Introduction
Today having an ecosystem that will sustain a population is required and only that can ensure sustained growth. An ecosystem is an ever changing complex interaction between living and nonliving things on this planet. The affect should be maintenance of balance in nature. Nature works on equilibrium and any disruption escalates natural calamities which makes life difficult for all living beings. Human is the only living thing which has acquired power to disturb this equilibrium.
An extensive study has been made under United Nations by Millennium Ecosystem Assessment on the present problem and relationship ecosystem has on human being. It may not be out of place to mention some of the key findings:
Key findings
- All people depend on nature for leading healthy and secured life.
- In the last half-century , people have made unprecedented changes to the planet’s ecosystems.
- These changes have improved the standard of living but have come at the cost of others. This has weakened the nature’s ability to maintain balance which badly affects the poor.
- We are living beyond our means. It has been found that 60% of the ecosystem services examined are being degraded to a level that it can not be sustained.
- Pressure on ecosystem will grow significantly unless human attitude and actions change.
- There is growing evidence that many ecosystems could reach tipping point at which sudden and irreversible changes may have grave implications for human well-being.
How these changes affect human being. It affects the poor people most and the need is to get healthy people who can be trained to become skilled labour. Human health is at risk. Large part of the humanity is suffering from poor health because of poor quality of environment and food products. How we are damaging the earth environment can be appreciated by just one fact that fertilisers used for higher farm production is ultimately increasing the growth of Algae in the sea and that eats in to the Oxygen in the water making it difficult for many species to live.
In India if you went to any factory near a river, you will be horrified to see the state of that river and the factory is not concerned. I have seen it in JK Nagar in Orissa and many places in Bihar where they have a sugar factory. We are destroying our system more than any county where as 80% of our population in villages and semi-urban places lives on ecosystem so do the urban population.
One study showed that India is the seventh larges country in the world is home to 6.67% of global faunal diversity and 12.51% of global flora. It sounds good as long as we do not destroy this balance. There is however no reliable study to show how many of the species we have lost for ever because of excessive human activities. Continue Reading
