• Question: Will humans be able to stop river and sea pollution and how.

    Asked by huntsop to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 6 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 6 Mar 2013:

      Honestly, I think that the bulk of pollution could stop right now, it would mean a lot of money and hassle for nearly every industry but isn’t impossible. The main problem that I see at the moment is that there is no real reason why an industry should stop.

      There’s an idea to start working out how much value an ecosystem (local environment) has in terms of cleaning the air, making drinking water, pollinating our crops or providing nutrients. I think that if we then charged industries how much they were damaging the ecosystem in real money then it wouldn’t take long to stop.

    • Photo: Phil Rice

      Phil Rice answered on 6 Mar 2013:

      I agree with Stefan. The reason for increased pollution is increased demand which is brought about by our desire to acquire “things” and “stuff”, most of which we do not need. There is an insatiable desire for growth, when what we should be doing is maintaining our environment; remember, as Carl Sagan said and I paraphrase “This (Earth) is the only place we have to live, there is nowehere else to go – yet”. We have an allotment at home; I think more younger people than me should have one and understand where our food comes from and how hard it is sometimes to get it to grow.

    • Photo: Melissa Brereton

      Melissa Brereton answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      On the whole, humans are the cause of river and sea pollution. Do you remember a few years ago when there was an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico near Texas and Florida in the USA? This caused a huge amount of devastation to the wildlife in the sea and also on the beaches were the oil washed on to. We could stop these problems by trying to use alterative energy sources and reducing the amount of crude oil we use for fuel

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