Hazards of environmental pollution

Jul 04

Man’s greed for wealth and comfort has resulted in the environment getting gravely polluted. And it has had a bad impact on the health of the people, the plants and the wildlife that inhabit this world. The purity of air is questionable and the water that we drink is no longer clean. We eat contaminated food. We wake up to foggy mornings when the air is thick with the smoke from the chimneys of toxic factories. This has shortened the life span of people and given mankind new diseases for which sometimes there is no cure. It is not extraordinary to see young people with grey hair and small children with birth defects. And yet people keep building more and more factories.

Nations, regions and cities try to outdo each other in the industrial race, ignoring the ill effects it is having on the world around us. People are not just getting harmed by the toxic waste that they can see and the smog that they breathe, there are also hazards that they can neither see nor touch, which cause them great harm. People living near telephone lines and satellite towers have been known to get cancer from the radiation caused by these objects.

Many major rivers that were once clean are green with the waste of toxic materials emanated from factories. Oil spills in the oceans of the world have killed millions of fish and caused the extinction of many species of marine life. There was a time when the condor used to fly freely in the mountains of South America and the tiger used to roam casually in the jungles of India. Such scenes are now a rarity. The noise caused by the honking of cars at traffic jams creates havoc on the ear drums of people. Life on this planet is threatened by chemical pollution, biological pollution, physical hazards, psychosocial problems and mechanical disasters.

Overcrowded cities are the reasons for the spread of various epidemics like a cholera outbreak or the dengue fever. The full effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster are yet to be fully understood. Animals contract many viruses and pass it on to people as in the case of the Bird Flu. There is a great deal of awareness spread about such matters, but mankind is yet to wake up. We hope it is not too late by the time we realise the problem.

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