In a publication posted by Environmental Science & Technology, the writers mention that 10% of soil lying under the United States’ surface water is contaminated. These contaminants include PCBs, pesticides, and mercury – all of which can have long-term effects on the ecosystems.

Cleaning these pollutants is never easy, but our technology can help. Typical methods, like dragging-out and disposing, have been proven to work in some cases, but have downsides.

It’s important that new techniques are brought into action to help eliminate the water contaminants. Traditional methods can miss the contaminants and/or cause disruption in the ecosystem (contaminants in the first place is enough of a disruption). New technology can help find ways of eliminating these pollutants and prevent long-term hazardous effects. If the problem isn’t solved, things will only get worse.

New ideas are being though of, but maybe the real problem is finding a way to prevent these contaminants from getting into environments in the first place. A solution to cleaning will help, but if prevention doesn’t happen then this will end up becoming a huge time cruncher, and money spender.

Two industrial pollutants have been found in carp in the eastern part of Lake Erie. Reasearchers from New York institutions recorded levels of PCBs and PBDEs in all of the 18 fish sampled. An article from Science Daily mentions that both of these contaminants can disrupt the endocrine system in these fish.

This study shows that human activity does indeed have long-term effects on the environment. The article from Science Daily mentions that one of these pollutants hasn’t been produced since 1979, but is still detected in the Great Lakes.

Clean-up of the lakes needs to start soon. If there are pollutants in one part of the lake, what’s to stop them from spreading to other areas? Society needs to pay attention to this and learn how it affects the environment overall. Waste disposal will hang around, even if we don’t see it.

On top of contaminants in the fish, who’s to say contaminants won’t start polluting the water to dangerous levels if things don’t change?

It’s up to society and the government to realize that these lakes are a precious resource. The Great Lakes affect many aspects of the environment, including weather, climate, and surrounding habitats. They are large bodies of water but can still be considered fragile when it comes to pollution and contaminants.

These lakes, as well as freshwater sources around the globe, need to be cleaned up and protected.

It’s sometimes hard to find a way to teach investors exactly how important it is, for themselves, to fight climate change. WWF-Canada found a way with their recently released report.

A news article was posted on the WWF-Canada website describing the report and how it was received.

The report highlighted that climate change is now a risk for institutional investors – and this may open their eyes. Investors may begin to react to climate change more now that they know it can affect the one thing most people value – money.

Conservation actions meant to preserve tropical rainforests from climate change may be heading in the wrong direction, as portrayed in the journal Nature in December. The world’s largest diverse ecosystems have been experiencing change for quite some time now, and an article from Science Daily talks about how humans may be making a bad situation even worse.

A rainforest can adapt to temperature and can survive when things get a little dry…Unless people take advantage of it. Higher temperatures and dry seasons see more people burning forest away to use for agricultural land. This requires conservation acts to find a way around these new problems and means that people are still not informed enough.

When creating conservation plans, we need to include plans that involve the people. Land can be protected, but people will still find away against it. The world needs to be informed of how their actions affect the planet and how the planet can adapt to changes, but not when the changes are made worse by people.

The most common answer that people think of – protected parks. A park can protect a piece of land, but it can’t protect an ecosystem. If a quarter of a rainforest is protected, what happens to the other three-quarters? If habitat is destroyed at any scale, the wildlife will move into what hasn’t been disturbed. So a park can’t protect the entire landscape, why not introduce larger protected areas. These plans need to be introduced at a nation-wide, or regional level, since the small ideas aren’t cutting it.

Farmers can find other land. There is plenty of land around the world that does not require the destruction of a rainforest at such drastic levels.

Unless more people become involved with conservation of these areas, rainforests will continue to be burned, logged, and destroyed. Climate change is one thing, destruction is another.

The poll, outlined in an article on the WWF website also shows that 2 out of 3 people feel that the current rules are not enough to protect against future sustainability threats.

