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Conservation of natural resources


Conservation of natural resources

ARTICLES

MANAGING BIODIVERSITY

NATURAL RERSOURCES AND CONSERVATION

ANIMAL AND CONSERVATION

PLANT AND CONSERVATION

CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

ORGANISATIONS THAT ARE INTO CONSERVATION

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND CONSERVATION

GOOD PRACTICES IN WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

Conservation of natural resources


Conservation of natural resources

MANAGING BIODIVERSITY

The term “biodiversity” describes the entirety of varying genes, species and organisms that can be found in a particular region. Africa is one of the continents of the world with the largest biodiversity. The efforts being given to managing the world’s biodiversity is of growing concern as the issue of consumerism rises due to the geometric increase the world’s population especially in the regions of the world that are described as having the greatest biodiversity. These same regions are compassed with the problem of poverty and hunger as well as the worst of economic situations.

Current biodiversity loss is evidenced by extinction rates that are 50 to 100 times higher than those in fossil records (Eric, 2008). The world’s population is growing and is estimated to increase to 9.1 billion people in the next 50 years. The resulting forest fragmentation and rural development bring ecological changes that alter the relationships of pathogens to host organisms.

Managing biodiversity really demands the concerted efforts of governments and non-governments alike. In fact individuals are needed to really act although the greatest problem in this case is actually that of paucity of information. We hope to try to bridge this knowledge gap through this medium and other practical means.

NATURAL RERSOURCES AND CONSERVATION

Natural resources is the collective word usually used to denote all natural endowments that are present in any given environment from which the inhabitants of such a place can obtain their means of livelihood.

Conservation of natural resources


Conservation of natural resources

The following write-up is by Theodore Roosevelt, 1907: The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life. We must maintain for our civilization the adequate material basis without which that civilization cannot exist. We must show foresight, we must look ahead. As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. For the last few years, through several agencies, the government has been endeavoring to get our people to look ahead and to substitute a planned and orderly development of our resources in place of a haphazard striving for immediate profit. Our great river systems should be developed as national water highways, the Mississippi, with its tributaries, standing first in importance, and the Columbia second, although there are many others of importance on the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Gulf slopes.

Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would. But there are certain other forms of waste which could be entirely stopped—the waste of soil by washing, for instance, which is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the United States, is easily preventable, and so that this present enormous loss of fertility is entirely unnecessary. The preservation or replacement of the forests is one of the most important means of preventing this loss. We have made a beginning in forest preservation, but ... so rapid has been the rate of exhaustion of timber in the United States in the past, and so rapidly is the remainder being exhausted, that the country is unquestionably on the verge of a timber famine which will be felt in every household in the land ... The present annual consumption of lumber is certainly three times as great as the annual growth; and if the consumption and growth continue unchanged, practically all our lumber will be exhausted in another generation, while long before the limit to complete exhaustion is reached the growing scarcity will make itself felt in many blighting ways upon our national welfare. About twenty per cent of our forested territory is now reserved in national forests; but these do not include the most valuable timberlands, and in any event the proportion is too small to expect that the reserves can accomplish more than a mitigation of the trouble which is ahead for the nation. We should acquire in the Appalachian and White Mountain regions all the forest-lands that it is possible to acquire for the use of the nation. These lands, because they form a national asset, are as emphatically national as the rivers which they feed, and which flow through so many States before they reach the ocean.

Conservation of natural resources


Conservation of natural resources

Theodore Roosevelt was a strong advocate of conservation during his presidency. Here he discusses the value of conservation and the problems that will result from excessive consumption of natural resources.

Source: Library of Congress.

ANIMAL AND CONSERVATION

An increase in human population in many parts of the developing world has both intensified the demand for food and made accessible, through the construction of roads as part of mining and logging operations, forested areas that were previously unreachable. These conditions have contributed to a rise in the hunting and eating of bushmeat. The level of impoverishment of rural dwellers that live close to protected areas and forests in general has also made hunting one of the readily available means of livelihood.

