Environment Poverty,
a tough place to live in.
To sustain life well the environment needs to be suitable chiefly in terms of its water, salt, warmth, weather, radiation, chemical and biological balance. Any of these being unsuitable, because of nature or because of human activities, can make a region a poor area for living in. The environment can be a part of general human poverty - and it can also help cause, maintain or worsen general human poverty.
Desertification
Nature and Environment.
Nature can be tough. Some parts of the world get too little rain and some get too much rain, giving deserts or swamps. Some parts of the world are too cold and some too hot.
Much of our world is not naturally well suited to producing food of otherwise sustaining human life easily. And that means that humans often need to use drainage for too much water, use irrigation for too little water, and use other methods to try to create and maintain sustainable environments. Sometimes these human environment activities are successful and sustainable, but sometimes they are unsuccessful and worsen the environment significantly.
Humans and Environment.
The more primative societies that long relied directly on their natural environment, as through farming, generally learned how to best maintain their environment so that a reasonable living could be sustained for thousands of years.
But more modern city-based societies that get their food and other needs from elsewhere have often shown less care about the environment generally, leading to increasing human-activity pollution and other environment degradation.
Attempts at new large scale farming of a region by people with little knowledge of the area concerned can also seriously backfire and produce desertification or other environment degradation. And large scale mining, industry and other modern human activities have generally worsened the environment in various ways. In many areas of the world today can be found deserted regions often containing ghost-towns which humans have had to abandon due to pollution and other environment degradation causing general poverty.
Today pollution-induced global warming is a major environment and poverty issue, attributed by some to increasing Carbon Dioxide from excessive burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas as for producing electricity. These fossil fuels have a limited supply and are starting to run out and increase in price, so governments now are having to encourage alternatives. While some alternatives like wind power are environment friendly, some alternatives like nuclear power may pose problems.
# The new biofuel industry converting foods to fuel gives less Carbon Dioxide overall than fossil fuel use, but can be very unhelpful for dealing with poverty as it inceases food prices for many poor. However, for the many poor small-farm families in some poor countries, increased food prices may actually help them somewhat. It has been noted that growing algae or seaweed may be a more useful form of biofuel production. See
Food To Fuel, ODI pdf 135 kb
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