These polls need to be carried out on a much larger scale. Since 94% of people in B.C. feel that nature, wildlife and animal protection is a top priority, maybe researchers should also ask the rest of Canada how they feel.

Contrary to what some may think, these results obviously show that people actually do care about the environment and how the freshwater is used to support it. Several other countries are using the same idea (considering the needs of nature) while working out their water management laws. If B.C. is able to follow through with these results and create laws to protect freshwater for the environment, the province may have an impact not only across Canada, but on a global scale as well.

Water resources have been taken advantage of for far too long and it’s about time that people realize it. Younger generations are informed of the situation and seem to be more concerned than past generations. A perfect example of why people should care – the Aral Sea. The massive body of water used to be one of the largest inland seas across the world, until the Soviet Central Government decided to increase their rice and cotton production. They decided to take the water, using dams and canals, from the two rivers that leaked into the Aral Sea. The Aral Sea is now 75% smaller, and the surrounding area is paying the price. Salt is in the soil, affecting agriculture and health, and salt levels in the water are rising and the once-thriving fishing industry is over, after all known fish species became extinct from the salt levels.

Hopefully this disaster opened the world’s eyes, and people will begin to care. The great lakes could easily suffer the same fate, as could any body of water. People need to take responsibility and start thinking of the environment. Nobody is saying that all water should remain with nature. The idea is simply to leave enough in the rivers and lakes for the environment to continue prospering.

The ban on Korean Pine logging was included on the list of must-do measures in hopes to preserve the Amur Tiger, with less than 500 remaining, and it’s habitat.
An article from the World Wildlife Fund talks about the ban and how it will affect the tigers.

The ban is a huge step taken by the Russian government to preserve not only the Korean Pine but its inhabitants as well. Along with the endangered Amur Tiger, the pine provides for at least 50 species. It’s about time action is taken to preserve these animals.

Logging is a major industry across the globe. Unfortunately, it is responsible for destroying 160,000 square kilometers of forest each year and endangering many species of birds.

The rest of the world needs to realize what impact logging has on the environment. Not just the trees themselves, but the animals that those trees host. Every forest holds an animal, and that animal is needed for another’s survival.

Despite the destruction, Logging companies make everything better by planting trees behind their path of destruction, do they not? Let’s be serious. Can this really make it alright though? A tree takes many more years to grow then it does to tear one down. And what if the company decides to plant just one type of tree in an area that had variety? There is no way to make their actions better. Sure, animals can move, but where to? Eventually an entire forest is knocked down, and the inhabitants need to move to a completely new environment. How can people be sure that the animals will survive in that type of habitat?

The tigers are a perfect example. Korean Pine is a major factor for the wild boar, and the boar is one of the few prey species for the Amur Tigers.

The world needs to realize the effect that industries have on nature. In 2009 alone pine logging increased illegally, more than doubling the legal limits. These forests are in the worst shape they’ve been in for years, and as they fall, so will the animals.

Obviously, the first issue raised here is the fact that people are still killing these animals, neglecting the fact that it’s illegal. But rather than go on about how people whom do this are awful, brutal, animal killing people, why not get to the bottom of how this is even able to happen.

Furadan is one of the most controversial pesticides out there today, and it is capable of killing rats, birds, and other large predators. Conservationists in the area have been pressing Kenya to ban the pesticide for quite some time now, saying that the government is unable to regulate the pesticides use.

But the issue being missed my many is this. Why even allow this into the market in the first place? What happened to the good-old scarecrow, and maybe, just maybe a pesticide that deters bugs. Pesticides that kill innocent animals are unnecessary.

A Kenyan wetlands officer says that the issue is whether or not a country is able to teach the citizens how to properly use the pesticide.

The United States have already banned this pesticide, so why is it that nobody else is taking the same action? Do these beautiful animals deserve to die just because you want to keep your crops safe from the birds and the bugs?

