Before you can begin promoting environmental awareness in your community, you must first make sure that you have a thorough understanding of environmental issues. Stay up to date on environmental news, read books and other resources, and learn about the issues affecting your own community. It’s much easier to talk to others about the environment if you’ve already taken the time to educate yourself.
Numerous resources are available to promote environmental awareness and education: group learning (inside or outside of the classroom), informational and inspirational seminars, online courses, books, articles, videos, and brochures are just a few of the tools that can get you involved in promoting the environment.
A good course of action that ensures your continued participation is to pick an environmental issue that strikes you as the most urgent. The amount of environmental issues seems limitless, and while they are all important, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Try choosing one issue to focus on at a time. You will soon see that all environmental issues are intertwined and will find your niche of interest
Examples of Environmental Issues
Here are several cause-and-effect problems that harm our environment:
Oil Drilling- This issue is one that causes a great deal of environmental destruction. Our dependence on fossil fuel is a global addiction that affects every aspect of the world. Oil spills and offshore drilling poison marine life, oil drilling (on land) suffocates the earth, and the combustion of fossil fuels add to the increased atmospheric CO₂, which in turns causes the progression of global warming and ocean acidification. This is a multifaceted issue and is a good cause to get involved with because it covers such a broad spectrum of issues.
Deforestation- Millions of acres of forest are cut down for industrial benefit, such as large scale farming, oil mining, and the production of paper goods. Deforestation causes wildlife and biodiversity extinction because the loss of habitat threatens many species’ existence. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has a Red List of environmentally threatened species with up-to-date information.
Production of Plastic Goods- Currently our society creates a great deal of waste and much of that waste consists of plastic. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2010 alone 31 million tons of plastic waste was created. This waste ends up all over the globe in both land and water, a good example is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Not only is plastic waste an issue, but the production of plastic is also dependent on fossil fuel combustion. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in 2010 191 million barrels of liquid petroleum gases(LPG) and natural gas liquids (NGL) were used in the U.S. alone to produce plastic goods.
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