Environmental problems – An overview - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 10

Figure 1.6 Methane cycle in the global ecosystem: the bottleneck is photochemical oxidation.

surplus, this trend draws the attention to the responsibility of humans, particularly the
politicians and other decision makers and is a forewarning to behave very humbly when
using our environment for our purposes. We have to understand that the overuse of the
ecosystem and the load on the environment in exchange for unnecessary production
and consumption are unethical and dangerous to the globe and the whole of mankind,
i.e., ourselves.
The most significant natural trends in the global ecosystem are discussed here by
focusing on microorganisms, as they play the most important role in the global element
cycle and in the elimination of contaminants, the main topic of our topic.

- The biomass and the genetic diversity of the biosphere increase gradually (com-

pared to the “primeval soup'') and the microbiological degradation is more and
more efficient because of the increasing variety, genetic, biochemical capacity,