This has happened before with other chemicals. How about before pesticides are put onto the market, they get tested, and its side effects get reviewed? Sure they are already tested and all that, but if they are known to be dangerous to animals like this, why even put it out there? Stop it before it happens, that way it doesn’t take something like this to happen before people realize that the pesticide is to extreme.

Nick Wadhams wrote an article on this issue in the National Geographic on April 12th, 2010.

The lake has shrunk by nearly 90% after its feeding rivers were diverted, in a Soviet project meant to increase the production of cotton. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the UN calls this one of the most shocking disasters on the planet.

“It is clearly one of the worst disasters, environmental disasters of the world. I was so shocked,” he said on Sunday.

An article in the Huffington Pot talks about this disaster. It was published by a Huffington Post reporter on April 4, 2010.

The drying of one of the largest lakes in the world is one example of why people need to sit down, and plan out what needs to be done to prevent disasters like this from happening. Global warming isn’t affecting the world’s freshwater supply as much as human activity is today. Every year, more plans are coming into effect that split off rivers and creeks, all of which supply our major lakes.

What will happen to North America’s Great Lakes? Will they end up like the Aral Sea in Asia? Studies show that rivers are shrinking, some becoming just shadows of their former selves.

The world’s freshwater supply is shrinking greatly, and prices will eventually rise. Look at the price of gas, for example. Over the past years, gas has become more and more limited, and the prices are constantly rising. Luckily there can be substitutes for gasoline. The same can’t be said for freshwater.

World Economic Forum experts have predicted that by 2030, the world will use 30% more freshwater than nature can replenish. This suggests that the world will indeed run out eventually.

Some countries already experience a shortage of water, and are struggling to manage without the constant supply. So when the entire world is experiencing difficulties with water supply, what is there to do?

As of now, it seems that the only solution is to cut down on how people use their water supplies.

This winter has been quite out of the ordinary for the United States’ east coast. Snowstorms have been larger than ever, reaching 3 feet in Washington, DC. Amanda Staudt and other scientists think that the snow storms are due to global warming. Staudt says that global warming causes more water to evaporate, which leads to more snowfall assuming temperatures stay below freezing. However, some scientists, including Joe Bastardi, feel that the heavy snowfalls are due to an El Niño which formed a year ago rather than global warming. An El Niño happens when Pacific waters by the northwest coast of South America become unusually warm, which disrupts the jet-stream winds and pushes the cold winds into the United States.

Global warming has been a hot topic for scientists for years now, yet there is still doubt that it is occurring, and if it is, that it’s caused by human activity. With heavy snowstorms and freezing temperatures along the east coast, the last thing someone would think is that it’s caused by global warming. However scientists have shown that if global warming was occurring, it could have similar effects. Without 100% proof, how can the world be sure that the scientists are right? It’s a touchy subject, so how do we know who’s right?

According to Bastardi, the world will need to wait another twenty to thirty years before finding absolute evidence that tells people if global warming is occurring or not. So without positivity on the global warming, wouldn’t Bastardi’s theory seem to make sense? An El Niño is something that scientists do know about, as opposed to global warming. Since people know about it and how it affects the climate, it just makes sense to accept this as the answer to the cold and stormy winters.

Scientists have tested, and say the Pacific is cooling, and that an El Niño did occur just over a year ago, and they can in fact affect the climate for up to over two years. As Bastardi stated, “When you get an El Niño with a cold Pacific, you get crazy winters in the East.”

Since the last El Niño occurred in 1997 and it irregularly happens between 2 and 10 years, give or take, it seems that this could be the answer to this odd winter for the East coast of the United States. The temperature of the northwest coast has raised by about 0.5 degrees celcius.

As right as the El Niño seems, the global warming theory could still be right. Theory one or two, it doesn’t change the fact that residents of the East coast should get ready for many more cold and snowy winters. And the question will remain until we know the answer for sure. Is global warming occurring, and is it because of human activity?