Animals that were once plentiful are now rarely seen.
Farmland is also vastly being developed on. Since 1967, so much land has been paved over that it equals the area of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New Jersey combined.
With population growth, another thing grows and that's pollution. The more people there are then the more use of cars and the more carbon dioxide there is being exhaled into the air and the more factories there are being built to give all these people jobs and well, you get the point. Our little planet can only take so much. But what happens when all humans do is take and take from the environment and never gives anything back? Whatever we do to the planet is going to effect us.
According to Karen Malarkey, science teacher at Haverhill High School, large cities are one of the biggest problems. So many resources are wasted in our cities. For instance, a city with 9 million inhabitants uses 5.6 million tons of water, 18,000 tons of food and 85,500 tons of fuel every day. That same city produces 4.5 million tons of wastewater, 18,000 tons of solid waste and 8,550 tons of air pollutants every day. U.S. citizens also produce more garbage than anyone in the world does.
Nothing consumes as much raw material as an automobile. The United States consists of only one fifth of the world's population; however, we use 25 percent of the world's fuel. Japan doesn't use even half of what the U.S. uses not a third not a fourth but one eleventh. .
An urban heat island is another name for a large city that traps in heat. Large buildings and dark pavement absorb sunlight and transform it to rising, unbearable heat which can not be released from the city until late at night because of the gases released by things such as automobiles that keep it in. Dr. Jeff Luvall, the principal investigator at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, believes that one of the ways to relieve large cities from this problem is to prevent the deforestation of forests surrounding them.