Natural Resources and Energy

Natural Resources and Energy

Forests and parks are among our most valued resources. Their conservation and management require that we understand landscapes; a larger view that includes populations, species, and groups of ecosystems connected together. Forests, a major kind of landscape that is harvested for commercial products but is also considered important biological conservation. In our assessment we look at various kinds of natural resources and energy and how to conserve and manage them while benefiting from them in many ways.

Agriculture is a dependable source of the existence of living being surrounding with two major factors associate with life expectancy. The two major impact associated with agriculture are natural and unnatural consequences, which can result into negative or positive impact. Low or higher temperature can be positive or negative impact, depending on the climate of a particular environment. There are plants which are not conducive to higher temperature they can only be productive in a low temperature climate. When the temperature goes higher the survival of some plants are unpredictable. Natural impacts are considered to be uncontrollable environmental destructions, such as climate change, earthquake, volcanic eruption etc. Climate changes in some cases can be very destructive to plants, forest, and the soil. For example, global warming is a climate change, which is a destructive weather condition. Its impact environmental landscape and threaten food production meeting the demand of the global population. Volcanic eruption is another impact on forest landscape that is causing erosion and high heats whereby in the process destroying forest from surviving. Earthquake is also an impact on agriculture. The force of earthquake energy release can be negative impacts on environmental landscape whereby trees and plants are destroyed. Another cause of effect of earthquake is; when flood takes over the environment it causes degradation, which damages and destroyed the soil. "Climate changes directly and indirectly affect the growth and productivity of forests: directly due to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate and indirectly through complex interactions in forest ecosystems. Climate also affects the frequency and severity of many forest disturbances." (2010 epa.gov) The unnatural impacts on forest are; economical reason, overpopulation, etc. Trees are very useful in the modern world; they use them to build houses, furniture and to make other wooden material. As population grows the want of wooden board or wooden material becomes demanding in the market and as such, deforestation is an option to the solution. While other countries in the world engaged on deforestation because of poverty, they sold their forest land to wooden companies for small amount of money, and in turn these companies deforested the trees and export them to other countries for big money.

Healthy ecosystems are the foundation for sound economies, sustaining and enhancing human life with services ranging from food and fuel to clean air and water. As such, ecology has an important role to play in society's efforts to improve the quality of life throughout the world. Although ecological scientists have neither the remit nor the capacity to judge the right of people to grow their economies, they do have the expertise and the responsibility to identify the ecological consequences of current and alternative growth strategies, recognizing that; human activities can degrade ecosystems, diminishing ecosystem services of value to society (loss of natural capital). Many ecosystem services such as clean air are public goods--they are freely and indiscriminately available to all members of a community, giving stakeholders little incentive to maintain them. In cases where ecosystem services do have a market value (e.g. food and fiber), economic activities may have ecological impacts that are not captured in market prices (environmental externalities). Society's ability to predict the consequences of ecosystem change is limited (environmental uncertainty) but can be improved with new modeling and forecasting tools. In taking a biodiversity approach to human population growth, our task is to stabilize and then reduce population because it drives the extinction of species, destruction of ecosystems, and production of greenhouse gases. Population growth is population growth whatever its source, whatever its cause, wherever it happens. In the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and other countries where the cause of population growth is primarily immigration instead of high birth rates, it is necessary for the sake of biodiversity to reduce immigration to no-net-growth levels. Conservationists, speaking as conservationists, should not debate immigration from social, cultural, economic, or justice standpoints. Our job is to show how human population growth from any source harms the beauty, wonder, diversity, and abundance of all life now and in the future.

One of the challenges facing modern forest management is producing forest products, including bioenergy and bio-based products, from southern forests in a sustainable manner. There are two basic kinds of ecological sustainability; sustainability of the harvest of a specific resource that grows within an ecosystem, and sustainability of the entire ecosystem. Worldwide concern about the need for forest sustainability has led to international programs for certifying forest practices, as well as to attempt to ban imports of wood produced from purportedly unsustainable forest practices. (200-2010 Wiley & Sons) Most basic is accepting the dynamic characteristics of forests, that to remain sustainable over the long term a forest may have to change in the short term. We need to improve the ability of the natural resource community to interpret a variety of performance indicator measurements with regard to sustainability. (Shifley, 2006) Examples of recent progress can be seen in the following three examples.