African Climes

Welcome to African Climes where we blog about environmental issues, with a bias to climate change, which will be the biggest single environmental issue/phenomenon influencing all aspects of our life both now and in the future.
Our Lovely Africa - she has 54 countries - image courtesy of wikimedia


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Let’s start with the basics, what is the environment. A friend of mine, once asked me why I studied the discipline, is it not all about sweeping the roads and picking leaves? I was flabbergasted. And pissed off. I thought he was intentionally demeaning both me and the course.

 But thinking about it now,  it seems that many people do not realize what environmental science is all about. This is sad and rather dangerous because we exist in and depend on the environment for our very survival.

 The environment is basically composed of the air (atmosphere), waterbodies (hydrosphere), ground (lithosphere), and surface where life exists (biosphere). The combination of all these things is what we call the environment. From it, we derive our resources and into it, we deposit our waste products.

 Lemme put that into context, rephrase it. You get oxygen from the atmosphere, water and food from the rivers, soil, clothes from natural materials and even laptop components from minerals mined deep from the Earth’s crust. All waste, biological and otherwise, is deposited into the environment. That means that if that plastic water bottle is not recycled, reused or burned to produce energy, it will be crushed into tiny tiny pieces which are compressed and buried in the earth in a landfill. Most of the time anyway.

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