The Impact of Human Activity on The Environment

Author John Green once said, “We can never know better until knowing better is useless.” What he meant by this is that humans are incredibly short-sighted in what consequences their actions may have. Humans can accomplish a great deal in short periods of time, sometimes without realizing the change is happening. Although changes to the environment are expected as nations grow and societies evolve, more often than not these changes prove detrimental to our quality of life in the long run. Humans have shaped their environment over time for the worse through insufficient water sanitation, rapid industrialization, and air pollution.

England, being an island nation, has always heavily relied upon its access to the ocean for subsistence fishing, international trade, and naval activity. However, many of England’s most important centers of culture and trade, such as the cities of London and Oxford, are landlocked, and thus had to develop a reliance upon the Thames River. As the British Empire expanded across the globe, the level of activity and traffic on the Thames also increased. An unfortunate byproduct, then, was the subsequent pollution left behind by this high level of human activity in the 19th century. This climax of pollution was brought about by local residents, slaughter houses, and factories alike being legally allowed to dump raw sewage and human waste into the river for seven years, in a period now known as The Great Stink. In 1855, Doctor Michael Faraday published a letter to British newspaper The Times detailing the current unacceptable state of the river.

“The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid...The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from...

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...ould sell, such as coal, crude oil, and steel, not to mention the air pollution the hundreds of new factories were responsible. If not for his isolationist economic policies, over-cultivation, and poor quality of overly produced goods, Stalin could have prevented the great hardships his nation’s environment faced in that time period.

Works Cited

Faraday, Michael, and Barbara Becker. "Observations on the Filth of the Thames: A Letter to the

Editor of the Times of London." (2008).

Kaiman, Jonathan. "China's toxic air pollution resembles nuclear winter, say

scientists."theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 26 Feb. 2014. Web. 15 May 2014.

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Trueman, Chris. "Stalin." Stalin. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 May 2014.

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