Effects of the use of technology on nature – In the last century, planet earth has been a tortured witness to man’s technological development. Development has meant mass death and destruction to the planet we call home.
Ironically we can realize that man, as a species, is the most unadaptable of all the species that have lived on the planet; regardless of our divine or Darwinian origin, we can ensure that the success of our domain is based on the development of our intelligence.
It is worth mentioning that this intelligence has made us the best and the worst species that inhabited this home. I mean the best because we have taken advantage of and used the environment for our benefit more than other species, and the worst because in this excessive and irresponsible use, we have destroyed in a century what an ecosystem took to form in thousands of years.
The brilliance of fame, power and money has so blinded men thirsty for knowledge; that with the ingenuity of Pandora who played with the evils that plagued the ancient world according to the Greek philosophers, they open the doors of knowledge with the interest of mastering them even without having reason or understanding of their use.
Effects of the use of technology on nature
It is ironic to observe how each discovery that benefits man and advances another 100 years in knowledge in just 1-hour results in the destruction of thousands of years of work done by nature in just a few years; By this, I refer to the great disasters that have tormented spirit.
Pesticide pollution, ocean oil spills, nuclear radiation hazards, and forest fires threaten Earth’s ecosystems. It essential to defend life on the planet that the errors that have led to severe ecological damage disseminated and analyzed.
Oil spills
One of the biggest causes of ocean pollution is oil spills. 46% of the oil and its industrial derivatives dumped into the sea are residues overturning coastal cities. The sea is used as a very accessible and cheap deposit of polluting substances, and the situation will not change as long as there no strict controls, with severe penalties for offenders.
Both oil spills and forest fires seriously affect the trophic chains of ecosystems.
Spills cause significant mortality of waterfowl, fish and other living beings in the oceans. This alters the balance of the ecosystem and modifies the trophic chain. In the affected areas, fishing, navigation and using the beaches for recreational purposes become impossible.
In forest fires, trees not the only ones affected: many animals trapped in the smoke, while others migrate.
nuclear leaks
Certain substances spread energy when their atoms disintegrate, and also the residual heat -persistent for years- that they generate. That phenomenon, known as radioactivity, is particularly intense in the case of plutonium.
Four hundred twenty-four nuclear power plants installed in 25 countries produce 16% of the world’s electricity. Some countries, like the United States, pressured by the terrible Chornobyl accident, have cancelled plans to build new nuclear plants.
The explosion registered in Chornobyl on April 26, 1986, released a large amount of radioactivity. The cloud that formed moved to other countries due to the action of the winds. The most contaminated area covered some 260,000 km2 of the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and directly affected 2,600,000 inhabitants.
Another problem related to nuclear leaks, and no less important for its consequences, is the fate of radioactive waste. Initially, it had been decided to dump them on the ocean floor. But the procedure was soon shown to be unsafe.
Different alternative solutions have been sought, and the debate continues today. Perhaps the best of the proposed methods is underground storage, hermetic and without a fixed term.
Forest fires
Every year man dismantles about 12,000,000 hectares of tropical forest. However, this reduction is not the only one suffered by the forest areas of our planet; To this must added the excessive exploitation sustained by other types of forests and the loss caused by fires.
What starts as a spark quickly becomes an advancing blaze that cannot stopped or controlled. More than 7,000,000 hectares of jungles, forests and bushes destroyed annually for this reason. Among the factors that favor this phenomenon are high temperatures, droughts and great lack of humidity and strong and dry winds that contribute to the spread of fire.
That is why the climate changes so radically. Droughts, floods, landslides, and volcanic eruptions remind us that the end of the world will not be of divine origin, but purely human; we will be the executioners and will dictate our own sentence that will be our destruction like a coward who commits suicide.
For this reason, we must redefine applied knowledge based on what we paid years ago with our mistakes and be more loyal to planet earth, sinking in complex chains of bureaucracy, politics and power.
The technology
We define technology as the application of knowledge to transform material resources into products that facilitate the performance of a task.
Applied knowledge is for the exclusive use of the human species.
Thus we observe how dinosaurs once built niches; beavers built dams, prairie dogs burrow underground, and ants and termites make sand mounds like ancient medieval castles, to name a few.
The technological advance of our days has had a radical increase. We can compare the technical development of the last year with the technological development that occurred in the previous decade, as well as the specialized product of the last decade with the technological development of the century. Thus giving exponential growth
I propose to the reader of this essay to reflect on the following points presented here:
Technology must be environmental
This must take care of man and nature, not only making the most of its material and energy resources, but also environmental ones, becoming part of a sustainable development that can maintain or improve nature, not creating mutants or playing with it, but strengthening it, and restoring the balance between species.
Technology must shared
We must share the use of knowledge and not manage it as our own, like the industrialized countries that give their waste to developing countries. We must take care of it and esteem it, but above all, share it since we can only advance if we advance together as a global society, without barriers or scepticism, yokes or borders.