The rate at which people are exploiting wildlife is alarming especially in those parts of the world where their means of livelihood is largely dependent on the environmental resources. In fact, in some parts of the world such as the remote African nations, large population of the people rely on wildlife for their body protein requirement as such leading to the over-exploitation of the resources in the wild. Conservation of wildlife is divided into in-situ and ex-situ conservation.

Ex-situ conservation involves the conservation of plants or animals in a situation removed from the normal habitat. It refers to special interventions in terms of protection given to these wild species outside their natural habitat for the sake of preserving gene pool and biodiversity.

In-situ conservation is the maintenance of live populations of animals in their adaptive environment or as close to it as practically possible. It refers to the protection given to wild species in their natural habitat i.e. their real home.

PLANT AND CONSERVATION

Plants that are within their natural habitat are also described as wildlife (for the sake of those who think that wildlife only refers to animals). There are several uncommon but useful plants both to the animals in the wild as well as humans in terms of medicinal usage and economic advantages.

Endangered Species, plant and animal species are in danger of extinction (dying out). Over 8,300 plant species around the globe are threatened with extinction, and many thousands more become extinct each year before biologists can identify them. The primary causes of species extinction or endangerment are habitat destruction, commercial exploitation such as plant collecting, damage caused by nonnative plants and animals introduced into an area, and pollution. Of these causes, direct habitat destruction threatens the greatest number of species.

CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

The rate at which technological advancement is taking place in the world is quite high and partly commendable when the goods are considered. The various eras of development such as the agricultural, industrial, technological revolution marked great changes in the settings that are obtainable in the natural world as so much natural resources have been exploited in order to achieve these so-called development. I say so-called because any development that does not take the natural ecosystem into proper perspective is doomed for serious environmental and societal catastrophe. Sad enough, however so many construction works are being undertaken without proper environmental survey for compatibility checks.

ORGANISATIONS THAT ARE INTO CONSERVATION

Several organizations both Governmental and Non-governmental organizations are working to conserve the world’s biodiversity the world over. As a matter of fact opportunities abound to individuals who are interested in volunteer or internship jobs with these organizations. The Section of the website provides a list of such organization and links. The links can however be accessed by clicking on the link tab.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND CONSERVATION

The environmental impact statement was first introduced in 1969 in the United States as a requirement for the National Environmental Policy Act. Since then, an increasing number of countries have adopted the process, introducing legislation and establishing agencies with responsibility for its implementation. Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), formal process used to predict how a development project of proposed legislation will affect such natural resources as water, air, land, and wildlife. Environmental impact statements have mostly been applied to individual projects and have led to various offshoot techniques, such as health impact assessments, social impact assessments, cumulative effects assessments, and strategic environmental assessments (environmental assessments of proposed policies, programs, and plans). In some cases, social and economic impacts are assessed as part of the environmental impact statements. In other cases, they are considered separately.

An EIS usually involves a sequence of steps:

1.    Screening to decide if a project requires assessment and to what level of detail;

2.    Preliminary assessment to identify key impacts, their magnitude, significance, and importance

3.    Scoping to ensure the EIS focuses on key issues and to determine where more detailed information is needed;

4.    Implementing the main EIS study, which involves detailed investigations to predict impacts, assess their consequences, or both. After a project is completed a post audit is sometimes done to determine how close the EIS's predictions were to the actual impacts.

A growing number of businesses commission independent audits that help set environmental performance targets, particularly regarding waste disposal and energy use. However, the term environmental audit is applied to the voluntary regulation of an organization's practices in relation to its environmental impact.

GOOD PRACTICES IN WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

Do not kill

Do not throw food to animals in the zoo

Report any animal abuse case that you see

Do not throw stones or sharp objects against wild animals

Do not buy endangered wildlife meats by the roadside, rather report such cases

Do not retrain animals unnecessarily

Do not litter Animals parks with dirt or any form of unwanted substances etc.