Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
When Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) wrote these words in an 1897
Hartford Courant
editorial,
he obviously did not realize that people have been doing something about the weather for a very long time.
Alone among the millions of species that have occupied the earth,
Homo sapiens
has been the only one
with the knack to shape the earth and alter its climate on a grand scale. Like volcanoes, earthquakes, or a
deadly asteroid from space, people have been a natural catastrophe.
This chapter examines the close relationship between geography, weather, and the environment. But it
also looks at the impact that humanity is increasingly exerting on both the weather and the environment.
Since the time irrigation ditches and canals were first dug to control water and extend nature's capacity
to make the land fertile, to the massive destruction of the world's rain forests in our lifetime, people have
attempted to control and alter nature, always with some measurable impact on the earth—sometimes for
good and sometimes with terrible results. But this simple fact remains: we are the only species that holds
in our hands not only the destiny of other species but our own future as well. In a very short space of geo-
logical time, people have played havoc with the earth's natural resources. And we are very nearly at a point
of no return.
Conservationism or environmental concerns didn't start with the first Earth Day in 1970. The first gen-
eration of people with a passionate concern for the preservation of the world's resources and wilderness
areas was already active in the late nineteenth century. Both the Sierra Club and the National Geographic
Society are more than a hundred years old. Acid rain was first described in 1872, and the greenhouse
effect was identified in 1896. But for the past forty years, scientists and concerned environmentalists have
stepped up their warnings about the possibly irreparable harm being done to the earth and its sensitive sys-
tems, all of which are required to sustain life. Unfortunately, these warnings have largely gone unheeded,
outweighed by short-term political considerations, the profit motive, and superpower rivalries.
Only slowly has the world come to recognize the necessity to change the ways in which we utilize the
earth's resources. In June 1992, many nations sat down at the Rio Conference on the environment in Brazil.
Their ambitious hopes of finding a common solution to protect the earth's resources while fostering world-
wide economic development were complicated by powerful national and regional interests, each with an
agenda. No country approaches the United States when it comes to emissions of carbon dioxide and other
threatening gases. America's per-capita consumption of energy and its carbon emissions are far higher than
those of any other country. But the Chinese may eventually overtake the United States as the largest culprit
in the emission of greenhouse gases, a result of the massive industrial use of China's vast coal reserves.
Pressed to restrain their coal burning, the Chinese argue that coal is the only choice they have if they are
to become a modern industrial nation. With more than a billion mouths to feed, the Chinese authorities
say that their national economic need for continued coal burning outweighs concerns about future environ-
mental damage. They argue that raising the standard of living must come before cleaning the environment.
But China is not a lone environmental outlaw. They have plenty of company. Any serious attempts to
come to grips with such issues as the depletion of the ozone layer, the disappearance of rain forests, the
real likelihood of global warming, and the international calamity of acid rain, are confronted by a maze of
special interests and powerful countries willing to dismiss long-term environmental damage when faced
