evolution of the pests we are killing. Over time, species build up a resistance to factors that are killing the species. When we spray chemicals we are forcing the species we kill to evolve at a more rapid pace, which could some day cause the "pests's" ability to survive to surpass the human ability to create or find a chemical that can kill the pest. It is better to use natural controls for pests like predators or natural pheromones that certain insects or plants, which are not harmful to our crops, that will hunt or repel the unwanted species.
I also learned about nature concurring man in my Popular Science Writing course last year. We learned about slumps, specifically rotational slumps. A rotational slump is a type of landslide in which masses of sediments move in a rotational manor. Below is a diagram of a rotational slump. We saw an example of a slump in Cobleskill on a field trip. Our professor told us that humans had cut into the hillside to create a roadway. The hill that was cut into now slumps annually, especially during wet weather, and workers have to clean up the road and put up materials to block the sediments from slumping into the road again. No matter how much effort is put into stopping the slump, the hillside continues to rotate and sediments fall. We also learned that man made or widened water ways, with steep sides in particular, will also eventually slump. Houses built above the waterway will eventually slump into the water. One house that will slump probably in 100 years or so is the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, New York.
The last area of nature people control that I wish to discuss is agriculture. People control the land to produce food to survive. Of course, I have no problem with using the resources around us to survive, but we should do it in a more natural way. Organic agriculture focuses on building up soil quality. Soil is one of the most important parts of growing health crops. Conventional agriculture methods use chemicals that deplete the nutrients in the soil. When soil quality is decreased plants cannot get the nutrients they need and it cannot hold water as well. When soil dries out and there are few plants around whose roots usually hold the soil in place erosion can occur. If the soil quality is depleted enough, huge amounts of erosion can occur like during the Dust Bowl.
The moral of my ranting is nature has a way of taking care of itself. In time, nature will win against our modifications or our modifications will destroy nature enough that we cannot use resources the way we used to. It is best to use natural pest controls, farming methods that focus on the soil, and chose to develop the land where we do not have to make so many changes.
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