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The Ecology Of Dust
It isn’t something we think about very often, but dust is a connector of ecosystems around the world. Dust carries various minerals and nutrients to places where such things are in very scarce supply. This includes the oceans of the world as well as many forests and other ecosystems. For example, phosphorus-bearing dust carried from the Gobi Desert is essential to the growth of giant redwoods in California’s Sierra Mountains.
Raw Wastewater On Farms
Clean water supplies are dwindling around the world. As a result, the use of untreated wastewater on farms for crop irrigation is on the rise.
Dams And The Environment
There are an estimated 84,000 dams in the United States which impound 600,000 miles of river, or about 17% of the rivers in the country. Within the next 15 years, more than 90% of the world’s rivers will be fragmented by at least one dam.
Melting Ice Adds Life To The Sea
The changing climate has many effects upon the world’s ecosystems, some of which are surprising. One of these relates to the effect of the increasing melting of ice in the Arctic. The ice melt is leading to more life in the Arctic sea.
Lake Baikal
Lake Baikal is an ancient and massive body of freshwater found in the mountainous Russian region of Siberia. Deep and voluminous, Lake Baikal holds 20% of the planet’s unfrozen freshwater. And it’s often been described as the world’s cleanest and most pristine lake.
Restorative Ocean Farming
The conventional aquaculture industry has often been associated with many of the same problems that beset land-based agriculture: creating sterile monocultures, fouling the environment with pesticides, antibiotics and organic pollutants, and spreading diseases.