Test

455

458

Why is population growth How can I reduce my

an environmental issue? carbon footprint?

460

How can air pollution be

a problem indoors?

463

How can I help prevent

global warming?

Environmental Health

15

Objectives

✱ Explain the environmental

impact associated with the

current global population and its

projected growth.

✱ Discuss major causes of air

pollution and the global

consequences of the

accumulation of greenhouse

gases and ozone depletion.

✱ Identify sources of water

pollution and chemical

contaminants often found in

water.

✱ Distinguish municipal solid

waste from hazardous waste, and

list strategies for reducing land

pollution.

✱ Discuss the health concerns

associated with ionizing and

nonionizing radiation.

✱ Describe the physiological

ISBN 1-256-05268-X

consequences of noise pollution.

453

Health: The Basics, Green Edition, Ninth Edition, by Rebecca J. Donatelle. Published by Benjamin Cummings. Copyright © 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc.

“We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home—

Earth—is in grave danger. What is at risk of being

destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.”

—Al Gore, opening statement before the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee, January 28, 2009

10

W

We live in an especially dangerous time—dangerous for us,

dangerous for future generations, and dangerous to our very

existence. Our global population has grown more in the past

50 years than at any other time in human history. Population

growth poses a potentially devastating threat to the water we

drink, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and our capacity to

survive. Our polar ice caps and glaciers are melting at rates

that defy even the most dire predictions of just a decade ago,

and threats of rising sea levels loom large. One in four existing mammals in the world is now threatened with extinction

as humans...