America's Environmental Issues

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Planet Earth and its miracles, this beautiful creation we called home that gives us life but yet we seen to not really care on the importance of taking care of it. Rivers, waterfalls, glaciers, oceans, animals, jungles and mountains, are not just panoramic views but the source of survival for human kind. We are killing the planet slowly, what are we leaving behind for future generations? We only have one planet to depend on and it is important for all of us to take responsibility and realized that if we continue to destroy this planet we will have nothing left for our children. We have serious problems in areas like population, climate changes, loss of Biodiversity, water, ocean acidification, pollution, ozone layer depletion, over fishing, …show more content…
“ Americans’ awareness of environmental issues began in the 19th century, as industries’ increasing exploitations of natural resources” (Theodoulou & Kofinis, 2012). It is a serious issue that needs to be taken seriously; the damaged is real and the consequences too. There are hundreds of articles written about environmental issues and how is affecting the stability of our planet. As a result the U.S. created the Environmental Control Agency which functions are to coordinate and enforce environmental laws.
Since the 1960’s there has been a number of laws that have been put into place to protect the environment such as Clean Air Act (1963), Water Quality Act (1965), Endangered Species Conservation Act (1966), and Air Quality Act (1967). During the 1960’s there was a major increased on environmental interest groups, it was then when the congress regained interest in the topic. Therefore the federal government took the problem seriously and started to work on policies that would not only protect our planet by creating more …show more content…
Chemicals are everywhere and work that has to be done is going to take a lot of resources, due to the impact is having to our natural resources. Toxic chemicals end up in the oceans and rivers, for instance a year ago we were all horrified with the spill of five million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In we put into consideration that the Gulf of Mexico is one of the richest fishing grounds in the nation, the damaged is accountable to the magnitude of the spill. As a consequence of this spill “roughly the same time, dozens of dead dolphins and sea turtles washed up on beaches in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. About 10 percent of the dolphins had oil on their skins, which in some cases was traced to the BP spill” (Weeks, Jennifer. "Gulf Coast Restoration." CQ Researcher 26 Aug. 2011: 677-700. Web. 9 Nov. 2015). The contamination created by the chemicals is killing our sea animals, and even worse we are consuming contaminated fish. In addition to death of millions of dolphins, and turtles, we are potentially at risk of health problems because all this chemicals are going into our
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